IMC 2026: Sessions

Paper 127-a:

The Christian doctrine of Christ's return for a final judgment resulted in the Church understanding that time was moving to a definite conclusion. Numerous Christian theologians responded by dividing history into a number of definable ages in an attempt to determine the proximity of the Last Day. This paper will look at the four-age division of the history of the Church put forth by the twelfth century Cistercian abbot Bernard of Clairvaux. His fourth age culminated with the period of the Antichrist, which he labelled the 'attack of the noonday devil,' an age the abbot believed was not far off. The paper will argue that Bernard's understanding of the movement of time played an important role in his mystical theology and his crusade activity.

Paper 127-b:

Throughout Old English poetry and prose, wyrd, habitually translated as "fate", is usually characterized as "what happens" when confronted with contingency. As a way to conceive of the inconceivable, wyrd lays bare an unaccountable, faceless force that shapes the time of human beings. It is occasionally depicted as cruel or wondrous, working on the elements of the visible world, if not the body itself. While personified in the Norse tradition as the three Norns, in the Old English corpus it is usually depicted as a singular abstract force, but without a clear origin. At times solely attributed to the time of happenstance, it is also translated as providential design In the B Text of the Alfredian Consolation [2:82] we read, ‘That which we call wyrd that is God’s work, which he effects every day, both that which we see and that which is invisible’ (Godden 2009, 39). Taking account of the plethora of meanings in Old English, this papers shows how, through the renditions of wyrd, we witness a battle over the understanding of human temporality, which Christianity will harness for theological ends.

Paper 127-c:

As Christian kingdoms came to dominate the Iberian Peninsula during the fourteenth century, the region’s ancient past became an urgent concern for medieval historians. To justify the Castilian project of conquering Moorish territory, Christian writers sought to tie the peninsula into Biblical history. They accomplished this by adopting Tubal, an obscure grandson of Noah about whom Genesis says little, as the progenitor of Spanish Christians. In this presentation, I will describe the origins of Tubalism in Josephus and Isidore of Seville. I will then analyze how Christian sources, including Alfonso el Sabio’s General Estoria and Diego de Valera’s Crónica de España, appropriate it for the expansionist project. Finally, I will examine the Crónica del moro Rasis, a Muslim source which both participates in and subverts Tubalism.

Paper 127-d:

Episcopal visitation records from the European Middle Ages are a rich source for the state of local churches in the period, with their inventories of liturgical objects and church properties, descriptions of church buildings, and complaints about clerical and lay behaviour. These records were previously interpreted primarily as instruments created by rationalizing ecclesiastical officials to manage diocesan territories and their unruly clerical and lay subjects, but building on newer approaches of scholars such as Ian Forrest, this paper moves beyond that perspective to examine the visitation as a cultural process shaped by multiple participants. Focussing on mid-fifteenth century visitation records from the northern Italian dioceses of Ferrara, Verona, and Padua, I explore how church officials, clerics, and laypeople negotiated their roles in visitations through the language of time and temporality. This language was flexible, elastic, and shared; both church officials and those they investigated drew on a multiplicity of expressions and concepts expressing past, present, and future time in their interactions. Reading visitation records through a temporal lens reveals connections among a diverse group of historical subjects and offers new ways to understand the process and consequences of episcopal visitation in the medieval period.