IMC 2018: Sessions

This is intended as the first of two proposed sessions. 'They were the new monks... devout like Palestinians, obedient like Thebans, fervent like Egyptians, the disciples of the Antonies and Macariuses in the deep desert.' This is how the regular canon Johannes Busch described the first brothers in his community at Windesheim. His quotation introduces what our two sessions are about: how people in the Middle Ages appropriated the past in order to create an identity for themselves. Busch claimed the Desert Fathers as well as the early brothers in his community as his direct forebears, arguing that his brothers imitated these to perfection. At the same time, he acknowledged that there were many differences between these and their great models. As far as he was concerned, a literal imitation was not the point. The Windesheimers had to find a way to imitate what the Desert Fathers were actually about: a total focus on God. This is session 1 of two sessions, which will address this dynamics of studying a past, claiming it and reworking it to serve as a model of contemporary identities as well as a model for imitation. More specifically, we would like to investigate how heritage studies, as performed by scholars such as De Certeau and Lowenthal from the 20th century, might be useful to understand these processes of reinventing oneself or - in the case of a new group or movement - even inventing themselves. How does memory work here? What is the connection between heritage and memory? This first session focuses on identity and memory in religious milieus.