CFP: ‘Performing Communities: Regular Canons Between History, Art, and Liturgy (11th–15th Centuries)’, International Medieval Congress, Leeds 2027 (deadline 14 September 2026)

Regular canons played a central, yet still insufficiently recognised, role in the religious and institutional history of the Latin Middle Ages. They did not constitute a homogeneous body, but a constellation of communities, networks, and congregations, from the Mortarians and Portuensians to the canons of the Great St Bernard, the Premonstratensians, and the later Congregations of the Lateran Canons and Windesheim, united by the common life but distinguished by their customs, institutional structures, pastoral vocations, and patterns of settlement.

In connection with “Communities,” the special thematic focus of the 2027 International Medieval Congress, these sessions will explore how communities of regular canons constructed, negotiated, performed, and transmitted their identities between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries. Particular attention will be paid to the circulation of rules, ordines, customs, individuals, liturgical practices, architectural models, and works of art across networks of affiliation extending beyond individual foundations.

Bringing together history, liturgical studies, anthropology, art history, and musicology, the sessions will examine canonical life in its historical, social, and material dimensions. They will consider institutions and relationships with wider society alongside the liturgical, spatial, architectural, and artistic forms through which canonical communities organised themselves and made their identities visible.

Proposals may address Italy or any other area of the medieval West between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries. Comparative studies and contributions combining documentary, normative, and liturgical sources with the analysis of buildings, spaces, and works of art will be especially welcome.

Proposals addressing the following themes will be particularly welcome:

• Rules, customs, statutes, and their role in defining communal affiliation;
• Identities, differences, relationships, and processes of reform within canonical networks and congregations;
• Relationships with ecclesiastical and political institutions and with urban and territorial communities;
• Pastoral care, hospitality, charitable provision, and relationships with lay society;
• Liturgy, spatial organisation, and the articulation of the common life as instruments of communal identity;
• Architecture and art as means of constructing affiliation, distinction, and memory;
• Patronage, artistic production, and the circulation of individuals, texts, works of art, models, and practices;
• Communities of female canons and comparisons between different forms of canonical life.

Please send an abstract of no more than 250 words, together with a short CV and the information requested by the IMC, by 14 September 2026, to Cristina Andenna (cristina.andenna@uni-saarland.de) and Fabio Massaccesi (fabio.massaccesi3@unibo.it).