Call for Papers for Session

AGENCIES AND TEMPORALITIES IN COMPLEX ARTEFACTS FROM RELIGIOUS COMMUNITIES (C. 1000–1600)

International Medieval Congress, Leeds, 6-9 July 2026

Special Thematic Strand: TEMPORALITIES

Deadline for proposals: 19 September 2025

Reliquary panel from the Benedictine Convent of St George at Prague Castle (I). The Meuse or Rhine region, 1280-1300, Bohemia after 1300, additions after 1330 and circa 1800; oak wood, gilded silver, gilded copper, niello, parchment, fabric, rock crystal, pearls, gemstones. Prague, The Royal Canononny of Premonstratensians at Strahov, Inv. No. 1310.

The proposed session(s) will focus on the multifaceted relationship between time, matter, and religious practice. More specifically, the sessions will examine medieval multi-material and multimedia artefacts that challenge our conception of a “finished” object. The materialities and meanings of these complex artefacts have evolved throughout their lives and afterlives. They must therefore be understood as “works in progress” or organic entities that hold multiple narratives, identities, agencies and temporalities.
These sessions will focus on complex artefacts that have received little scholarly attention or have been misinterpreted due to discipline-bound approaches from a single perspective, overlooking their fluid or hybrid nature. The analysis will encompass reliquaries and other ornamenta sacra, devotional diptychs or triptychs, manuscripts as written artefacts, etc., from religious communities in a global perspective.
We welcome proposals for 20-minute papers in English from a variety of disciplines, including art history, material culture, archaeology, history, cultural history, anthropology, gender studies, musicology, literary studies, theology and the history of emotions. Contributions that facilitate a broader interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary or transregional approach to the study of materiality and religious practice are particularly encouraged.

Suggested topics may include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Case studies of complex written and material artefacts resulting from the assembly of different elements that have been incorrectly labelled and studied. Particular attention will be given to objects from communities that have not been well integrated into mainstream scholarship, such as communities of hermits, non-cloistered religious women and communities belonging to understudied orders and territories.

• Embodied agencies. How complex artefacts resulting from the assembly of different elements, materials and media functioned as new media, shaping and reshaping the relationship between humans and matter, between individuals and communities.

• Objects embodying overlapping, nonlinear or anachronic temporalities. The interactive relationship between things and humans created an individual and communal sense of time that was not strictly linear.

• The potential of multi-material objects to display fluid religious identities, transcending binary divisions and boundaries that have defined religious life and practice.

• Textual materialities and temporalities. How inventories (and other sources containing 'textual things', i.e. descriptions of objects) facilitate the fluid and non-linear temporality of objects.

Please submit an abstract (max. 300 words) and a short biography (max. 150 words) to mercedes.pvidal@uam.es by 19 September. All proposals should include your name, email address, academic affiliation and preferred presentation format (in-person or virtual).

Speakers will be informed by 23 September.