Winter Symposium, 3rd - 7th of March 2023

University of Oslo, Norway

Contact: Kaia Rønsdal Associate Professor Faculty of Theology

During this Winter Symposium, we want to explore the racialising tendencies in Gerald of Wales's (c. 1146 – 1223) writing. It has been argued by Geraldine Heng that his portrayal of the Irish is a  particular case in point where questions of racialisation also are drawn to the use of land and cultural customs in relation to the landscape. We want to investigate how the portrayal of religious rituals, agricultural practices, lived religion and ethnicity sometimes were used to create a sense of community and inclusion that overruns bodily descriptions of otherness, while at other times these same practices divided people.

We imagine that the way Gerald of Wales has written his travelling accounts this symposium will be able to attract people not only from historical and performance studies but also geographers and researchers of political science and cultural studies. In the Symposium we will read extracts of the English version of both Topographia Hibernica (1188) and Itinerarium Cambriae (1191) which are rich in descriptions of land, peoples, customs and cultures. Our intent is also that each Symposium opens with a deep dive into the social imaginary and cosmology of the specific period under investigation. In this session such an introduction will be given by Line Cecilie Engh, Associate Professor of History of Ideas specialising in medieval studies.

Summer Symposium, 27th of July to 3rd of August 2023

Palanga, Lithuania

When we arrived among those barbarians, it seemed to me as if I were stepping into another world.

The men surrounded us and gazed at us as if we were monsters.

- William of Rubruck (1248–1255).

In the early 13th century, a new military and cultural power rose in the East. Both Pope Innocent IV and some years later, King Louis IX of France sent out Franciscan friars as official envoys from Europe to reach the Mongol court. William of Rubruck was the one who wrote the most expansive account of what he encountered on this journey. Geraldine Heng explains that what we see in these texts is how Mongols gradually became familiar aliens in less than a decade during these early missionary encounters. They transmuted “from the inhuman barbarians without civilised practices, mores, and customs described by the Pope’s alarmed ambassador into the possessors of rudimentary culture and ceremony.” As William of Rubruck lived with the Mongols, took part in their customs, and familiarised himself with their practices, their inhumanness began to recede. In this micro-history, Heng argues, we can instead see how questions of Christian practices, liturgies and questions of faith between Nestorians and Roman Catholics constitute a virtual race that predominates questions of ethnic differences.

Some 50 years later, also the son of a Venetian merchant: Marco Polo (1254-1324), travelled East and spent time in the Great Khan’s Cathay. Once he returned, a book capturing his fascination for the magnificence of Mongol China, was written by Rusticello da Pisa. He praises its cities, ports, and hinterlands and details a vision of modernity, security, efficiency, welfare, success, and unimaginable prosperity and power, the like of which is found nowhere else in the world. From the gigantic tax receipts of its ports to the glories of imperial gardens and architecture; from exorbitant feasts to massive granaries; from the exquisite abstraction of paper money as symbolic currency to the high-speed postal relay gridding the empire; from welfare and disaster relief to a panoptic surveillance system; from military might to statesmanlike innovations in governance – Mongol China’s incarnation of an economic, aesthetic, technological, and ethical sublime. Marco Polo transmutes the Mongol race and empire into an object of fascination and desire under the Western gaze. At the same time as his gaze seems to eradicate racialised differences based on ethnic and religious grounds, the commodification of bodies, places and space grows strong. For example, a new form of objectification of women as goods is something that Heng brings to the forefront of her reading of Polo.

During this Summer Symposium, we will thus explore two different accounts of Mongol China: William of Rubruck’s Itinerarium fratris Willielmi de Rubruquis de ordine fratrum Minorum from 1253 and The Description of the World from 1300. This enables us to compare and contrast how a liturgically trained gaze reads and understands customs and cultural practices to how a profit-minded merchant will see and describe what he encounters. The texts of this session will be of particular interest to students of economy, democracy, engineering and gender studies as well as our core group of religious, historical and artistic scholars.   

Winter Symposium, 13-17 March 2024

Oulu Arts Museum, Finland

Contact: Laura Lampinen, Museum lector

Both Geraldine Heng and Ibrahim X Kendi have identified the traveller and sociologist Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), as one of the early influential authors who picks up Aristotle’s thinking around climate zone theories with descriptions of character and intelligence. In his Muqaddimah (1377), he posits that black Africans are prone to excitability, emotionalism and to dance whenever they hear a melody. It is unclear if such language, relating to epidermal whiteness as a superior trait (in contrast to blackness) was used in the European continent before these texts and Aristotle was re-introduced into European scholarly teaching in 13th century. Thus, a further question of this symposium is: can it be traced - through the reading of these encounters with others - when an understanding of climate theory together with cultural expressions and physiognomy started to dominate the European social imaginary?

The texts of Ibn Khaldun are a classic for scholars in sociology and cultural studies however we see that they also carry potential to raise interest with researchers in human genetics and medical engineering.

Summer Symposium, 28th of July to 4th of August 2024

Place: Løgumkloster Høyskole, Denmark

Not all theological accounts where ignorant about the human and ecological crisis that came with the conquistadores colonial endeavours in South America. There were also Christian voices from Europe that raised resistance towards the treatment of the Indigenous populations. One of these was Bartolomé de las Casas  (1474/84-1566) who wrote about the need to set the Indigenous populations free from slavery. 

