IMC 2025: Sessions

Conspiracy, or a belief in conspiracy, has been an important driver of historical events and transformations. According to modern conventions, conspiracy falls into two categories. A conspiracy, to borrow recent language from a sociologist, involves a small group of people acting together in secret for their own benefit, often against the common good. A key premodern characteristic of these groups is that they were bound by oaths. The label for such conspiracies is, appropriately, coniuratio. Conspiracy theory, on the other hand, refers to a more illusory, perhaps delusional, phenomenon. It is an explanation for events based on the existence of a powerful, secretive organization that contradict fundamental epistemological authorities. It is a core contention of these sessions that while conspiracy was a political practice carried out throughout the Middle Ages, the later Middle Ages, starting around 1200, saw a turn toward belief in “conspiracy theories,” a transition that relates to and perhaps cast light on the idea of a “persecuting society,” as formulated so compellingly by R. I. Moore. To draw this distinction as much as possible in medieval terms, our first session will examine medieval conspiracies, and the second, conspiracy theories.