CONGRESS CANCELED Fourteenth-Century Religious Cultures

CONGRESS CANCELED Fourteenth-Century Religious Cultures

Bernhard Brown & Gold Room

In the last few decades, scholars have begun to recognize the diversity of religious thought and experience in medieval Europe. For example, religious historians have started to think less in terms of Christianity and more in terms of “Christianities” or even “micro-Christianities.” Nowhere arguably is this multiplicity of devotional practice, religious experience and even dogma more evident than in the Fourteenth Century. From Schism within the institutional Church, to the inquisition and the experiences of female mystics and beguines, the fourteenth was a century in which the line between saint and subversive, between canonical and controversial, was continuously blurred. This session examines the multiplicity of fourteenth-century religious cultures, formal and informal, elite and lay, male and female, Christian, Jewish and Muslim, on their own terms, and seeks to find what commonalities these diverse religious cultures might share. Maya Soifer Irish