Workshops and Conferences

 

Third St Andrews Book Group Conference

On 7th to 8th July 2011 the University of St Andrews held a conference “Documenting the Early Modern Book World: inventories and catalogues in manuscript and print”. The conference raised awareness of the varied uses of early modern catalogues, including their invaluable role in recording dispersed libraries and lost editions.

Sermon Reception and Religious Identity

The Reformation Studies Institute will be hosting a series of workshops to examine how sermons were heard and understood in sixteenth-century Europe. In the past five years, scholars have increasingly called for attention to cultural transmission between social groups, the lives of ordinary people, and specifically, the experience of laypeople, rather than institutions, in the European reformations – information that can all be met by studying sermon reception. This project will concentrate on continental Europe, where religion in the early modern period increasingly divided rather than united. In so doing, it will explore how different ways of listening to sermons demonstrated increasingly different religious, and thereby cultural and national identies. At the same time, it will allow us to examine how different confessions (with their attendant preaching cultures) influenced each other in an age of growing, if reluctant, religious coexistence.

The first workshop was held on June 2, 2011, and explored problems particular to Huguenot temples and to Calvinist preaching in and around Geneva. Speakers were Dr Graeme Murdock, Prof. William Naphy, and Prof. Andrew Spicer, with participation from the Schools of History and Divinity at St Andrews and visiting scholars from the US and Canada.

For further information or to participate, please contact Dr Emily Michelson (edm21@st-andrews.ac.uk) or visit http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/reformation/sermonreception

The Historiography of the Catholic Reformation

Dr Simon Ditchfield from the University of York will be holding a historiography workshop with MLitt postgraduates and with undergraduates studying a special subject course on the Catholic Reformation. The topic is ‘Writing a history of the Catholic Reformation for the 21st century’ and it will be held on Thursday 14th April, in advance of his presentation to the Reformation Studies Institute Seminar.

Reformation Studies Colloquium

The biennial meeting of the Reformation Studies Colloquium took place at the University of St Andrews from 7th to 9th September 2010. This year the Colloquium attracted scholars from fourteen different countries and welcomed a total of 130 delegates. There were three plenary lectures by Professor Brad Gregory (Notre Dame), Dr Ulinka Rublack (Cambridge) and Professor Ethan Shagan (Berkeley), and around eighty shorter presentations arranged in parallel sessions. These were grouped according to theme rather than geographical focus where possible, integrating the study of the English, Scottish and European Reformations.  The Colloquium was particularly successful because of the participation of a large number of junior scholars from both the UK and abroad. We are very grateful to all those who took part, and look forward to the next meeting in Durham in 2012. For information about the Colloquium in St Andrews, see http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~rsc2010/