Blurring the Boundaries of Religious Dissent: New Approaches to Heresy in Premodern Europe
A special issue of Religions (ISSN 2077-1444).
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (29 February 2024) | Viewed by 703
Special Issue Editors
Interests: religious; gender; cultural history of the later medieval Mediterranean basin
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
This Special Issue explores new frameworks for the study of religious dissent in a variety of religious contexts across Europe, focusing on the eleventh to the sixteenth century. Its organizing principle, “Blurring the Boundaries,” signals its aim to move away from traditional and methods of inquiry regarding heterodoxy and inquisition, which have focused on binary labels and the history of persecution and repression. This Issue invites papers that interrogate and challenge the assumption that medieval and early modern dissent in Europe was automatically heterodox in nature. It seeks to engender discussions about the utility (or lack thereof) of such categorizations in future historiographical narratives, ways to potentially build a new lexicon, and question the prevalent historiographical trend of approaching the study of dissent—and concomitant inquisitorial procedures—through a single religious, institutional, or methodological lens.
Recent essay collections, such as that edited by Jennifer Kolpacoff Deane and Anne Lester, and Matthias Pohlig and Sita Steckel, respectively, have critiqued the ideas that the only European models in the Middle Ages were “orders versus heretical movements,” and the trend to impose strict chronological divisions between the medieval and early modern period when interrogating religious decision making and their implications. This Special Issue is situated in dialogue with these studies but aims to build on these discussions through an emphasis on the diversity of experiences through questioning the blurred boundaries of religious dissent from various geographical regions and time periods. Furthermore, the Issue will interrogate the perspectives of individuals and sects who were “othered” by their contemporaries on the basis of religious experience.
Prof. Dr. Janine Larmon Peterson
Dr. Delfi Nieto-Isabel
Guest Editors
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Keywords
- heresy
- inquisition
- lay religiosity
- persecution
- Christianity
- Middle Ages
- early modern Europe
- religious traditions
- religious dissent
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