Conference: Landscapes of Sanctity in the Medieval World

The venerable Bede recounts that before meeting Cædwalla of the Britons in battle in 633/4, Oswald of Northumbria set up a hastily made wooden cross and knelt before it with his army to pray for victory. His prayers were answered and this place, known as Heavenfield and marked by Oswald’s cross, became a site of many miracles. The monks of nearby Hexham made an annual pilgrimage on the date of Oswald’s death and subsequently built a small church on the site so that, as Bede declared, ‘the place has become still more sacred and worthy of honour’. A church dedicated to Oswald still stands at Heavenfield, and in 1928 a new wooden cross was erected nearby.

Oswald is not the only saint to have left his mark on the landscape. This conference explores the multiple ways in which saints and their cults are connected to landscape, both as physical reality and as experienced and constructed in cultural memory and imagination. Papers draw on multiple disciplinary perspectives and range geographically and chronologically from early medieval northern-England to the Austrian Tyrol shortly before the Reformation; they include studies of saints and landscapes in medieval chronicles, manuscripts, painted church interiors, material artefacts and literary texts as well as how traces of saints in landscapes are manifest today, both physically and in cultural imagination.

The conference is convened by Johanna Dale (UCL History) and Sarah Bowden (King’s College London, German and Medieval Studies)

CONFERENCE PROGRAMME

Wednesday 2 July

9.30 am       Welcome
9.45 am       Introduction: Landscapes of Sanctity (Sarah Bowden, King’s College London and Johanna Dale, UCL)

10.15 am     Panel 1: Creating and Shaping Landscapes of Sanctity
                    Relics of Person and Place: Mobile Matter and the Creation of Sacred Landscapes (Lucy Donkin, Bristol)

11.00 am     Coffee

11.30 am     Panel 1 continued 
                    Medieval Religious Objects in the Archaeological Landscape (Michael Lewis, British Museum, with Eljas Oksanen and Rob Webley, both University of Reading)

                    Saints and the Liturgical ‘here’ in Medieval Iberia (Kati Ihnat, Nijmegen)

1.00pm        Lunch

2.00 pm       Panel 2: Sanctity and Historiography
                    Landscapes of Sanctity in Norman Chronicles (Leonie Hicks, Christ Church Canterbury)

                    Sanctity and the Grounding of History: The Case of Two Thirteenth-Century French Manuscripts (Fiona Barsoum, Cambridge)

3.30 pm       Coffee

4.00 pm       Panel 3: Saintly Ecologies: The Case of St Patrick
                    The Settler and the Saint: Keeping Landscape Sacred and Protecting the Land (Máire Ní Mhaonaigh, Cambridge)
                   
                    Underground Stories: Purgatory and Onkalo (Miranda Griffin, Cambridge)

5.30 pm       Drinks reception

Thursday 3 July

9.15 am       Panel 4: Seascapes of Sanctity
                    Maritime Landscapes of Sanctity in Coastal Northumbria (David Petts, Durham)

                    Sea-terrors and Cleansing Floods: Land, Water, Sanctity and Time in the Old English Andreas (Mary Kate Hurley, Ohio)

10.45 am     Coffee

11.15 am     Panel 5: Imagery, Aesthetics, Devotion
                    Rock Art: Hermits, Saints and Wilderness Aesthetics in Later Medieval England (Bob Mills, UCL)

                    Worship at the Holy Mountain: Landscapes of Contemplation in Late Byzantine Thessalonike (Andrei Dumitrescu, Stanford)

12.45 pm     Lunch

1.45 pm       Panel 6: Landscapes of Sanctity, Medieval and Post-Medieval
                    The Medieval Cult of St Hild: Space, Place and Landscape (Thomas Pickles, Chester)

                    Marking the Boundaries of Barking Abbey (Josh Davies, King’s College London)

3.15 pm       Closing remarks

Sponsored by the AHRC project Liturgical and Literary Landscapes: the cult of Oswald of Northumbria in the German-Speaking World [AH/X003841/1]