With Catherine Sanok: Secular Temporalities

Sponsoring Organization(s)

Harvard English Dept. Medieval Colloquium

Organizer Name

Anna Kelner

Organizer Affiliation

Harvard Univ.

Presider Name

Kathryn Mogk

Presider Affiliation

Harvard Univ.

Paper Title 1

Medieval Spanish Historiography and the Integration of Christian and Islamic Chronologies

Presenter 1 Name

Alexander Peña

Presenter 1 Affiliation

Yale Univ.

Paper Title 2

Time Dis/jointed: Ekphrasis and Prosopopoeia in Chaucer's The House of Fame

Presenter 2 Name

Rory Sullivan

Presenter 2 Affiliation

Univ. of North Carolina-Chapel Hill

Paper Title 3

Presumption and Despair: Sacred and Secular Time in Malory’s "Lancelot and Guinevere"

Presenter 3 Name

Adam Horn

Presenter 3 Affiliation

Columbia Univ.

Paper Title 4

The Secular Day

Presenter 4 Name

Catherine Sanok

Presenter 4 Affiliation

Univ. of Michigan-Ann Arbor

Start Date

11-5-2019 1:30 PM

Session Location

Bernhard 211

Description

While much ink has been spilled over the complexities of sacred time in medieval studies, secular time has attracted significantly less attention. This panel welcomes papers that discuss secular temporalities from any angle, but which might respond to one or several of the following questions. Does secular time, as Charles Taylor has argued, act as a hegemonic force, a way of evacuating the multifaceted nature of sacred time? Or does secular time in fact have the potential to accommodate religious difference, such as the different ways of structuring the day in various religious traditions? What rhythms structured the medieval day, the hour, or the week? How might figurations of the secular relate to astrological time, or other modes of considering the saeculum? How might secular time be bound up with the organization of political community, or with genealogical or regal time? If secular time can be seen, at least in part, as sequential or linear, how might this kind of temporality intersect with literary narrative? Anna Kelner