SOMERVILLE MAGAZINE 23
Thoughts Without Borders:
Reflections on Openness in Medieval Europe
Inside-Out: Domenico di Michelino’s fresco of Dante standing outside the walls of Florence
The fourth volume by the Somerville Medievalist Research Group was conceived as an affirmation of openness’s importance to medieval thought and modern academia. Its editors, Professor Almut Suerbaum, Somerville’s Fellow and Tutor in German, and Professor Manuele Gragnolati join us to reflect on this new study featuring 15 Somerville scholars, past and present.
O
penness is considered a virtue in modern liberal society: keeping an open mind, welcoming others with open arms, being open to new ideas are ideals for any academic and academic community. Often, these ideals are also implicitly associated with modernity, whereas pre-modern societies and cultures are conceived around a binary opposition and therefore associated with fixity and closure.
In its workshops and publications, the Somerville Medieval Research Group has set out to probe and challenge some of these assumptions. When we came together for an initial workshop around concepts of openness in the Middle Ages on 25 June 2016, this was particularly poignant because it was the morning after the UK had decided, by a narrow margin, to leave the European Union. Discussing with colleagues
