Conference: Legende – Mirakel – Predigt. Klösterliche Sammlungspraxis und die Modellierung religiöser Leitbilder in den Textkulturen des Mittelalters

From an interdisciplinary medievalist perspective, the conference examines fundamental aspects of monastic collection practices, particularly with regard to order-specific compilations of texts in legendaries, miracle collections, and sermon collections.

With regard to the religious text cultures of the Middle Ages, the conference takes as its starting point the idea that collecting is of decisive importance in terms of textuality and narrative form, as well as the (re)configuration of religious models in the context of monastic teaching. Over long periods of time, texts are continually adapted to specific collection interests and pragmatic contexts. In contrast to older research approaches, which tended to emphasize stereotyping and standardization in the discourse of religious didacticism, current questions in literary studies, codicology, and the history of tradition and religious orders will be combined in order to highlight the dynamics and freedoms of hagiographic réécriture with regard to practices of contextualization in collections.

During the conference, case studies will be used to determine individual profiles of producers, tradition bearers, and their users in different historical situations and contexts of use. This will be supplemented by contributions that address overarching questions of tradition, liturgy, church, and monastic history in order to arrive at a differentiated description of the modeling and transformation of religious models resulting from monastic collection practices.

The conference is funded by the German Research Foundation as part of the project “Saints in Collections, Collected Sanctities: Collection Practices and the Modeling of Religious Models in Legends of the High and Late Middle Ages” (Kiel/Cologne).

The program can be found here.