Session1026
TitleThe Twilight Zone: Negotiating the Liminal in the Early Medieval Imagination
Date/TimeWednesday 6 July 2022: 09.00-10.30
 
SponsorCentre for Medieval & Renaissance Studies, Monash University, Victoria
 
OrganiserStephen Joyce, Centre for Medieval & Renaissance Studies, Monash University, Victoria
 
Moderator/ChairRoderick McDonald, Emu Forge, Sheffield
 
Paper 1026-a The Liminal Music Space of Chant: Augustine and the Loss of Boundaries
(Language: English)
Carol J. Williams, Centre for Medieval & Renaissance Studies, Monash University, Victoria
Index Terms: Ecclesiastical History; Liturgy; Music
Paper 1026-b Neither Beast nor Man: Byzantine Adversaries as Sub-Humans in 6th- and 7th-Century Literature
(Language: English)
Ryan Strickler, School of Humanities, Creative Industries & Social Sciences, University of Newcastle, New South Wales
Index Terms: Byzantine Studies; Rhetoric; Sermons and Preaching
Paper 1026-c None Shall Pass: Women at the Heavenly Toll-Gates
(Language: English)
Bronwen Neil, Department of History & Archaeology, Macquarie University, Sydney
Index Terms: Ecclesiastical History; Gender Studies; Lay Piety; Religious Life
Paper 1026-d Excommunicate!: Negotiating Exclusion in the Early Medieval Church
(Language: English)
Stephen Joyce, Centre for Medieval & Renaissance Studies, Monash University, Victoria
Index Terms: Canon Law; Ecclesiastical History; Theology
 
AbstractThe boundaries between law and crime, between virtue and sin, between civilised and barbarian, between the rational and the irrational created a liminal space - a no man's land - between the included and the excluded, the saved and the damned, the cultured and the uneducated, the sane and the mad, where elements of society existed. This session examines aspects of these ephemeral and shifting liminal spaces and how early medieval cultures connected to the rejected, the strange or the 'beyond the pale', and the impact of these peripheral spaces on core developments within these societies.