medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
CALL FOR PAPERS
The third Hagiography Society symposium, hosted and co-sponsored by the Department of Medieval Studies, Central European University, will be held in Budapest on 24-27 June 2004.
Like the first two Hagiography Society symposia, this will be a fairly small conference, with approximately 20 speakers presenting papers of 25-30 minutes each, another 10 or 12 people acting as moderators and respondents, and no concurrent sessions.
The overall topic of the symposium will be "SAINTS AND PATRONAGE," defined broadly enough to encompass a wide range of disciplines and perspectives and to address many different manifestations of patronage--
for example, patron saints of ecclesiastical foundations, religious orders, urban guilds, professions, confraternities, cities, dynasties, or countries; local church dedications; personal patron saints and individuals' relationships with them; donors and shrines; patronage of particular saints' cults by powerful families and institutions; disciples and enthusiastic confessors of living saints; promotion of candidates for canonization; commissioning of visual and literary artworks to
honor (and sometimes redefine) a saint's memory.
We hope to include papers from both established scholars and students, dealing with a variety of regions and periods (from the Ancient World to the end of the Middle Ages), and shedding light on such questions as these:
• Why was patronage such a widespread phenomenon in relation to cults of saints?
• What did it mean in different contexts?
• Was it significantly affected by such factors as gender, social status, or economic level?
• How were relationships established and maintained between patrons and the recipients of their patronage?
• What was expected on each side?
• What functions were served by such patronage?
• Who benefited from it?
• Under what circumstances was one patron replaced by another?
Central European University is an ideal site for an international conference like this one both because of the rich Medieval heritage of Budapest and the surrounding area and because of the character of the university itself. The CEU is a private university founded by George Soros in 1991 to foster academic cooperation in post-communist East-Central Europe. Besides fields directly related to "transition" (constitutional law, international relations, economics of privatization, political science), the CEU has made an investment in efforts to work out a new interpretation of the historical heritage of the region. From this line has come the Department of Medieval Studies, founded in 1992, which has been chaired successively by Gabor Klaniczay, Janos Bak, and Jozsef Laszlovszky. During its first ten years of existence the CEU Department of Medieval Studies has already educated more than 250 M.A. students from more than 25 countries in interdisciplinary medieval studies and sup
ervised 18 defended Ph.D. dissertations, becoming one of the most important international centers of this field in Europe.
Potential speakers at this symposium should send 250-word abstracts BY 15 DECEMBER 2003 to Sherry Reames, Department of English, University of Wisconsin, 600 N. Park St., Madison, WI 53706, USA; fax (608) 263-3709; email [log in to unmask] The program committee will also include Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Susan Einbinder, Thomas Head, Gabor Klaniczay, and Jozsef Laszlovszky. Abstracts may be submitted in any language, but the papers themselves should be given in English, the usual language of instruction at the CEU.
As the planning for the symposium proceeds, we will post further details and updates on the Hagiography Society website:
<http://mendota.english.wisc.edu/~hagio> .
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