New Discoveries in Medieval Religion: A Susan Manning Workshop at IASH
On 13th June 2024 IASH welcomed a small community of medievalists interested in time, bodies, interactions of words and images upon spaces and environments, and the ideological and emotional acts of creating art historical and literary materials. The workshop was organised by Dr Hope Doherty-Harrison (Centre for Research Collections Fellow) and supported by the Susan Manning Workshop Fund.
The workshop comprised a selection of talks on varied topics, including Hebrew and Latin literature; early medieval stone sculpture and its landscape environment; depictions of love between people of all genders in theological art and writing; strange omissions in theological diagrams which relate to historical, visual, social, and scholastic contexts; close textual and palaeographical work, especially to identify individual names and individuals; and the theological and political purposes of staging dramatic biblical retellings as a synthesis of their performed environments (northern European towns) and the first-century Judea where their stories of Christ took place. These talks drew on a rich array of interdisciplinary perspectives, including (but not limited to) ecocriticism, deconstructionism, psychoanalysis, and literary theory.
The main religions and religious contexts discussed were Judaism, Christianity, and Jewish-Christian relations. While talks and perspectives from religions beyond these would have been very welcome, this narrower scope meant that discussions could be focused and investigative on how to ethically and progressively teach the Christocentric topics that appear across curricula in UK and US higher education. We discussed how we came to our own topics; being trained in English Literature, I study Christian sources simply because this is what I learned to do during my undergraduate and masters degrees. It is therefore incumbent on current teachers to develop their research in a way that helps students see that medieval Christian culture does not exist in a vacuum and that there is more to learn beyond and around it.
Indeed, possibly the most challenging and fruitful part of the day was the closing session, when participants came together to confront problems in our teaching experiences, and how the ideas explored in the workshop might help us to work towards new ideas and ways of addressing them. Together, we explored ideas about how to help students build both a foundation of knowledge and the confidence to explore unfamiliar sources, which can also help when placing medieval Christian culture in context, attending to where sources were intended to oppress and manipulate. While some participants shared experiences of students assuming knowledge of Christian culture, which can pose problems for approaching the medieval context, many also suggested that perceptions of Judaism in current society (including anti-Judaism) needed to be addressed and overcome in the current classroom.
We discussed how theological biases among academics can impact (and harm) developing work by emerging scholars in the field. As the workshop was mainly attended by early-career and PhD researchers, it was bittersweet to share our hopes and ideas for our own best practice as supervisors of the future, knowing the uncertainty of whether we will be able to implement these ideas. Though we did not have time in the workshop to discuss intersections between the limits and biases of teaching and research in medieval studies and the conditions imposed by precarity, this would be a vital topic for further discussion.
Among the busy medieval conferences of the summer—including Gender and Medieval Studies and the infamous International Medieval Congress in Leeds—this workshop provided a small, quiet space for academics at all career stages to share new discoveries with one another, and think about what medieval religions mean to us and to the world in which we live, write and teach.