Sanctuary Seminar Series: The Quest for Shelter
When:
—
Venue:
Birkbeck 43 Gordon Square
No booking required
The Sanctuary Seminar Series, given by Professor Marina Warner, explores the meaning of sanctuary. The seminars are open to students on the following postgraduate courses: MA Renaissance Studies, MA Medieval Literature and Culture and MPhil/PhD students researching the period 1500-1680.
The concept of sanctuary ranges from a specific holy space, such as a temple or shrine, to a place of safety or refuge, both physical and metaphorical; it is set apart by certain processes from ordinary locales and sites of activity and its special 'sacrosanct' status depends on consensus to continue. It includes ideas of asylum, stronghold, home and inner sanctum or private territory. The medieval law of sanctuary offered a refuge to fugitives in certain churches, whatever the reason for their flight, and a popular sign still says, 'To you this may be a shed. But to me it's a sanctuary.' Sanctuary develops through shared notions about the rights of others and the obligations of hospitality, and therefore contributes to defining the claims of nation and home; these contradictory elements have been formed historically by a complex mesh of taboos, laws, customs and values that still reverberate today, in times when the numbers of refugees, from war, famine, and other dangers are perceived with growing hostility.
The seminars look at how different forms of sanctuary are established.
- How do places become holy, beyond consecrated sites of religious worship?
- What are the laws of hospitality and shelter and how have they changed?
This introductory seminar is followed by two case histories from narratives which were circulating in the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries.
Background reading:
- Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 2, Mythical Thought, trans. Ralph Manheim. New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press, 1965.
- Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, translated by Steven F. Rendall. Berkeley, Calif.; London: University of California Press, c1984.
- Jacques Derrida, Of Hospitality, trans. by Rachel Bowlby. Stanford:Stanford University Press, 2000.
- Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: University of Columbia Press, 1991.
- Karl Shoemaker, Sanctuary and Crime in the Middle Ages, 400-1500. New York: Fordham University Press, 2011.
Contact name:
Euan Griffith