The study of the expansion of the Crown of Aragon and the Catalan presence in the medieval Mediterranean has been a recurrent subject of historiography. Yet, in many aspects, the general vision still continues to be subject to directions and states of the question that have not yet integrated the new perspectives of analysis or the new contributions that recent researches have been producing from the most varied disciplines.

As a result of research specialization and the academic segmentation, it is often difficult to find spaces of debate, routes of joint diffusion and, especially, multidisciplinary platforms for exchanging the new proposals and findings that in recent years have been taken upon maturity. For this reason, the main objective of this colloquium is to spread and to debate, from a multidisciplinary perspective, a set of contributions about the presence and the effects of the active presence of the Catalans within the framework of relation and dialogue that was the medieval Mediterranean.

The proposal emerges from a vision of the Mediterranean basin as a space of interchange and encounter that derives in positive influences in all the ambits, and from the conviction that, in the long run, productive interrelations and dialogue dominated over conflict. Obviously, the colloquium is not, nor can be, exhaustive and comprehensive of all the research in course. For the first time, however, it brings together a set of new contributions from different disciplines, selected for their innovating character and from a spirit of integration, which offer themselves as a point of departure towards a new global perspective of the Catalan presence in the medieval Mediterranean . A more oriented point of view towards the cultural, social, and economic interactions, rather than the more general approaches which guided the study of the political, military, and commercial Catalan expansion.

Thus, either through new reflections and readings of well-known sources or through the contribution of new ones, we attempt to facilitate the convergence of the new efforts which are being carried out in the areas of History of Literature, of Language and Written Culture, of the History of Art and Architecture, of Socioeconomic and Cultural History, and of the History of Religions and Arabic Studies, in a colloquium analyzing the active presence of the Catalans in the cultural space that was the medieval Mediterranean.

PROPOSED THEMATIC BLOCKS:

- The Catalan language, culture and art in the medieval Mediterranean

- The presence and integration of Catalan collectives in the Mediterranean

- The interrelation and dialogue with muslims and jews

 

Peter the Great arrives in Sicily (Cronica of Giovanni Villani,
Vatican Libr., ms. Chigiano L VIII 296, 14th c.)