L'Agenda des Médiévistes

Musicology at Kalamazoo is sponsoring a session on “Music and the Visual Arts” for the 2026 International Congress on Medieval Studies (May 14-16, 2026).

This session focuses on the connections between medieval music and the visual arts. Scholars may adopt a wide range of approaches and methodologies drawn from musicology, art history, and elsewhere. We welcome papers that either consider specific and direct relationships (e.g., art that depicts musicians or instruments; marginalia in music books; music that describes handicrafts) or papers that investigate more abstract connections between sound and sight (e.g., philosophical/epistemological approaches). This session offers a space for cross-disciplinary discussion among art historians, musicologists, and others with the aim of enriching our understanding of the medieval period.

Abstracts are due on September 15, 2025, and may be submitted at this website.

Source : Medieval Art Research

À l’occasion de la venue et conférence de la Pr. Lauren Benton (Université Yale) au Louvain Lab for Law, History and Society (LHS) à l’UCLouvain le 15 octobre 2025, est organisé un atelier doctoral ouvert à tous les doctorants et doctorantes en droit, histoire et histoire du droit de Belgique. Cet atelier prend la forme d’une rencontre entre Lauren Benton et les jeunes chercheurs et chercheuses, afin qu’ils et elles puissent dialoguer autour de leurs recherches doctorales pouvant porter sur l’une des thématiques suivantes :

• L’histoire du droit et de la justice, toutes périodes confondues
• L’histoire des empires
• L’histoire globale et comparée
• L’histoire coloniale et l’histoire du droit colonial
• L’histoire de la violence
• L’histoire du droit international

Chaque doctorant.e est invité à faire une présentation de 10 minutes en anglais autour de ses recherches doctorales et qui sera suivie d’un échange avec Lauren Benton.

Pour participer à cette rencontre, veuillez nous envoyer votre proposition de communication (résumé de 350 mots + CV) à l’adresse quentin.verreycken@uclouvain.be pour le 30 septembre au plus tard.

Lauren Benton est Barton M. Biggs Professor of History and Professor of Law à l’Université Yale. Ses travaux portent principalement sur l’histoire globale des empires et l’histoire du droit international. Son dernier livre est intitulé They Called It Peace: Worlds of Imperial Violence (Princeton University Press, 2024).

Date et lieu de l’événement :

15 octobre 2025, 14-17h
UCLouvain
Salle Dabin, Bât. Thomas More
Place Montesquieu 2
1348, Louvain-la-Neuve

Contact :

quentin.verreycken@uclouvain.be

Source : CRHiDI

Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Campus de Madrid – Quintana Organized by Project Thesauri Rituum : https://eventos.urjc.es/go/instrumentaaltaris

In the Middle Ages, Christian liturgy was far more than a sequence of prayers and ceremonies: it structured religious practice, shaped sacred space, and gave material form to the expression of faith. Objects, vestments, and books played a central role in this framework, endowed with a visual, tactile, and symbolic language that embodied the theology of the sacred. The International Conference Instrumenta altaris: Ritual Artefacts and Their Images for Medieval Liturgy seeks to refocus attention on the material dimension that, throughout the medieval centuries, rendered the invisible visible and preserved —often in fragmentary form— a tangible legacy of devotion.

For several decades, medieval art historiography has moved towards a reassessment of what was once pejoratively labelled as “minor arts”, no longer regarded as decorative appendices to the dominant monumental tradition, but as essential components for understanding the spaces, gestures, and imagery that shaped Christian liturgy. This shift owes much to the work of scholars such as Colum Hourihane, Eric Palazzo, Cécile Voyer, Klaus Gereon Beuckers, and Elisabeth Crouzet-Pavan, who have drawn attention to the luxurious, performative, and sensory dimensions of medieval liturgical art.

Organised by the research project Thesauri Rituum at Rey Juan Carlos University (Madrid), this conference focuses on three main categories of liturgical artefacts: ritual objects —sacred vessels, reliquaries, crosses, censers— whose craftsmanship reveals a theology of materials; sacred vestments, textiles that not only clothed liturgical ministers but transformed them into figures of transcendence endowed with graces bestowed through ordination; and liturgical books, often illuminated manuscripts, which contained not merely the order of prayer but a spiritual choreography of Christian time. These elements were not autonomous but interdependent, belonging to a practice in which art was not simply contemplated, but activated and handled within liturgical performance —something difficult to reconstruct solely from written sources.

The International Conference Instrumenta altaris: Ritual Artefacts and Their Images for Medieval Liturgy is therefore also an invitation to reconsider the status of medieval art through the vitality of liturgical practice. It calls for a dialogue between form and function, between aesthetics and rituality, between the history of images and the presence of objects. This approach reflects a historiographical sensibility that no longer accepts the nineteenth-century hierarchy between the “major arts” and objects of worship, but instead pays renewed attention to those voices excluded from traditional academic classifications. For in the Middle Ages, the sacred was not confined to grandeur; it was equally revealed in the refinement of the minute and in the quiet eloquence of material signs that accompanied each rite, gesture, and ceremony.

