IMC 2022: Sessions

Under the title 'Blurred Boundaries and Religious Dissent', this series of four conference sessions seeks to explore the disparity between the prescribed ideal of orthodoxy in the Middle Ages and Christianity as it was practiced by members of ecclesiastical, monastic, and lay communities. Thus, starting from different case studies with their own spatial and temporal particularities, the papers will be focusing on how the religious boundaries of the most diverse communities were negotiated. How and why was it possible or even desirable to preserve such blurred boundaries and how do they relate to what has been defined by R. I. Moore as 'dissent'? Participants will build on the sessions presented at the International Medieval Congress at Leeds (2021) under the title, 'Reconsidering Boundaries of Religious Dissent in the Long 12th Century'. Scholars in these sessions used their research as case studies to exemplify the permeability of the lines that were intended to separate ecclesiastical clerics from monastic authorities, male from female religious, laity from clergy, and orthodox from heretical. The current series of sessions will expand the temporal scope to include topics from the late 10th through the 14th centuries.