"The son of a small merchant, Las Casas is believed to have gone to Granada as a soldier in 1497 and to have enrolled to study Latin in the academy at the cathedral in Sevilla (Seville). In 1502 he left for Hispaniola, in the West Indies, with the governor, Nicolás de Ovando. As a reward for his participation in various expeditions, he was given an encomienda—a royal land grant including Indian inhabitants—and he soon began to evangelize that population, serving as doctrinero, or lay teacher of catechism. Perhaps the first person in America to receive holy orders, he was ordained a priest in either 1512 or 1513. In 1513 he took part in the bloody conquest of Cuba and, as priest-encomendero (land grantee), received an allotment of Indian serfs.

Although during his first 12 years in America Las Casas was a willing participant in the conquest of the Caribbean, he did not indefinitely remain indifferent to the fate of the indigenous peoples. In a famous sermon on August 15, 1514, he announced that he was returning his Indian serfs to the governor. Realizing that it was useless to attempt to defend the Indians at long distance in America, he returned to Spain in 1515 to plead for their better treatment. The most influential person to take up his cause was Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros, the archbishop of Toledo and future co-regent of Spain. With the help of the archbishop, the Plan para la reformación de las Indias was conceived, and Las Casas, named priest-procurator of the Indies, was appointed to a commission to investigate the status of the Indians. He sailed for America in November 1516.

Las Casas returned to Spain the next year. In addition to studying the juridical problems of the Indies, he began to work out a plan for their peaceful colonization by recruiting farmers as colonists. His stirring defense of the indigenous peoples before the Spanish Parliament in Barcelona in December 1519 persuaded King Charles I (the emperor Charles V), who was in attendance, to accept Las Casas’s project of founding “towns of free Indians”—i.e., communities of both Spaniards and Indians who would jointly create a new civilization in America."

"Upon his return to Santo Domingo, the unsuccessful priest and political reformer abandoned his reforming activities to take refuge in religious life. He joined the Dominican order in 1523. Four years later, while serving as prior of the convent of Puerto de Plata, a town in northern Santo Domingo, he began to write the Historia apologética. One of his major works, the Apologética was to serve as the introduction to his masterpiece, the Historia de las Indias. The Historia, which by his request was not published until after his death, is an account of all that had happened in the Indies just as he had seen or heard of it. But, rather than a chronicle, it is a prophetic interpretation of events. The purpose of all the facts he sets forth is the exposure of the “sin” of domination, oppression, and injustice that the European was inflicting upon the newly discovered peoples. It was Las Casas’s intention to reveal to Spain the reason for the misfortune that would inevitably befall it when it became the object of God’s punishment." 
Quotes from Britannica

In this symposium, we will be reading his Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias - A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, which he wrote in 1542.
 

Winter Symposium, March 5th to 9th of 2025

Place: Sigtunastiftelsen, Sigtuna, Sweden

Contact: Anders Claesson, Head Librarian.

We want to turn our gaze towards the Nordic region during this Winter Symposium. The text of this winter Symposium was selected as it was written by a theologically schooled clergyman, later selected archdeacon and archbishop of Uppsala, Sweden. Olaus Magnus (1490-1553) travelled in the Nordic region, and once he was exiled to Rome due to the Reformation by the Swedish King Gustav Wasa, he decided to write a book about his “home”. The Historia de Gentibus Septentrionalibus (1555) is a compilation of 12 books dealing with everything from brewing beer and making cheese and descriptions of flora and fauna to reports of local culture. The texts will carry the possibility of attracting any one from biology and physics to chemistry and cartography, particularly with an interest in how different regions where governed and cared for at the brink of the modern era. What we will encounter in this book are depictions of the Indigenous people of the North, both Inuits on Greenland and Sami people in the North. We have also invited Sami artist and Choreographer; Ola Stinnerbom to be the Keynote of this session as he has investigated the dance practices found in historical document on the Sami.

Summer Symposium, 20.07-28.07 2025

Place: Jyväskylä, Finland

In the last and final Summer Symposium, we turn to the writings of José de Acosta (1540-1600). Theologian Willie James Jennings writes in his The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (2010), that the reason for the Western Church’s difficulty in grasping its deep involvement in the formation of the modern racial condition fully is due to the distorted social imaginary that was formed when the first theologians and conquistadores passed over the Atlantic to conquer the “New World”. One of the leading theological voices in re-imagining the world after the textual authorities - both biblical, theological and philosophical - had been questioned and altered through the experiences in the “New World” was the Jesuit pater José de Acosta. Jennings describes that Acosta's Historia Natural y Morales de las Indias (1589) earned him the title “the Pliny of the New World”. Historia was one of the most comprehensive descriptions of the Americas for its time, widely translated and spread across Europe. According to Jennings, Acosta's treatment of creation and description of new ways to imagine the doctrine of creation in relation to the Christian presence in “the New World” came to alter European consciousness for centuries.

To inform critical engagement with this claim, we will invite symposium participants to a series of Zoom sessions to contextualize Acosta’s work through exploration of sixteenth century Indigenous codices that narrativized Spanish colonisation (El primer nueva crónica y buen gobierno by Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala and the Codex Aubin, for example).

After this summer there is currently a plan that Lindsey Drury will propose a new three year study circle for the Nordic Summer University, while Laura Hellsten will continue working more closely with the team involved in the research project Praxis of Social Imaginaries: Theo-artistic Interventions for Transdisciplinary Research.