On 28th November OxTalks will move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events' (full details are available on the Staff Gateway).
There will be an OxTalks freeze beginning on Friday 14th November. This means you will need to publish any of your known events to OxTalks by then as there will be no facility to publish or edit events in that fortnight. During the freeze, all events will be migrated to the new Oxford Events site. It will still be possible to view events on OxTalks during this time.
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Archival documents do not always record and represent significant parts of past societies. The buildings of the Loge du Mer at Perpignan, the Lonja in Palma and the Lonja de la Seda in Valencia reveal how the construction of market halls and municipal organisations supporting trade can provide insights into the underrepresented histories of Muslims, enslaved people, or labourers. These presences are largely absent from archival records – but do emerge as significant elements in a painted panel for the Loge du Mer (1479). As a way to make sense of this apparent dissonance, this lecture unspools the material quality of the silk traded in these halls. A new reading of the architectural structures of the Lonjas through the lens of the material world of the cloth they contained leads to a reading of the markets’ spiral columns as spines supporting a different history. Shifting the narrative from the mastery of an architect towards the collectives involved in winding the threads of silk histories furnishes a new view of these innovative municipal buildings.
