Medieval Studies in France at the Threshold: 2000

Martin Aurell, Université de Poitiers, Centre d'études supérieures de civilisation médiévale

Do national considerations have any relevance for medieval studies? In a period when the construction of a united Europe, indeed its globalization, abolishes intellectual boundaries, it is slightly artificial to focus on the state of a "French" historiography. The meeting of October 2003 at Urbana-Champaign proves, if proof were necessary, how the centers of interest and the domains of research are evolving on a world-wide scale. Seminars involving professors invited from abroad, international conferences, email exchanges, and circulation of works are drawing medievalists closer together than ever before, distant though they may be geographically. It is hardly necessary to add that this expansion is particularly embraced in France, thanks to an increasingly international policy of recruitment of teacher/researchers, as the case of the author of this survey proves.