IMC 2026: Sessions

The festive culture of the early Middle Ages has so far been approached only tentatively by specialists, often treated as secondary to broader topics such as liturgy, ecclesiastical authority, or sociability (Hen 1995; Bailey 2017). Yet festivals and celebrations are omnipresent in the documentary record: they appear in liturgical books, conciliar legislation, diplomatic acts, hagiographic narratives, and historiographic accounts. Their ubiquity invites renewed attention to the sources themselves, not only as repositories of information but as discursive constructions that frame and shape festivity.

This session proposes a close and comparative reading of corpora rarely studied together in order to highlight how they encode and transmit the festive. Contributions will focus on martyrologies, relic labels, and liturgical texts. Each category offers a distinct perspective—commemoration of saints, material circulation of relics, and ritual practice—showing how texts inscribe festivity into memory, prescribe ceremonial forms, or authenticate sacred presence.

This methodological dialogue will underline the necessity of crossing corpora in order to grasp the complexity of early medieval festivity, while also raising questions about genre, authority, and audience. In doing so, the session foregrounds the sources themselves as central actors in shaping how festivities were recorded, imagined, and lived.