EVENT DETAILS

Commons: Shared Resources and Collective Activity in Classical, Medieval and Renaissance Studies

Fourth Annual Graduate Student Conference for the Group for the Study of Early
Cultures

Keynote Address by Julian Yates
"The Impossible Feast: Shared Resources, Prison Polities, and the Allure of Orange
in Renaissance England"
Julian Yates is a professor of English at the University of Delaware, where he is a
founding member of the Center for Material Culture Studies. He has a degree in
English from UCLA.

The commons once referred to tracts of land – forests and meadows, seas and
waterways – open to collective use by members of one or more communities. The
commons were shared spaces where public goods were generated through activities
such as agriculture and hunting. They were also sites where social practices (for
example, the rites of May) took place, marking the commons as an essential
component to the shared cultural heritage of the people. However, the enclosure
system sealed off these lands for exclusive use, dissolving the commons and
opening the possibility for modern forms of private property. The commons also
referred to a people distinguished from nobility by virtue of their birth, occupations,
and cultural practices. There was a distinctly political characteristic to the commons
that implied the bearing of communal burdens and the sharing of certain limited
rights and privileges. The commons became an indicator of plebeian identity, shared
backgrounds, beliefs, and ways of experiencing everyday life.



Today the term is widely associated with shared cultural legacies, open-source
software, and public space and resources that are collectively owned and shared
among members and populations. The commons may include everything from
physical to intellectual property, water to ecosystems, media, languages and
literatures, performances, public health and infrastructure, and the internet. This
conference aims to gather models of the commons in its various modes including but
not limited to land, public space, joint ownership, and collective action in medieval
and Renaissance practice, with some sense of their viability as models for alternative
economic, spatial, artistic, and political practice today.



The Group for the Study of Early Cultures focuses mainly on fields that investigate
pre-modern societies, including but not limited to: Classics, Late Antiquity, Medieval
Studies, Renaissance Studies, 18th Century Studies, East Asian Studies, Latin
American Studies, and Islamic Studies. We are also interested in a wide range of
disciplinary approaches to Early Cultures, including literary studies, history, art
history, drama, visual studies, sociology, culture studies, anthropology, political
science, philosophy, and religious studies.

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