IMC 2026: Sessions
Session 1511: Embodied Temporality: Ecclesiastical Dialogues and the Medieval Body
Thursday 9 July 2026, 09:00-10:30
| Sponsor: | Bodies and Being: The Pre-Modern Body Project |
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| Organisers: | Autumn Reinhardt-Simpson, Department of History, Classics & Religion, University of Alberta Francesca Squitieri, School of English, University of Nottingham |
| Moderator/Chair: | Autumn Reinhardt-Simpson, Department of History, Classics & Religion, University of Alberta |
| Paper 1511-a | The Opus Dei of Death: Temporal Disjunctures and Ritual Cohesion in Early Benedictine Monastic Practice (Language: English) Index terms: Ecclesiastical History, Monasticism, Religious Life, Theology |
| Paper 1511-b | 'Ride upon the beast that is our flesh': The Body as a Horse in 12th-Century Spiritual Thought (Language: English) Index terms: Ecclesiastical History, Language and Literature - Latin, Religious Life, Theology |
| Paper 1511-c | Sins and Legitimacy: Representations of Muslim Corporality in 13th-Century Castilian and Sicilian Sources (Language: English) Index terms: Historiography - Medieval, Islamic and Arabic Studies, Political Thought, Religious Life |
| Abstract | This panel, explores how medieval bodies were constructed, disciplined, and represented across diverse cultural and historical contexts, with particular attention to the temporal frameworks that shaped these understandings. The papers examine how bodily practices and depictions mediated the flow of time - whether by creating continuity with the past, disciplining present experience, or projecting future possibilities. The first paper considers early Benedictine monastic contexts, showing how the deceased body was integrated into ritual and liturgy in ways that transformed the rupture of death into a coherent and sanctified temporal order, extending communal bonds across mortality and eternity. The second paper turns to 12th-century allegories of the body as a horse, charting how metaphors of training, restraint, and discipline reframed monastic bodily ideals within lay preaching, and how these metaphors configured the body as simultaneously weapon, obstacle, and site of temporal struggle. The third paper examines 13th-century Castilian chronicles, where depictions of Muslim corporality were charged with emotional and symbolic force. These representations constructed the Muslim body as temporally Other - rooted in an imagined, deviant past, or as an ever-present threat - while also revealing tensions in Christian identity-making over time. By narrating the alignment or disruption of gender norms through the body, these accounts shaped the reputations of historical figures and offered retrospective judgements that influenced contemporary understandings of legitimacy and order. Taken together, the panel highlights the temporal elasticity of the medieval body: as a vessel for eschatological hope, as an instrument of moral discipline, as a rhetorical tool in polemical representation, and as a performative site through which gendered and political identities were contested. The body emerges not as a static entity, but as a temporal medium - shaped by ritual, allegory, polemic, and performance - through which medieval communities negotiated their past, present, and future. |