Canadian Medievalists Online: seminars, roundtables, lectures
See below for announcements of online events throughout the year from the Canadian Society of Medievalists.
| 2025 Boyle Prize Winner Laura Moncion, 5 Nov. 2025Tune in Wednesday 5 Nov. 2025, at 11am EST (12:30 NT; 12 noon AT; 11:00am CT; 10:00 MT; 9am PT), to hear 2025 Boyle Prize winner, Laura Moncion, deliver an online presentation about her dissertation, entitled Being a Recluse is No Small Thing: Late Medieval Women’s Reclusion in Theory and Practice. Laura will speak to us from Germany where she is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Tübingen. See here for the Boyle committee's citation for Laura's prize and below for an abstract of Laura's talk. Register here to receive the Zoom link |
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Abstract:
The life of a recluse (or anchorite) may at first appear straightforward: voluntary, permanent, and solitary enclosure in order to focus on prayer. As this form of life became popular among women in the towns of late medieval Alsace, it also became apparent that it was not so simple. The archives of late medieval Strasbourg, Obernai, and Haguenau provide an especially rich source base for understanding these complexities. This talk will present case studies, drawn largely from unpublished archival sources in Alsace, showing how these women, as well as the men who wrote and preached for them and the society that surrounded them, understood the tension between the ideals that made reclusion prestigious and the practices that made it livable.
The manuscript image on the right is from St. Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, Cod. Sang. 602 (c. 1451–1460) (http://www.e-codices.unifr.ch/de/csg/0602/315).