IMC 2026: Sessions

Paper 825-a:

The postmodernist novel Harmonia Caelestis by the Hungarian author Péter Esterházy creates a decentered narrative of a series of fathers, these being figures which cannot be unequivocally referred to as entirely parental, regal/royal, or divine. Our interpretation focusses on the aspect of the novel already designated by its title, evoking the Ptolemean geocentric model of the Universe, dominant throughout the Middle Ages, and implicitly united with the historical, fatherly subject in an ego-centric model of History. We will attempt to show how the novel traces and yet destabilizes the sacred ancestral lineage, symbolically ranging from "Genesis", to the hagiographic "faits et gestes” of the fathers, and finally reaching the "Apocalypse", disordering at once the personal and the historical, which can be read as a deconstruction of the medieval hagiographic genre.

Paper 825-b:

Scholarly work on Counter-Reformation sanctity most often concerns saintly subjects who lived and died in the era of Counter-Reformation. This paper, however, examines how medieval saints were recalled in early modern canonisation trials. I begin with a conundrum: how could the case for medieval saints be made when generations, indeed centuries, separated witnesses from their prospective candidates. The lapse in time forced a situation where living witnesses who personally knew the saint had long since passed away. Using canonisation inquests made for 'immemorial' cults in the 1620s, my paper shall explore how early modern people were able to remember as far as hundreds of years into their medieval past. By probing at these problems, I hope to test the limits of oral memory, illuminate the multi-media dimensions of recall whereby texts, objects, and churches served as monuments to memory, and elaborate how recollection was creatively rechannelled in early seventeenth century canonisation trials.

Paper 825-c:

The Battle of Mohács (1526) has been a defining trauma in Hungarian and Central European memory. This paper examines the evolving signification of the Mohács National Memorial Site, established in 1976 during the socialist era, and its ongoing metamorphosis in anticipation of the 500th anniversary in 2026. Shaped by shifting political contexts, heritage practices, and international frameworks of remembrance, the memorial illustrates how collective identity is negotiated through national tragedies. Contemporary Mohács does not represent a static site of mourning; rather, it is a dynamic arena of reinterpretation.