CFP: ‘Rethinking Popular Religion from Late Antiquity to the Early Medieval Period’, deadline 30 September 2025

Venice, 12–13 March 2026, Department of Humanistic Studies, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice

The relationship between popular culture and religion in the centuries between the fourth and the eleventh centuries has long posed interpretive challenges. Sources from this period often depict lay religious practices as deviant, syncretic, or unorthodox—testimonies that are as partial as they are polemical. As a result, categories such as popular religion, lived religion, syncretism, and hybridity have emerged in recent scholarship as tools to understand the religious experiences of communities often excluded from formal theological or institutional narratives.

We invite PhD students and early career scholars to explore the multiple forms through which religion was lived, negotiated, and contested outside the bounds of orthodoxy and ecclesiastical authority. Rather than seeking to fix definitions, we aim to interrogate the value and limits of these categories, and to reflect on how religious practice and belief were shaped by encounter, adaptation, and everyday agency.
We welcome proposals for case studies or theoretically engaged reflections that address, but are not limited to:

• Religious practices of laypeople and local communities;
• Subaltern or gendered experiences of religiosity;
• Encounters between Christian, pagan, and other religious traditions;
• The role of material culture, ritual, and domestic space;
• Discourses of heresy, deviance, and unofficial religion;
• Methodological approaches to studying fragmented or polemical sources.

Submission Guidelines

Please send:

• An abstract of approximately 300 words of your proposed paper and
• A short statement (max. 200 words) describing how your proposed paper relates to your broader research interests or ongoing work
• A CV is not required

to lilian.diniz[at]unive.it with subject “abstract – Rethinking popular religion” by 30 of September 2025.

Accommodation and travel expenses will be covered for participants without institutional funding.

For any questions, please contact Lilian Diniz – lilian.diniz[at]unive.it