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

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