Religion and Conflict in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods
Nottingham Trent University
11-13 July 2017

This conference is the inaugural event for the Centre for the Study of Religion and Conflict in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods at NTU. The centre aims to increase understanding of the origins, ideology, implementation, impact and historiography of religion and conflict in the medieval and early modern periods. Conflicts with religious elements incorporate not just military engagements but also social, political, cultural and economic events, forming a common strand between Medieval and Early Modern worlds. The conference will both launch the centre and highlight new subjects and strategies for its future development.

Current members have expertise in the Crusades and the Military Orders; Reformations and Confessional societies; the Conquest of the New World and Seventeenth Century Britain, but we are keen to establish networking links with scholars and students who investigate the role of religion and conflicts with different faiths, confessions and heterodox groups, so that comparisons may contribute towards the development of new definitions and paradigms for understanding the roles played by belief in national, communal and inter-personal conflict.

The conference will incorporate a broad chronological spectrum from medieval to early modern with a view to developing current research, sharing techniques, investigating new approaches and enhancing study in the wider field. It will consist of keynote and public lectures, and academic papers presented in a workshop format. Postgraduate and early career applicants are particularly welcome.

Prospective speakers are invited to submit 200 word abstracts which broadly relate to the following themes from any period in the medieval to early modern range, and comparative approaches are particularly welcomed:

• Religious discourse and dissent
• Religion and warfare/military conflict
• Conflict relating to religious property or objects
• Gender and religious conflict
• Confessional conflict
• Conversion and conflict
• Religion and family conflicts: marital violence, divorce, separation, property disputes
• Religion and conflict in social environments, communities and networks
• Religious sources in conflict

There will be an opportunity to publish conference proceedings in a special volume for the Themes in Medieval and Early Modern History Series for Routledge.

Abstracts should be sent to: Natasha.Hodgson@ntu.ac.uk by Friday 7 April, 2017.

Devotional Writing in Print and Manuscript in Early Modern England, 1558-1700
Ramphal Building, University of Warwick
Monday 26 June, 2017

Plenary Speakers:

• Prof Bernard Capp (Emeritus, Warwick)
• Dr Johanna Harris (Exeter)

Devotions in early modern England, public or private, were central to the everyday lives of clergy and laity alike. Yet such practises were routinely transformed by men and women who did not just record but reconfigured their piety through writing. From accounts of fasts, feasts, and thanksgiving days; prayers and sacred songs; covenants and confessing of sins; narratives of conversion, baptism or burial; biblical graffiti; repetition of sermons; conferencing and conventicles. English citizens, individually and communally, and on either side of the confessional divide had a regimen of acts that were to be performed and perfected during their lifetimes. This one day conference aims to investigate how print and manuscript cultures coalesced and collided in their re-presentation of post-Reformation devoutness.

‘Devotional Writing in Print and Manuscript’ is a major one day multi-disciplinary conference, hosted by the University of Warwick’s English Department in collaboration with the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance and the Early Modern Forum. Contributions are invited from established scholars and postgraduate students alike. Publication of a selection of papers is envisioned. Themes for papers may include (but are not limited to): literary, visual. political, theological, historical, material, musical, polemical or any other treatments of the topics of devotional writing in print or manuscript in the context of reformation-era England.

These may include:

• Piety of the Household/Neighbourhood
• Schools, Education and Memory
• Temptation/Possession/Conversion Narratives
• Fasts/Feasts/Thanksgiving Days
• Prayer Books/Church Books/Book of Sports
• Psalmody versus Hymnody
• Playhouses, the Pulpit, and the Theatre of the Word
• Sick-bed/Death-bed Accounts (ars moriendi)
• Godly Missives and Communal Correspondences
• Martyrology/Hagiography
• Religious Iconography/Graffiti/Objects
• Biblicism versus Fanaticism
• Spiritual Manuals and/or Cases of Conscience

Please send abstracts of up to 250 words for 20-minute papers by 30 April, 2017 to Prof Elizabeth Clarke (E.R.Clarke@warwick.ac.uk); or Robert W. Daniel (Robert.Daniel@warwick.ac.uk).