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Forthcoming Events

 

CMS Research Seminars take place via Zoom at 3pm (in the UK)

 

23 October 2024: ‘The Marian Signature of Singapore Catholicism’ – Dr Michel Chambon (Research Fellow at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, coordinating the Initiative for the Study of Asian Catholics) 

 

13th November 2024: ‘Theological and Philosophical Perspectives from Joseph Ratzinger and Peter Kreeft on Mary, the Mother of God, Providing the Grammar of Person in Humanity’ – Dr Mary Frances McKenna (Fellow of the Centre for Marian Studies)

 

11th December 2024: 'A Walk on the Wild Side: Pilgrimage to the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe, Mexico City’ – Dr Sian Lacey Taylder (Fellow of the Centre for Marian Studies)

 

15th January 2025: ‘Russia and Peace: the Apparitions of Fatima as Prophecy’ – Dr Chris Maunder (Foundation Fellow of the Centre for Marian Studies)

 

26th February 2025: ‘The Passion of Jesus (and Mary) according to Maria of Agreda and Anne Catherine Emmerich’ – Fr. Edward Looney (Pastor of Sacred Heart Parish,hawano, WI, USA; former President and currently Secretary of the Mariological Society of America)

 

26th March 2025: ‘The Annunciation in Theology and Art: shedding new light on an old doctrine’ – Professor Tina Beattie (Emerita Professor of Catholic Studies, the University of Roehampton)

 

9th April 2025: ‘Mary’s kenosis of faith’ – Fr Jim Doyle (Aumônier of the Irish Chaplaincy. Paris, France)

 

14th May 2025: ‘Aubrey de Vere's ecological Mary’ – Professor Emma Mason (Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies, University of Warwick)

 

11th June 2025: 'Our Lady of the Watersmeet: Marian shrines on the tidal rivers of southern Wales and Gloucestershire' – Professor Sarah Jane Boss (Foundation Fellow of the Centre for Marian Studies)

CMS Candlemas Lecture on 3rd February 2025

Candle
 

IOur annual Marian art lecture, organised in honour of our late colleague Dr Cathy Oakes, will take place via Zoom on 3rd February 2025 at 7:00 pm GMT (01:00 pm CT; 02:00 pm ET; 20:00 in France). Cathy, who was one of the founding members of the Centre for Marian Studies, was an art historian with particular expertise in medieval Marian iconography, and her untimely death in 2019 remains a great loss to us on both a personal and academic level. Every year we hold an event around the time of Candlemas as an opportunity to remember Cathy and to reflect on the importance of Marian art. This year our guest speaker is The Reverend Dr Ayla Lepine, who is an art historian and theologian.

There are more details and information on how to register here: 

https://www.marianstudies.ac.uk/post/announcement-about-our-candlemas-lecture-in-2025

Call for Papers

The Sorrowful Virgin: Medieval and Early Modern Devotion

Monday 24th March, St Hugh’s College Oxford

 

Images of the Sorrowful Virgin, whether in the form of Michelangelo’s Pietà, or Mary at the foot of the Cross on the Isenheim altarpiece are ubiquitous in medieval and early modern culture. Liturgically this was explored through the Stabat Mater, while vernacular writers found in the Marian lament a vehicle through which the Virgin could speak, offering a route for affective engagement with Mary’s suffering. The Reformation and Counter-Reformation inflected the ways in which the Sorrowful Virgin was presented, as devotions such as the Seven Sorrows served as spiritual models for more standardized monastic environments in the post-Tridentine period. Moreover, with colonisation of the New World, Marian devotion took on new emphases.  

 

Eliška Kubartová Poláčková’s 2023 monograph Medieval Laments of the Virgin Mary offers new insights into a medieval aspect of this devotion, emphasising the performativity of Marian laments, giving a firm foundation for further research into medieval laments, and offering potential models for early modern engagement with this devotion.  Her work opens up the wider questions about medieval affective piety and performativity in the Marian context, and whether this continued to manifest into the early modern period, or whether the Counter-Reformation precipitated new developments or emphases. 

 

This interdisciplinary workshop will investigate the Sorrowful Virgin in medieval and early modern culture, in which we aim to engage with some of these questions. The workshop will include a hands-on session with material objects and a performance of an early modern lament. We have entitled this workshop ‘The Sorrowful Virgin’ to encompass the many manifestations of this devotion, from the Seven Sorrows to the Mater Dolorosa and welcome broad interpretations of the theme.

 

We are looking for proposals for 20-minute papers on all aspects of this devotion in medieval and early modern culture, and encourage submissions from those in the fields of History, Music, Medieval Languages and Literature, Theology, and Art History including but not limited to:

 

  • Vernacular poetry

  • Musical Settings

  • Performativity

  • Liturgy

  • Iconography

  • Material Culture

  • Theological development

  • Affective piety

  • Reformation

  • Counter-Reformation

  • Monastic devotion

 

Please send proposals of 250 words along with a short bio to anna.wilmore@st-hughs.ox.ac.uk and taro.kobayashi@st-hughs.ox.ac.uk by 24th January 2025. We aim to respond by the 1st February. 

 

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