Dr. Zrinka Pešorda Vardić participates in the Leeds International Medieval Congress 2026

As part of the activities of the Croatian Science Foundation project The Formation of the Territorial State in Late Medieval Croatia, Dalmatia and Slavonia: Socio-Political and Administrative Transformations (CroDaSTrans, IP-2025-02-4345), Dr. Zrinka Pešorda Vardić participated in the International Medieval Congress (IMC) in Leeds, the largest annual conference for medieval studies in Europe. This year's congress was dedicated to the overarching theme Temporalities.

In the session Time and the Peasants: Examples of Temporality from the Rural History of East Central Europe II, Dr. Pešorda Vardić presented a paper entitled “Temporal Origins and Civic Identity: Genealogy, Memory, and the Hinterland in Late Medieval Dubrovnik.”

Drawing on the records of the Dubrovnik Brotherhood of St. Anthony—including the Matrikula antunina, the Specchio register of 1603, and the genealogical collections compiled by Dubrovnik chancellors—the presentation examined how Dubrovnik's urban elite constructed its civic identity as a temporal project. Particular attention was given to migrants from the city's hinterland who, following the closure of the Major Council (Serrata) in 1332, were excluded from political power.

The paper demonstrated how these families built social prestige through alternative institutional mechanisms, first through the unification of confraternities and the establishment of the elite Brotherhood of St. Anthony in 1432, and later through the closure of its membership recorded in the Specchio register of 1603. A detailed analysis further revealed how these families actively reshaped their origins by compiling and reconstructing genealogies, adapting family memory to reflect their newly acquired social status.