Silence and Consent

SEMINAR SERIES
Ideology, Society, and Medieval Religion: Impositions and Negotiations

This lecture will introduce you to the book that Prof. Fiona Somerset is currently finishing, about the history of the idea that silence gives consent. Canon law, through the maxims and verses that proliferate in its commentary tradition, was the means by which this idea proliferated in various media and discourses in the later Middle Ages and became a fertile means of literary experimentation. As well as sketching this history, Prof. Somerset will examine how it features in the Anglo-French “Song of the Church”, which fuses imagery from Lamentations 1 with terminology from legal French to evoke both excessive taxation, and a disturbingly elaborate fantasy of female subjection.

(Open to non-York attendees)

 

For more info contact Tim (tim.wingard@york.ac.uk) or Emmie (erpg500@york.ac.uk)

Seminar Series details: 

In recent decades, medievalists have studied the ways in which people interacted with the institutional structures, practices, and theological orthodoxies of the Church, including issues such as popular belief, the lived experiences of monks and other members of religious orders, and litigation in the ecclesiastical courts.

Less well understood is how doctrine and theology shaped the behaviours and beliefs of the laity, or the middling members of a religious order or institution. We are interested in thinking about the ways in which ideology was implicated in the lives and actions of ordinary people, and the outcomes of that. How did religious ideologies influence the structuring of power relations within communities? How did individuals within religious communities internalise, personalise and negotiate the rules of their order? How did lay people contribute to the functioning of the system of ecclesiastical law? This seminar series aims to think about these questions and others, by showcasing the work of an interdisciplinary array of medievalists specialising in different religions, geographic locations, time periods, and source materials. 

Image: Detail of a medallion with monks being seduced, Harley MS 1527, f. 96v