The Aesthetics of Devotion in Medieval England
A one-day symposium hosted by the Department of English at the University of Chicago and co-sponsored by Frederic Ives Carpenter Fund, the Medieval Studies Workshop, the ASSC, and the Nicholson Center for British Studies
Friday, October 25th 2019
10:00 – 5:00
SIFK Classroom – 5737 University Ave
This symposium brings together three scholars whose work, in varied ways, has generated new insights into the devotional cultures of medieval England. At this one-day symposium, we invite them to explore issues of devotional aesthetics in their respective archives. How did medieval spiritual writings seek to provoke and steer readers’ responses? In what ways did the design of a text reflect conceptions of who would be using it and why? How might we understand issues of (for instance) ecclesiastical hierarchy, monastic discipline, or lay piety to have been negotiated through formal and poetic decisions that leave their traces in medieval works we continue to encounter today? Our choice of the term ‘aesthetics’ is meant to call on the word’s roots, in the ancient Greek term for sense perception. Focus on perception—or, more generally, on the experiential uptake of religious texts and objects—both follows from recent invocations of ‘form’ in medieval literary studies and also departs from them. Aesthetics seeks to push form into motion, into those dynamic processes of apprehension that generate meaning and experience. We look forward to a day of conversation about the interplay between English medieval religious writing and the sensory, affective, and interpretive responses it sought to incite.
Program
10:00 Thomas O’Donnell (Fordham University) “The Common Life and Marks of Erasure at Durham Cathedral Priory” with a response by Michelle Karnes (University of Notre Dame)
Lunch provided (RSVP requested)
1:00 Leslie Lockett (Ohio State University) “Dialogue, Devotion, and Episcopal Culture in the Old English Soliloquies” with a response by Emily Butler (John Caroll University)
3:00 Catherine Sanok (University of Michigan) “About Face: Addressing the Vernicle in Late Medieval England” with a response by Katharine Breen (Northwestern University)
Reception following final talk