CfP: Bodies and minds in the early modern Catholic world, March 2017

University of Warwick, 24-25th March 2017
Keynote speakers: Alex Bamji, Nancy Caciola, and Andrew Redden.
Convenors: Rebecca Noble and Anastasia Stylianou
This conference will explore embodied experiences of Roman Catholicism, c.1450-1800. Distinctive Catholic ‘somatic’ theologies and practices developed in the medieval period; however, the era of the Reformations, colonial expansion, scientific revolutions, and Enlightenment presented dramatic new opportunities and challenges to Catholic theories and practices of the body and mind.
The aim of this conference is to draw on a burgeoning body of research on early modern Catholicism in order to address the key yet still insufficiently understood questions of how Catholics understood and constructed bodies and minds, and how this changed and differed across geographical, social, and gendered variables.
Papers are invited on any aspect of the relationship between early-modern Catholicism and the body and/or mind. They may include, but are not limited to:
- Blood and other bodily fluids
- Reason and the passions
- The supernatural and/or miraculous
- The senses and sensory experience
- Saints and/or martyrs

We invite all those interested in presenting a twenty-minute paper at this conference to send us their proposed title and an abstract of maximum 250 words by 1st November 2016.
Conference email: bodiesandminds2017@gmail.com

Webpage: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/history/research/conferences/emconversions
This conference is generously funded by the interdisciplinary Conversions Project, based at McGill University. As such, we encourage project members to participate if they would like to do so. Moreover, we especially encourage papers with a focus on the mutability, or changeable nature, of early-modern Catholic bodies.