CONGRESS CANCELED Religious Thinking in Secular Literature
Description
In a recent Speculum article, “In the Name of Charlemagne, Roland, and Turpin” (April 2019), Adrian McClure calls for scholars to “be attentive to religious semiotics as a key way of generating meaning [...] across the entire field of medieval textuality” [465]. Our panel seeks to respond to this call by bringing together new research examining the religious forms and contents of the so-called ‘secular’ literature of the Middle Ages: epics, romances, love songs, comic tales, chronicles, satires, etc. Although the porous boundary between the worldly and the spiritual spheres of medieval life has long been acknowledged, and the mutual influence of devotional and profane genres demonstrated, ‘secular’ literature is still often siloed and its relationship to religious thought and practice understudied. In this panel, we invite those who focus on ‘secular’ writings to reread them from a theological standpoint, and/or reconsider their place within the medieval religious imaginary.
Mae Lyons-Penner
CONGRESS CANCELED Religious Thinking in Secular Literature
Schneider 1140
In a recent Speculum article, “In the Name of Charlemagne, Roland, and Turpin” (April 2019), Adrian McClure calls for scholars to “be attentive to religious semiotics as a key way of generating meaning [...] across the entire field of medieval textuality” [465]. Our panel seeks to respond to this call by bringing together new research examining the religious forms and contents of the so-called ‘secular’ literature of the Middle Ages: epics, romances, love songs, comic tales, chronicles, satires, etc. Although the porous boundary between the worldly and the spiritual spheres of medieval life has long been acknowledged, and the mutual influence of devotional and profane genres demonstrated, ‘secular’ literature is still often siloed and its relationship to religious thought and practice understudied. In this panel, we invite those who focus on ‘secular’ writings to reread them from a theological standpoint, and/or reconsider their place within the medieval religious imaginary.
Mae Lyons-Penner