In the Middle Ages, Christian liturgy was far more than a sequence of prayers and ceremonies: it structured religious practice, shaped sacred space, and gave material form to the expression of faith. Objects, vestments, and books played a central role in this framework, endowed with a visual, tactile, and symbolic language that embodied the theology of the sacred. The International Conference Instrumenta altaris: Ritual Artefacts and Their Images for Medieval Liturgy seeks to refocus attention on the material dimension that, throughout the medieval centuries, rendered the invisible visible and preserved —often in fragmentary form— a tangible legacy of devotion.

For several decades, medieval art historiography has moved towards a reassessment of what was once pejoratively labelled as “minor arts”, no longer regarded as decorative appendices to the dominant monumental tradition, but as essential components for understanding the spaces, gestures, and imagery that shaped Christian liturgy. This shift owes much to the work of scholars such as Colum Hourihane, Eric Palazzo, Cécile Voyer, Klaus Gereon Beuckers, and Elisabeth Crouzet-Pavan, who have drawn attention to the luxurious, performative, and sensory dimensions of medieval liturgical art.

Organised by the research project Thesauri Rituum at Rey Juan Carlos University (Madrid), this conference focuses on three main categories of liturgical artefacts: ritual objects —sacred vessels, reliquaries, crosses, censers— whose craftsmanship reveals a theology of materials; sacred vestments, textiles that not only clothed liturgical ministers but transformed them into figures of transcendence endowed with graces bestowed through ordination; and liturgical books, often illuminated manuscripts, which contained not merely the order of prayer but a spiritual choreography of Christian time. These elements were not autonomous but interdependent, belonging to a practice in which art was not simply contemplated, but activated and handled within liturgical performance —something difficult to reconstruct solely from written sources.

The International Conference Instrumenta altaris: Ritual Artefacts and Their Images for Medieval Liturgy is therefore also an invitation to reconsider the status of medieval art through the vitality of liturgical practice. It calls for a dialogue between form and function, between aesthetics and rituality, between the history of images and the presence of objects. This approach reflects a historiographical sensibility that no longer accepts the nineteenth-century hierarchy between the “major arts” and objects of worship, but instead pays renewed attention to those voices excluded from traditional academic classifications. For in the Middle Ages, the sacred was not confined to grandeur; it was equally revealed in the refinement of the minute and in the quiet eloquence of material signs that accompanied each rite, gesture, and ceremony.

Taking into account the theme of the conference, the International Conference Instrumenta altaris: Ritual Artefacts and Their Images for Medieval Liturgy accepts proposals for on-site presentations (15–20 minutes in length) in Spanish, English, Italian, or French, which may be framed within the following thematic lines:

• Historiography and Theory of Medieval Sumptuary and Liturgical Arts: Proposals consisting of historiographical approaches to the study of sumptuary arts, with special attention to their revaluation within medieval art history. Also included will be studies addressing Christian liturgy as an aesthetic, performative, and spatial category, from interdisciplinary methodological perspectives (art history, theology, anthropology, musicology, philology, or cultural history, among others).
• Materiality and Agency of Liturgical Objects: Presentations addressing questions centered on the matter, technique, use, and circulation of ritual objects: sacred vessels, ritual artifacts, vestments, and liturgical manuscripts. Both case studies and comparative approaches to ecclesiastical treasuries, relics, or sacred textiles will be considered, paying attention to their symbolic construction, cultic functionality, and artistic value.
• Image of Objects and Objects in Images: Studies addressing the visual representation of liturgical objects in manuscripts, wall paintings, sculpture, or any figurative medium, as well as research on how these artifacts were visualized, interpreted, and re-signified in artistic productions from later periods, from the Early Modern era to the present. Anthropology of Sacred Objects: Analyses focused on the social, symbolic, and ritual contexts of creation, use, and transformation of liturgical objects. Special consideration will be given to studies addressing processes such as copying, dismemberment, transfer, donation, inheritance, reuse, or re-signification of these pieces in scenarios different from those for which they were originally conceived.
• Current Presence and Musealization of Medieval Liturgical Art: Presentations addressing the place and treatment of medieval liturgical objects in current museums, collections, and heritage institutions. Included are both innovative curatorial proposals and the ethical, hermeneutic, and pedagogical dilemmas posed by exhibiting decontextualized ritual artifacts, now detached from their original cultic function.

Abstract Submission: Please submit paper title, abstract and CV to https://eventos.urjc.es/go/instrumentaaltaris

‘Although plants have no sense of touch, they nevertheless suffer when they are cut […] for their roots function as a mouth, to receive food; and the bark as skin; and the wood as flesh; and the knots or branches as arms with their nerves and veins’ writes Vincenzo Scamozzi discussing the use of wood as a building material in his The Idea of Universal Architecture (Venice, 1615), citing Aristotle. Scamozzi’s reflection about natural suffering surrendering to human necessity embodies a collision of ecological consciousness and anthropocentric values that also animates modern debates around natural and cultural heritage.

In addition to wood, coral, palms, reeds, bark, and turf (as in Scandinavian ‘sod roofs’) have long been used in architecture for their strength, flexibility, and insulating properties. In pre-modern epistemologies, even stone was seen as ‘alive’ and endowed with human qualities (Scamozzi’s pietra viva). Central to pre-modern building practices, yet side-lined in stories of architecture (with some exceptions, e. g. Payne 2013), living building materials offer a new angle to rethink the discipline from the perspective of the more-than-human, the cyclical, and the living.

Ecocritical and post-anthropocentric studies have challenged the long-established dualism between nature and culture. Proposing new ways of understanding such relations, from “vibrant matter” (Bennet 2010) to “naturalism” and “animism” (Descola 2005), such research urges a reconsideration of the historical entanglements between human and nonhuman dimensions. This panel wishes to engage with these debates by foregrounding the architectural traces of such

interconnection: where life becomes form, and ecosystems are refigured as structures. Building as a form of human manipulation participated in a process of material as well as conceptual conversion: it turned animate, ecologically embedded life-forms into static, structural

components of human spaces. Architectural structures thus emerge as hybrid entities, natureculture bodies that resonate with memories of the former lives of their natural materials.

We invite papers exploring these and related questions across all geographic areas during the premodern period (from antiquity to ca. 1750). Papers may investigate the architectural

“afterlife” of living materials, with particular attention to how such transformations were understood, represented, or ritualized in historical contexts. What were the ecological, spiritual, or symbolic implications of turning the natural environment into the built “environment”? How

did premodern societies conceptualize or mediate the shift from life to lifelessness, from ecological actor to architectural object? And how might examining these material histories

illuminate broader understandings of human-nature entanglements in the premodern world?

We particularly encourage contributions considering multiple materials or contexts from a microhistorical or comparative perspective. Further topics may include:

• The architectural use and symbolic transformation of wood, coral, leather, bone, shell, stone or other once-living (or understood-to-be-living) substances;
• Reuse and recycling of organic matter in construction practices, including its material decay;
• The environmental impact of organic material extraction, production, and exchange;
• Cosmologies, ontologies, and ecologies underlying material choices;
• Theoretical approaches to material vitality, decay, and transformation.

Submission Guidelines:

Abstracts of no more than 300 words should be submitted directly to the chairs, along with the applicant’s name, email address, professional affiliation, address, telephone number and a short curriculum vitae (maximum one page).

Please submit your proposal via email to:

• Costanza Beltrami, Stockholm University costanza.beltrami@arthistory.su.se
• Saida Bondini, University of Zurich / Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut Saida.Bondini@khi.fi.it