Appel à contribution – Religious Men in the Middle Ages

This conference seeks to explore and re-evaluate medieval men’s relationship with religion, both professed religious men and laymen of any faith. Despite their centrality to ‘traditional’ histories of the Middle Ages, many aspects of the lives and representation of medieval men remain relatively unexplored. Only recently have scholars begun to consider what religion, belief and devotion meant to men as men and how these informed and intersected with other aspects of their identity (social status, gender, occupation, ethnicity, age, location, etc). We invite papers which consider the experiences, self-perception or depiction of individuals or groups from any faith, religious tradition, monotheistic, pagan, or heretical, or could focus on men who rejected faith and religion altogether. We encourage proposals from scholars working in any relevant field: history, literature and language, art history, musicology, archaeology, etc, and from any Medieval period (c. 500 – early 1500s) or geographical setting. We hope to publish a volume of essays based on a selection of the papers delivered at the conference.

Plenary speakers:

– Professor Michael L Satlow, Professor of Religious Studies and Judaic studies Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, USA. ‘Antique and Early Medieval Rabbinic thought on constructions of masculinity and religiosity, with particular reference to Torah study’

– Dr Jennifer Thibodeaux, Associate Professor in Women’s Studies and Anthropology, University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. ‘The disciplining of the Norman clergy and the engagement with celibacy as a defining feature of clerical identity in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries’

– Dr James Clark, Reader in Late Medieval History, University of Bristol. ‘The attractions of the monastic life for English men between the Black Death and the Reformation’

Informations pratiques :

The conference will be held at the University of Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, UK (6-8 July 2012). It has been timed for the weekend before the Leeds IMC to allow international visitors to attend both. Leeds is a 20 minute train journey from Huddersfield. Huddersfield has good train connections to Manchester Airport which lies less than an hour away. The conference organisers are Dr Pat Cullum and Dr Katherine J. Lewis, editors of Holiness and Masculinity in the Middle Ages, (Cardiff, 2004). Please send a brief proposal to Conference.presentations07@hud.ac.uk. Deadline : 30 September 2011.