Preferred Thematic Lines

The International Congress ‘Instrumenta altaris’: Ritual Objects and Their Images for Medieval Liturgy accepts proposals for on-site presentations in Spanish, English, Italian, or French that may be framed within the following lines:

1. Historiography and Theory of Medieval Sumptuary and Liturgical Arts

Proposals consisting of historiographical approaches to the study of sumptuary arts, with special attention to their revaluation within medieval art history. Also included will be studies addressing Christian liturgy as an aesthetic, performative, and spatial category, from interdisciplinary methodological perspectives (art history, theology, anthropology, musicology, philology, or cultural history, among others).

2. Materiality and Agency of Liturgical Objects

Presentations addressing questions centered on the matter, technique, use, and circulation of ritual objects: sacred vessels, ritual artifacts, vestments, and liturgical manuscripts. Both case studies and comparative approaches to ecclesiastical treasuries, relics, or sacred textiles will be considered, paying attention to their symbolic construction, cultic functionality, and artistic value.

3. Image of Objects and Objects in Images

Studies addressing the visual representation of liturgical objects in manuscripts, wall paintings, sculpture, or any figurative medium, as well as research on how these artifacts were visualized, interpreted, and re-signified in artistic productions from later periods, from the Early Modern era to the present.

4. Anthropology of Sacred ObjectsAnalyses focused on the social, symbolic, and ritual contexts of creation, use, and transformation of liturgical objects. Special consideration will be given to studies addressing processes such as copying, dismemberment, transfer, donation, inheritance, reuse, or re-signification of these pieces in scenarios different from those for which they were originally conceived.

5. Current Presence and Musealization of Medieval Liturgical Art

Presentations addressing the place and treatment of medieval liturgical objects in current museums, collections, and heritage institutions. Included are both innovative curatorial proposals and the ethical, hermeneutic, and pedagogical dilemmas posed by exhibiting decontextualized ritual artifacts, now detached from their original cultic function.

Abstract Submission for Evaluation

Researchers interested in participating with an on-site oral presentation (Madrid) at the International Congress ‘Instrumenta altaris’: Ritual Objects and Their Images for Medieval Liturgy should submit their presentation abstract through this digital application before October 1, 2025. Any queries will be addressed at the email proyecto.thesaurirituum@urjc.es.

Travel Grants for Master’s and Doctoral Students

To encourage young researchers’ participation, the congress organizing committee will award four grants to cover national or European travel expenses to the best presentation proposals submitted by master’s or doctoral students. These grants will only cover travel expenses to the congress city (Madrid), excluding accommodation, meals, or local transportation. They will be awarded based on criteria of academic quality, originality, and relevance among applicants.

Requirements to apply for the grant:

• Being enrolled in a master’s or doctoral program at the time of proposal submission.

• Explicitly indicate in the submission form the intention to apply for the travel grant.

• Traveling from within Spain or Europe.

Key Dates Summary

• Deadline for presentation proposal submissions: October 1, 2025

• Notification of acceptance: November 1, 2025

• Early registration deadline: November 15, 2025 *

• Congress dates: January 20-22, 2026

* At least one author per presentation must register for the congress under the appropriate category.

Only properly registered participants will receive congress certifications and documentation.

Leeds International Medieval Congress, 6-9 July 2026

Medieval Cistercians appear to have had a strong interest in history. Their libraries housed Classical and Medieval historical texts, and members of the Order authored annals and chronicles about their abbeys, universal chronicles, hagiographies of Cistercian saints, collections of Cistercian stories, and more. But what does it mean to write “Cistercian history”? What are the structural and thematic features that reveal how authors gave expression to the Order’s concerns and priorities? And are these features always present?

Our aim is to gather case studies from a variety of Cistercian contexts across Europe in order to explore the multiple strategies by which authors of historical texts reimagined the Order’s past, engaged with its historical tradition, and responded to the political, social, and religious challenges it faced – both locally and more broadly. We are particularly interested in works that, although written by authors belonging to the Order, may not appear, at first glance, to convey a distinctly Cistercian perspective: texts that omit references to the history of the author’s abbey, refrain from offering a specifically Cistercian interpretation of major events, or seem more invested in national self-definition or in compiling all available sources regardless of their non-Cistercian origin.

Possible themes may include, but are not limited to:

• Cistercian continuations and adaptations of existing chronicles
• Accounts of the founding of Cistercian abbeys in Cistercian chronicles
• Representations of other monastic communities in Cistercian historical writing
• Cistercian historians’ perspectives on secular affairs and political events
• Cistercian worldview and ideas in universal chronicles
• Cistercian historiography in “non-historical” texts (hagiography, exempla, etc.)

Please submit an abstract (max. 100 words), with your name, email address and academic affiliation, to Antoni Grabowski (agrabowski@ihpan.edu.pl) and Elisa Lonati (elisa.lonati@chartes.psl.eu) by 15 September 2025.