IMC 2008: Sessions
Session 302: Mercantile Piety and the Material Artifact in Late Medieval Yorkshire
Monday 7 July 2008, 16.30-18.00
| Organiser: | Shannon Gayk, Department of English, University of Notre Dame |
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| Moderator/Chair: | Dee Dyas, Centre for Medieval Studies, University of York |
| Paper 302-a | The Merchant Writes Back: The Bolton Hours and the Negotiation of Mercantile Sacred Space (Language: English) Index terms: Art History - General, Lay Piety, Local History, Manuscripts and Palaeography |
| Paper 302-b | Reading the Writing on the Walls: Visual Literacy and the Pricke of Conscience Window (Language: English) Index terms: Architecture - Religious, Language and Literature - Middle English, Lay Piety, Literacy and Orality |
| Paper 302-c | Diamonds round the Neck of Our Lady: The Will and the Gift (Language: English) Index terms: Archives and Sources, Economics - Urban, Lay Piety, Local History |
| Abstract | This session will consider the merchants in late medieval Yorkshire and their public expressions of piety, focusing in particular on the Bolton Hours (paper 1), the Pricke of Conscience window at All Saints Church, North Street (paper 2), and late medieval wills of Yorkshire merchants (paper 3). Papers will explore issues such as the public nature of the charitable bequest, devotional aesthetics, and the cost of producing, using, and bequeathing objects - in short, the complex interrelationship between commodities and devotional objects. In a theology of work where humans create industry just as God creates nature (Inferno xi.97-108), this session inquires into the status of the artifact, the manmade object, whether created for trade or for worship. |