POSTPONED: Early Modern Sacramentalism Conference

Due to Yale’s Covid-19 Policy, this event is postponed until further notice. You can check the status of Yale’s response anytime at the COVID-19 website being regularly updated by the Office of Public Affairs and Communications.

 

This conference follows from the 2016 “Bible in the Renaissance” conference hosted by the Israel Institute of Advanced Study in Jerusalem.  The purpose is to bring together approximately fifteen scholars for three days of intensive exchange  that  will  result  in  a  book  that  explores  diverse  aspects  of  sacramental  culture  in  the  Early  Modern  period  from  the  perspectives  of  literature,  history,  theology, and art history. 

 

 

Intellectual Agenda:

Despite the fact that between the early sixteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries, the Passion shifted from being a foundation of faith and a profound bond of the Church with  Christ’s  example,  to  a  relatively  marginal  principle  of  faith,  which  the  single  believers    failed    to    understand    or    perceive,    throughout    the    whole    process    sacramentalism constituted one of the primary vehicles for the definition of religious identity.    With    its    reinterpretation    of    the    Scriptures    and    radical    semiotic    reformulation,   Protestantism   aimed   to   emphasize   the   importance   of   Christ’s crucifixion  as  an  example of  the  believer’s  internal suffering  and  self-correction, ruthlessly  dismissing  the  physicality  of  late-medieval  Eucharistic  theology  on  the  basis of a Scriptural unsustainability. This semantic conveyance of Christ’s presence, accomplished in catechesis, homiletics and less frequently in poetry, was inevitably trapped  within  the  fragmentation  of  human  understanding.  “Reason,”  as  Raphael  taught Adam in John Milton’s Paradise Lost,  can be “discursive, or intuitive: discourse / Is oftest yours, the latter most is ours.” Displaced in the word-centered theology of the Reformation, the immediate apprehension of truth (Raphael’s “angelic intuition”) inherent  in  the  visual  perception  of  the  Eucharist  lapsed  into  the  discursiveness  of  inductive thought, in the inescapable fragmentation of the human thinking. While a good part of Protestant poets, theologians, and philosophers of the time responded with a silent acquiescence or with militant assent, this conference wishes to challenge this dichotomous and bipartisan narrative, focusing on the ways in which individual authors yearned to formulate a personal response to this distancing of belief from the Passion. 

 

Sponsored by European Studies Council  of the MacMillan Center, Yale University; Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library; and the Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund