14/11/2012
The conference Cuius patrocinio tota gaudet regio. Saints’ cults and the dynamics of regional cohesion, fourth international symposium of Hagiotheca – Croatian Hagiography Society co-organized by our project, took place in Dubrovnik, Croatia on October 18-21, 2012. The conference was truly international and interdisciplinary, with almost 50 speakers and 6 poster presenters. Several project members presented their papers: Kateřina Horníčková and Gerhard Jaritz from Krems, Anu Mänd from Tallinn, Sebastian Salvadó from Trondheim, Gábor Klaniczay, Cristian Gaşpar and Stanislava Kuzmová from Budapest. The topics ranged from late Antiquity until early modern period, from North Africa and Cyprus to Scandinavia, from Portugal to Caucasus, from hagiographical writings and visual representations to musicology and statistical examinations (book of abstracts attached). Thomas Head, Professor of the Hunter College and Graduate Center of the City University of New York, an outstanding expert of medieval hagiography, delivered a keynote lecture with the title Saints’ Relics and Community in the Earlier Middle Ages (400-1100). The studies and discussions brought many fruitful thoughts about the symbolic function of the saints’ cults and their territorial aspects.
The Centre for Advanced Academic Studies of the University of Zagreb provided a great venue, well-equipped for the conference, located a few steps from the amazing historical old town of Dubrovnik surrounded by walls. We explored historical sights of the town and its surroundings on the last day of the conference, which took us also to the island of Lokrum and its ruins of Benedictine monastery, salt-works of the town of Ston up the coastline, and the arboretum in the Renaissance villa of Trsteno with a magnificent view of the Adriatic, not to forget about the pleasures of the local cuisine and hospitality and the sea in lovely sunny weather during the entire conference. In keeping with the topic of our conference, we followed the symbolic territory of St. Blaise, bishop and patron of the Ragusan Republic, whose representations were very much present in Dubrovnik and in the areas where its power expanded in the Middle Ages and later period. From the Croatian Hagiotheca side, Ana Marinković and Trpimir Vedriš organized the event.
Two books were launched at the conference:
besides the proceedings of the previous Hagiotheca conference, Saintly Bishops and Bishops’ Saints, ed. John S. Ott and Trpimir Vedriš (Zagreb: Hagiotheca, 2012), with a number of studies of interest to our project including some papers by project participants;
the Budapest team presented a newly published book in the Central European Medieval Texts Series, Saints of the Christianization Age of Central Europe (Tenth to Twelfth Centuries), ed. Gábor Klaniczay, transl. and annotated by Cristian Gaşpar and Marina Miladinov. Central European Medieval Texts Series, Vol. 6 (Budapest: CEU Press, 2012), in the presence of the authors – editor of the volume Gábor Klaniczay and translators of the texts, Marina Miladinov and Cristian Gaşpar. The volume contains lives of Central European saints, translated into English. Another volume containing some more hagiography from this region is to be published in the upcoming months.
The proceedings of the conference are planned to be published in the Hagiotheca series, in cooperation with the CULTSYMBOLS project.
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