IMC 2026: Sessions
Session 613: The Identities of Religious Orders between the Passage of Time and the Manipulation of Memory, II
Tuesday 7 July 2026, 11:15-12:45
| Sponsor: | JSPS Grant in Aid for Scientific Research (B) |
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| Organiser: | Toshio Ohnuki, Faculty of Humanities & Social Sciences, Tokyo Metropolitan University |
| Moderator/Chair: | Toshio Ohnuki, Faculty of Humanities & Social Sciences, Tokyo Metropolitan University |
| Paper 613-a | Prophecy and Memory in Franciscan Hagiographic Writings (Language: English) Index terms: Hagiography, Historiography - Medieval, Monasticism, Religious Life |
| Paper 613-b | A Manipulated Identity?: Academic Values in the Memory of Dominican Friars (Language: English) Index terms: Education, Historiography - Medieval, Monasticism, Religious Life |
| Paper 613-c | Translation as a Tool of Memory: Cultural Preservation and Erasure in the Jesuit Mission in Japan (Language: English) Index terms: Historiography - Medieval, Monasticism, Religious Life |
| Abstract | This session undertakes a comparative and analytical inquiry into the factors that endowed monastic orders and monastic institutions of the medieval and early modern periods with a distinctive identity. In the approximately eighty years following the foundation of a given order, the “communicative memory” of its origins was constructed and transmitted by living witnesses. With the passing of these contemporaries, however, many communities entered a phase of “crisis”: across the ensuing rupture—the so-called “floating gap”—they sought to recollect the past in ways that gave rise to a “cultural memory” (Jan Assmann). By integrating into the discussion this correlation between the temporal distance from foundational events and the strategic shaping of memory, the session aims to elucidate the processes through which monastic orders forged enduring identities and sustained the vigor of their religious practice. |