IMC 2021: Sessions
Session 1715: Changing Climates, The Preternatural, II: Negotiating the Supernatural - Changing Intellectual Climates in Late Medieval England
Thursday 8 July 2021, 14.15-15.45
| Organiser: | Tabitha Stanmore, Department of History, University of Bristol |
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| Moderator/Chair: | Henry Marsh, Department of History, University of Exeter |
| Paper 1715-a | Climates of Toleration: Service Magic in Late Medieval England (Language: English) Index terms: Economics - Trade, Lay Piety, Social History |
| Paper 1715-b | From Avalon to the Back Garden: The Shift of Fairy Habitat in the Changing Intellectual Climates of Late Medieval and Renaissance Fairy-Summoning Rituals (Language: English) Index terms: Folk Studies, Lay Piety |
| Paper 1715-c | 'Am I in Paradise?': Supernatural Spaces within the Real World in Late Medieval and Early Modern Drama (Language: English) Index terms: Performance Arts - Drama, Technology |
| Abstract | Papers in this session consider how magic and the supernatural were practiced and constructed within a physical context in the late Middle Ages. The first paper analyses how practical magic, despite being technically illicit, was tolerated within late medieval communities. It argues that magic's fundamental utility made it an important part of medieval society, and the climate of toleration this fostered is under-recognised in modern scholarship. The second paper assesses how ritual magic to summon fairies moved into vernacular contexts as the milieu it was practiced in changed in the Late Middle Ages and early modern period, particularly turning to the shifts in terminology as a demonstration of this mutating cultural and intellectual climate. The third paper will examine the depictions of the medieval and early modern heaven and hell, and how these depictions suggest a shift in social attitudes to a vernacular climate of expression. |