The venerable Bede recounts that before meeting Cædwalla of the Britons in battle in 633/4, Oswald of Northumbria set up a hastily made wooden cross and knelt before it with his army to pray for victory. His prayers were answered and this place, known as Heavenfield and marked by Oswald’s cross, became a site of many miracles. The monks of nearby Hexham made an annual pilgrimage on the date of Oswald’s death and subsequently built a small church on the site so that, as Bede declared, ‘the place has become still more sacred and worthy of honour’. A church dedicated to Oswald still stands at Heavenfield, and in 1928 a new wooden cross was erected nearby.
Oswald is not the only saint to have left his mark on the landscape. This conference explores the multiple ways in which saints and their cults are connected to landscape, both as physical reality and as experienced and constructed in cultural memory and imagination. Papers draw on multiple disciplinary perspectives and range geographically and chronologically from early medieval northern-England to the Austrian Tyrol shortly before the Reformation; they include studies of saints and landscapes in medieval chronicles, manuscripts, painted church interiors, material artefacts and literary texts as well as how traces of saints in landscapes are manifest today, both physically and in cultural imagination.
Sponsored by the AHRC project Liturgical and Literary Landscapes: the cult of Oswald of Northumbria in the German-Speaking World [AH/X003841/1]
Please visit the conference Eventbrite page to book your free place!
Programme:
Wednesday 2nd July
9.30 Welcome
9.45 Sarah Bowden (King’s College London)/Johanna Dale (UCL): Introduction: Landscapes of Sanctity
10.15 Panel 1: Creating and Shaping Landscapes of Sanctity
Lucy Donkin (Bristol): Relics of Person and Place: Mobile Matter and the Creation of Sacred Landscapes
11.00 Coffee
11.30 Panel 1 continued
Michael Lewis (British Museum) with Eljas Oksanen and Rob Webley (both Reading): Medieval Religious Objects in the Archaeological Landscape
Kati Ihnat (Nijmegen): Saints and the Liturgical ‘here’ in Medieval Iberia
13.00 Lunch
14.00 Panel 2: Sanctity and Historiography
Leonie Hicks (Canterbury Christ Church): Landscapes of Sanctity in Norman Chronicles
Fiona Barsoum (Cambridge): Sanctity and the Grounding of History: The Case of Two Thirteenth-Century French Manuscripts
15.30 Coffee
16.00 Panel 3: Saintly Ecologies: The Case of St Patrick
Máire Ní Mhaonaigh (Cambridge): The Settler and the Saint: Keeping Landscape Sacred and Protecting the Land
Miranda Griffin (Cambridge): Underground Stories: Purgatory and Onkalo
17.30 Drinks reception
Thursday 3rd July
9.15 Panel 4: Seascapes of Sanctity
David Petts (Durham): Maritime Landscapes of Sanctity in Coastal Northumbria
Mary Kate Hurley (Ohio): Sea-terrors and Cleansing Floods: Land, Water, Sanctity and Time in the Old English Andreas
10.45 Coffee
11.15 Panel 5: Imagery, Aesthetics, Devotion
Bob Mills (UCL): Rock Art: Hermits, Saints and Wilderness Aesthetics in Later Medieval England
Andrei Dumitrescu (Stanford): Worship at the Holy Mountain: Landscapes of Contemplation in Late Byzantine Thessalonike
12.45 Lunch
13.45 Panel 6: Landscapes of Sanctity, Medieval and Post-Medieval
Thomas Pickles (Chester): The Medieval Cult of St Hild: Space, Place and Landscape
Josh Davies (King’s College London): Marking the Boundaries of Barking Abbey
15.15 Closing remarks
Oswald of Northumbria 