Landscapes of Sanctity, panels at the 2024 International Medieval Congress, University of Leeds, July 1–4, 2024

The AHRC-funded project “Liturgical and Literary Landscapes” welcomes applications from Early Career Researchers to participate in panels on ‘Landscapes of Sanctity’ to be put forward for the Leeds International Medieval Congress 2024. The four successful applicants will each be given a bursary of £450 towards the costs of attending the conference.

‘Liturgical and Literary Landscapes’, led by Johanna Dale (UCL) and Sarah Bowden (King’s College London) brings together historical approaches with those from literary studies to reassess the transmission of the cult of St Oswald, and, more broadly, uses multi-disciplinary approaches to place, space and landscapes to explore new ways of thinking about the transnational cults of saints. The organizers plan to propose two or three interlinked panels to the Leeds IMC 2024, with contributions from the project leads, a couple of established experts, and new ECR voices. In these panels, which will be brought together under the framework ‘Landscapes of Sanctity’, the organizers would like to explore the ways in which the cults of saints are connected to the landscape, both as physical reality and as experienced and constructed in the cultural memory and imagination. Papers might consider the ways in which cults change as they move, and how these movements can be traced through texts or material artefacts; or how cults leaves traces on landscapes through time (e.g. buildings or settlements) and how these traces and connections are manifest today, both physically and in the cultural imagination. They might explore the role and construction of landscape in lives of saints, or offer ecocritical readings; alternatively they might think about ways in which saintly cults are anchored across time in place, i.e. through liturgy.

Paper proposals are welcome from ECR researchers from a range of disciplines, including (but not limited to): History, Literatures, Art History, Archaeology, Musicology, Theology.