Session at the Renaissance Society of America 2020 Conference

The Toronto Renaissance & Reformation Colloquium plans to run a series of interdisciplinary panels on "Sacred Spatiality and Materiality" at RSA Philadelphia 2020. Please see the description and details below. For further inquiries, please contact: Ana Sekulic ([email protected]) or Nicholas Terpstra ([email protected]).

Scholars have moved from seeing landscape as a mere background to recognizing landscapes as agents that both reflect and shape human experiences. As many representations of the various holy sites and ritual practices around them attest, early modern actors actively translated otherworldly ideas into three-dimensional physical spaces. Interweaving the spiritual with the spatial did not, however, occur only in the well-known pilgrimage centers; clergy and laity alike routinely created and experienced the holy by sensing, moving through, and intervening in many different environments.

Pursuing this line of inquiry, we invite scholars of history, history of art and architecture, historical geography and/or anthropology, religious studies, and literature working across the geographical and political spectrum of the early modern world to submit contributions that explore a repertoire of spatial and material strategies that shaped the early modern religious experiences.

Possible questions and themes include:

  • Through what physical, textual, liturgical/ritual or other practices were holy spaces created?
  • How did certain urban, mountainous, aquatic or other natural landscapes become endowed with spirituality, as opposed to the others?
  • Similarly, how were familiar holy sites recreated in different environmental and political settings?
  • What kind of power regimes did sacred sites engender and how were they interwoven into broader social and political phenomena?

Papers are limited to 20 minutes, and we welcome presentations employing visual and digital tools. Please send a 200-word abstract and 150 word (max) CV to Ana Sekulić ([email protected]) by June 15th, 2019. Submissions will be reviewed by the organizing committee and TRRC Executive, and responses will be sent by the end of June.