At the heart of medieval Christian culture lay the paradox of a transcendent God who was made flesh, a God who was beyond creation and yet ever present in the Eucharist and other sacraments. Medieval people believed in a world of the soul and the spirit that was anchored in a world beyond, and the ultimate goal of their existence. Yet that world was subject, in this life, to endless theological reflection, and at the center of a legal, institutional, and political framework that laid claim to all of society. Midieval people lived in a material world that was itself wondrously alive, a world of speaking statues and powerful relics, of stone and wood and metal charged with power and energy. All of it might be embodied and contained and harnessed in various ways, and yet it was always threatening to break beyond its own material boundaries.

This two-and-a-half-day conference seeks to explore this paradox more deeply through the lens of three specific perspectives. T hrough the perspective of “Access,” it will explore how women and men in the premodern era sought to approach and to encounter transcendent power, or sought to prevent others from doing so. Through the perspective of “Use,” it will explore how they sought to control, to deploy, or otherwise manipulate transcendent power in the pursuit of what were often all-too worldly interests of power, politics, family, and money. And through the perspective of “Embodiment,” it will explore how the transcendent, paradoxically, took root in this world, in sacred objects, spaces, and so on, and yet also pointed to the world beyond.