Mirator

CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS: Learned and Popular in Medieval Christianities?
Conceptualising differences in medieval religiosities

Mirator - a multilingual electronic journal devoted to medieval
studies (http://www.glossa.fi/mirator) - will in autumn 2008 publish
a theme issue with the provisional title 'Learned and Popular in
Medieval Christianities?'. In a given medieval culture, not all
people approached religion or expressed their piety in the same way.
There was acknowledged and sanctioned diversity, such as different
saints' cults or religious organisations, as well as undesirable and
even prohibited diversity, practices labeled superstitious or
heretical. How useful are the concepts 'learned' and 'popular' in
approaching these differences? What is 'learned', what is 'popular',
within a given context? Are they opposites, or rather intertwined? If
there were significant differences in approaches to Christian life,
where in the social structure did the dividing line run? Between the
clergy and 'laymen' or between ecclesiastical and secular elite and
the rest of the society? What about variety within learned - or
popular - religious cultures? How did people in the middle ages
define these concepts?

We seek contributions examining these and related questions, such as
interaction between clergy and congregations, and prescriptions and
practices, as well as suitable case studies on e.g. saints' cults,
reform movements or heresies, and medieval theories or visualisations
of religion. We especially welcome inspiring ways of conceptualising
contemporaneous differences in medieval religiosities, furnished with
informative examples.

We invite contributions from scholars of all disciplines working on
medieval religion or devotion. Please send a one-page proposal for a
15-page article in English, and your CV, to the editor in chief
(mirator@glossa.fi) by the 31st of October. The editorial board will
perform a preliminary selection of the contributions to be included
in the issue. The selected authors will be asked to turn in a
finished article by the 1st of February 2008, for external review.

Mirator - a multilingual electronic journal devoted to medieval
studies, is published by Glossa, the Society for Medieval Studies in
Finland (http://www.glossa.fi). Mirator is an open access publication
adhering to a double blind referee-system.

Yours,
Jesse Keskiaho, editor in chief.