IMC 2026: Sessions

This session investigates how medieval texts articulated forms of religious authority that operated alongside, or even in tension with, clerical structures. While hagiography and devotional writing are often read as affirming ecclesiastical norms, the papers presented here reveal how they also foreground alternative voices and strategies of legitimation.

Bo Davids explores the construction of spiritual motherhood in the hagiographies of Marie of Oignies and Lutgard of Aywières. These texts depict women who, despite lacking official office, exercised authority through ascetic practice, visionary experience, and advisory roles. Their “maternal” status emerges as a theological and social category that critiques as well as supplements clerical power.

Ger Sierink examines the seemingly digressive dice game in Jean Bodel’s Jeu de saint Nicolas. Far from being mere comic relief, the gamblers’ scene interrogates order, chaos, and the unpredictability of human action. By embedding themes of chance and temporal disruption within a hagiographical narrative, the play invests lay experience with theological weight, granting authority to popular performance as a medium of religious instruction.

Thymo Gieltjes studies the extensive ghost dialogues of the Devotio Moderna sister books, where the dead return not just to seek aid but to teach the living about salvation, good living, and the afterlife. Here, authority resides in the interplay between female religious communities, vernacular storytelling, and voices from beyond the grave.

Taken together, these papers show how medieval texts repeatedly located authority outside clerical institutions—whether in maternal embodiment, popular performance, or dialogue with the dead—challenging assumptions about where and how the sacred could speak.