Dominican Culture, Dominican Theology:
The Order of Preachers and Its Spheres of Action (1215-ca. 1600)
Virtual conference
29 June – 2 July, 2021
Annual meeting of IGTM – International Society for the Study of Medieval Theology
Hosted by the Faculty of Theology at the University of Copenhagen.
In the high Middle Ages, a novel concept of religious community overran the occidental world: the Dominican Order. Unlike earlier religious orders who confined monks to the purview of praying the liturgy and living a life of contemplative seclusion, the Dominicans focused on engaging with the broad community beyond the convent walls. The result was a hitherto unseen interpenetration of a religious order into the intellectual and cultural realities surrounding it.
This conference aims at stimulating interdisciplinary debate on Dominican culture and Dominican theological thought, seen as two aspects of the same medieval and early modern reality. The conference thus strives to bridge a gap between cultural and intellectual history that often has characterized modern scholarship on the history of the Dominican Order.
The conference has six sessions:
A: Dominican Theology and Its Production
B: Theology and Culture of Dominican Preaching
C: The Institutional and Legal Constitution of the Order
D: The Materiality of Dominican Culture and Theology
E: Dominicans in Debate
F: Dominicans and ‘The Other(s)’
Across the sessions, more than 60 papers will be read and discusssed. Keynote lectures will be given by Isabel Iribarren (Strasbourg), Carolyn Muessig (Calgary), Marika Räsänen (Turku), Volker Leppin (Tübingen), and Johnny G.G. Jakobsen (Copenhagen). See the whole conference programme here.
