IMC 2009: Sessions

Every year the International Medieval Congress includes a Special Thematic Strand in addition to its regular 35. The chosen focus for 2009, 'Heresy and Orthodoxy', contributes a total of over 180 sessions on many varied aspects of religious life and identity in the Middle Ages, as well as the place of medieval heresies in modern imaginations and cultures. The concluding discussion is intended to allow a forum in which speakers from different disciplinary backgrounds can offer comments, responses, and reflections on the road as it will have been travelled over the course of the preceding three-and-a-half days. The round table will look forward to the possible afterlives of the strand's good works in the form of future research and questions that might inform either resulting publications (whether the projected volume of proceedings or other activities), or indeed possible directions for follow-up sessions in 2010. As with views of heresy and orthodoxy in Medieval Studies it is intended that the panel should be a broad but lively church. Among the questions and issues to be addressed in the discussion are:

• What is the current state of knowledge about the place and formation of either orthodoxy or heresy in medieval religious life? How has the study of these areas developed in recent years?

• What significant responses have presentations at the 2009 Congress offered to those reflections?

• Have any particular new perspectives, especially interdisciplinary, emerged for the study in the field?

• What are the challenges and new perspectives facing the study of religious identity in a global climate in which conflicts between faith community and national identity are increasingly of concern and in which broader and more inclusive views seem especially pertinent?