We place the trilogy of identity, memory and ideology at the centre of a project designed to better understand medieval society. We may thus analyse the multiplicity of personal identities, the ways in which these were expressed within particular social structures (such as feudalism), and their evolution into formal expressions of collective identity (municipalities, guilds, nations, and so forth). A specific legacy of such developments was that, by the end of the Middle Ages, a sense of national identity, backed up by theological, philosophical, and political thinking, defined society. Thus, people in medieval societies shared an identity, based on commonly held memories. Religions, rulers, and even cities and nations justified their existence and their status and cohesion through stories that guaranteed their deep and unbroken historical roots. For this reason, memory was always maintained and promoted as a strategy for social power as well as guided by a specific ideology. In this sense, we can define the Church in the West as a framing ideology for the Middle Ages as Christianity supplied a coherent narrative that provided people with security through an integrated explanation of their physical surroundings, social order and spiritual hope.

About the author: Flocel Sabaté is a Professor of Medieval History at the University of Lleida and Doctor honoris causa from the Universidad Nacional de Cuyo. He won the leading research prizes in Catalonia (Distinció, 2000, ICREA Acadèmia, 2015, 2020) and participated in different University entities, serving as a member of the Governing Board of the Catalan University Quality Assurance Agency (AQU). He edited the journal Imago Temporis. Medium Aevum and lectured in many universities as invited professor (Cambridge, Concepción, JSPS-Tokyo, Lisbon, Paris-1, Poitiers, TIIAME-Tashkent, UNAM-México, Yale, etc.). He has published around five hundred research articles and chapters, edited one hundred collective books and written more than twenty books. Among them, we may highlight Lo senyor rei és mort (Lleida, 1994), El territori de la Catalunya medieval (Barcelona, 1997), La feudalización de la sociedad catalana (Granada, 2007), Fin del mundo y Nuevo mundo (México, 2011) and The Death Penalty in Late Medieval Catalonia (London-New York, 2020).

Due to the speaker’s absence, the event will be held exclusively via Zoom.