Journée d’étude – Tradition and transformation. Visionary experience from the Middle Ages to the Early Modern Times

6 February 2014

Universiteit Antwerpen

Dans le cadre de la Chaire Francqui – Class of Excellence (janvier-juin 2014)

This workshop explores visionary culture in the Low Countries in order to discover patterns of continuity and change from the Middle Ages to Modern Times. The devotional and mystical traditions of the Low Countries will be focused upon, which will allow for a comparative approach to the central theme. Special attention will be given to the dynamics between views on vision laid out in theoretical and normative discourses and the representation of lived visionary experience in text and image.

Specific questions that can be addressed, are: What medieval influences can be traced in early modern views on the visionary? How and to what extent was the medieval heritage in e.g. mystical visionary literature, exempla and theological treatises on discretio spirituum, appropriated within the new ‘splintered’ reality characterized by competing religious factions and the emergence of scientific observation? As for the relation between continuity and innovation at the level of lived practices and their representation: Are there important differences in visionary culture between – and within – different milieu’s such as the monastic and the non-monastic, the clerical and the lay, the learned and the common? What routes of cross-pollinations between these lieu’s can be traced? Can we speak of an over-all pre-modern religious visionary culture in which the religious as well as the lay participated? If so, which are the privileged sources to write its history? And how does this story relate to the received grand narrative of the Entzauberung of the world and the emergence of the modern self?

Programme

13h00 : Rob Faesen (KUL-UA) – Rupert von Deutz’ christological vision

13h40: Renske van Nie (UA) – Visio Dei in Elisabeth of Schonau’s Liber visionum

14h20 : Thom Mertens (UA) – Alijt Bake and Windesheim’s ban on visionary writing

15h00 : Break

15h20 : Jonas Van Mulder (UA) – Lay visions in vernacular miracle books (15th-17th centuries)

16h00 : Tine Van Osselaer (UA) – Marian apparitions in 1930s Belgium

UCSIA-lecture

20h00: Victor Stoichita (Université de Fribourg) – Minimal Zurbaran. The visionary experience in Spanish art

Informations complémentaires : veerle.fraeters@uantwerpen.be