Religious Mobilities

Europe and the Medieval and Early Modern World

A collaborative, five-year project of the Medieval and Early Modern Studies Program of the Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry at the Australian Catholic University, Melbourne, Australia

Project summary

Religion, and particularly Christianity, is often cast as unchanging and reactionary, the immobile force behind static cultural and social settings, and only in exceptional circumstances becoming an inspiration for episodic, exceptional motivation and action. This project offers a different view, by uncovering the multiple and intersecting roles that religion has played in relation to mobility in a critical period for the formation of our globalized world.

Religious Mobilities pays close attention to the chronology and character of movement within the traditions, structures, social groups, identities, and practices that comprised Christianity within Europe, their connections and relationships with varieties of Judaism and Islam in and around Europe, and colonial interactions of Europeans with non-European Christianities and religions.

The project will produce new, nuanced, and connected histories of mobility and religion, while also exploring religion’s role in violence and stasis. Its ultimate ambition is to reframe the study of religion and culture across the medieval and early modern periods around the central and definitive force of mobility.

Through its collaborations and activities with partners in Melbourne, Rome, and elsewhere and through the publications produced as a result, the project brings IRCI’s particular expertise in the religious life of medieval and early modern Europe into close dialogue with wider expertise to place Europe firmly within comparative and global contexts. These contexts include the histories of other Christianities practised elsewhere in the pre-modern world; the histories of Islam, Judaism, and other religions with significant intersections and entanglements with Christianity; and the historiographies of race, gender, senses, emotions, temporalities, colonialisms, literature, trade, and material culture.

The project draws on the MEMS programme’s particular expertise in the religious life of medieval and early modern Europe. It is also designed to bring Europe’s modes of mobility into close dialogue with wider expertise that places Europe in comparative and global contexts.
These contexts include:

histories of other Christianities practised elsewhere in the pre-modern world
histories of Islam, Judaism, and other religions with significant intersections and entanglements with Christianity
historiographies of race, gender, senses, emotions, temporalities, colonialisms, literature, trade, and material culture.

The project thereby aims to write histories of mobility that seek out expertise and methods to trace Europe’s deep embeddedness in a polycentric, multilayered, cosmopolitan, and ever-globalizing world. Established with these parameters, the project is intended to change the way we understand religion’s many roles in medieval and early modern Europe, as a catalysing and ordering force of movement within and between societies, a force still at work in the world today.

People and partners

People

MEMS fellows form the project’s core. Beyond regular team meetings, reading groups and project seminars, they present work at national and international conferences, jointly plan the project’s major seminars at ACU’s Rome Campus, collaborate on resulting publications, host international and national visiting fellows, and supervise (HDR) students.

Partners

Strands

Strand 1: Pathways of Power

This strand of the project investigates the role of different kinds of mobility in shaping organized religion and its institutional structures, and it considers the role of these structures in cultivating, managing, and restricting mobility. It will explore how individuals navigated networks and hierarchies in pursuit of their own mobile goals: social mobility, the acquisition of artefacts, the propagation of the faith, etc. It considers how individuals charged with responsibility within religious institutions bridged distance, especially as they moved between global contexts and places of origin, how they devised strategies for sustaining growth in new areas, and how they retained flexibility to scaling-up or down their endeavours as the need arose. The strand also considers unwanted mobility: how some groups and individuals used religious apparatuses to control or limit ability to cross social, racial, gender, or cultural boundaries. Finally, it will analyse the responses of those subjected to such impositions, and their ability to adapt to imposed restraints on mobility.

Strand 2: Mobile Matter

This strand of the project studies the mobility of the materials and objects of religion across the medieval and early modern world. It will examine how unrefined substances traversed the globe, from germs to raw materials, as well as the movement of objects, information, and technologies through networks strongly inflected by religious exchange and movement. Expanding the project’s wider emphasis on motion across scales, it will examine movements at multiple levels – global, regional, and local – as well as competing, complementary, and superimposed beliefs, concepts, symbols, values, conventions, social practices, and patterns that conditioned movement. It will think about the mobility of objects and materials within their social and cultural settings, interrogating the gendering of material culture, alongside understandings of objects that change states – e.g., between the living and the dead, and the moving and the static – and that were imagined as having agency in moving human souls and bodies in affective and aesthetic senses.

Strand 3: Crossroads of Communication

This strand of the project analyses the nature of pre-modern communication in religious contexts. The strand explores how ideas and information, like material objects, took on new meanings when they entered new environments, how these environments transformed ideas and information, and how individuals and communities understood such change. It further considers the infrastructure that enabled ideas and information to go mobile, in terms of both media and networks. It examines networks at multiple scales, from the large and schematic (such as monastic administrative networks) to the specific and the specialized (such as urban confraternities or secret societies). The strand will also consider the incentives on historical actors to authorize, control, or promote the circulation of existing ideas and information, including through religious orders, print networks, and censorship, and how such incentives often represented potent admixtures of theological and mercenary, or literary and political, or otherwise utopian and expedient motives. Finally, the strand addresses the crucial question of relationships of sensory and affective styles to the circulation of ideas and information.