CANCELLED: The Early Parish Compared: Local Ecclesiastical Organisation in the Latin West

18 Jul 2014

All day

CRASSH, Alison Richard Building, 7 West Road, Cambridge CB3 9DT - SG1&2

Description

Description

Due to unforeseen circumstances this event has been cancelled.

Convener

Erik Niblaeus (CRASSH)

Summary

This discussion-based conference aims to reconsider the growth of a parish system in the Latin West in the middle ages. We will confront and contrast disciplinary traditions and create unexpected encounters between different narratives of parish formation. The perspective will be consciously transregional: discussants should represent different European traditions. The papers should be a mixture of broader re-evaluations and more specific case studies. The objective is to get a fuller picture of the early parish, not only as an abstract institution or a legal phenomenon, but as a community and a bounded territory, as well as a centre of local pastoral, liturgical, and even political activity.

The questions to be considered include the following:

How do we recover the reality of the local secular church when the written sources are so dominated by the perspectives of higher churches and the religious orders?
Is the idea of ‘parish formation’ in itself an obfuscating teleology? Is there a methodological danger in conflating changes in religious organisation with demographic change or the fragmentation of lay political power?
How do the parrochiae of early medieval Francia relate to the European parishes of the central and later middle ages?
What implications did the growth of a parish system have for relationship between the church and the laity?
How homogenous was the European parish system? Can we even speak of a system at all? How does parish formation relate to processes of cultural transformation and Christianisation at the European ‘peripheries’?