CFP: MATERIALIZING THE SPIRIT: SPACES, OBJECTS AND ART IN THE CULTURES OF WOMEN

CFP: MATERIALIZING THE SPIRIT: SPACES, OBJECTS AND ART IN THE CULTURES OF WOMEN
RELIGIOUS
ANNUAL CONFERENCE
5-7 September 2013
Institute of Historical Research, Senate House LONDON

The History of Women Religious of Britain and Ireland Annual Conference
will be hosted by the Institute of Historical Research, University of
London, on 5-7 September 2013.

Paper proposals are now invited. Presentations should be 20 minutes in
duration, and should address some element of the conference theme, with
reference to British and/or Irish contexts.
The devotional and vocational activities of women religious sculpted the
physical space of religious houses in unique ways. Patterns of use were
etched into the fabric of buildings, guiding structural design and interior
decoration. But buildings also shaped practice: whether the formal monastic
sites of early or revived enclosed orders or the reused secular buildings
of active congregations, women both adapted and adapted to their material
surroundings.
A growing body of literature has addressed itself to convent art, exploring
nuns as patrons, consumers and manufacturers of material and visual
culture. These practices span the history of women’s religious life – from
the early Middle Ages to the present day – and suggest a hidden but dynamic
tradition of artistic enterprise. This conference explores the creative
output of women religious including but not limited to textiles and the
decorative arts, illuminated manuscripts and printed books, women’s
patronage of painting and architecture, the commercial production of
ecclesiastical textiles in the nineteenth-century, production of liturgical
and devotional art in recent periods, and the development of unique convent
and institutional spaces by and for women religious.
Key aims of the conference will be to highlight the scholarly value of
these under-researched and little known spaces and collections and also to
raise awareness and discuss the threats that they face as communities
decline, buildings close, artifacts and archives are dispersed.
This conference will take a broad and diverse view on what constitutes
‘material culture’, emphasizing the conception, production, and meanings of
the many material outputs of convents and monasteries. Papers are welcomed
from a diverse range of disciplines: scholars from social and religious
history, art and architecture, theology, anthropology, psychology and
beyond are invited to offer fresh and innovative perspectives in order to
illuminate ways in which women religious in Britain and Ireland created and
were formed by material histories for over a thousand years.
Please send 200-word proposals for 20-minute papers to kate.jordan.09 [at] ucl.ac.uk and ayla.lepine [at] gmail.com by no later than 1 February 2013.