Material Hagiography, Hagiography Society panel at the Renaissance Society of America Annual Meeting 2016, Boston, March 31–April 2, 2016

The Hagiography Society invites papers for RSA 2016 for thematic panels taking up the question of issues of material hagiography. Scholars across disciplines—art history, religious studies, and anthropology among others—have increasingly directed attention to material cultures of religions, considering everyday sensory, material, and aesthetic practices of religions as well as monuments in art and architecture. The material hagiography panel(s) undertake to explore ways in which early modern religious practices related to hagiography—engaging with holy people and their cults across eras, cultures, and religious traditions—were as inherently sensory and material as they were textual, and were intimately engaged with “stuff.” This stuff could include “high art” or quotidian utensils, consecrated ritual objects, as well as customary gestures, texts, and/or spaces. Proposed papers may consider sites—geographic, material, physical and metaphorical—where sensation and materiality engaged each other, and both concerned hagiography. They may also address how early modern hagiography, particularly the objects and spaces cults used and activated, looked, felt, smelled, tasted, and sounded, together with what cultic practitioners said, did, or wrote.

Please submit a 150-word (max) abstract, a 300-word (max) CV, and keywords to Ruth Noyes at by June 5th.