Round-table on ‘New religious histories’ at IMC Leeds 2014

The International Medieval Congress at Leeds is almost upon us, and I’m looking forward to very many of its sessions – not least, of course the ‘New religious histories’ sessions, co-organized by Melanie Brunner (Leeds), Amanda Power (Sheffield) and myself – sessions 529,  629, 729, 829).

I wanted to post here about the Round-table (929) titled ‘Towards a Comparative Approach to Religious Histories – A Round Table Discussion’. (Leeds University Union – Room 5 – Kirkstall Abbey, 19.00-20.00h). We have just (rather late in the day, alas) asked the participants of the round-table to prepare brief statements on a number of questions. As these questions are probably also discussed elsewhere and we usually only have limited  time in the round-table session, I wanted to post them here in case one of the session speakers, session attendees or otherwise interested parties wanted to add something in written form here. I was hoping I could summarize any pre-event comments to this blog post during the roundtable, but it might also serve for further comments after the Leeds week. Any interested scholar is welcome to post relevant short comments.

The idea for the sessions arose after past Leeds round-tables and informal discussion. We organized the 2014 sessions and this round-table hoping that they would bring together scholars from different fields which have drifted rather (too) far apart: Participants come from the history of the mendicant and monastic orders, male and female convents, but also from research on heresy and various aspects of ecclesiastical history (especially post-Lateran IV) and theology. While the concept binding them together – religion – might be one item for our common agenda, we hope to use the round-table to discuss further current problems, trends and future plans. Ideally, we would encourage participants to engage other corners of the broad field of religion, and name problems and issues which might be discussed profitably in a larger group. This might include

– Theoretical and historiographical issues:  As many old paradigms are abandoned, shall we try to build new ‘total‘ explanations? Which recent developments do we find particularly useful and why?

– Conceptual issues to do with the history of religion, which might profit from interdisciplinary discussion. Not least, we might discuss which approaches to religion itself we consider useful at the moment.

– Future plans, including ideas on how to cross-fertilize adjacent research fields methodologically and organizationally, and research questions which could connect separate fields, ideas to break down very compartmentalized approaches, but also possible events.