Join Religious Studies for our November Brownbag featuring Professor Tom DuBois (GNS+ and Religious Studies Affiliate). He will discuss The Agency of Place: Helgafell and 13th-century Icelandic Monastics. This event will take place in Room 204, Bradley Memorial Building.
Date and Time: Friday, November 15th, 12:15 to 1:15pm.
Abstract: While Indigenous scholars have underscored the agency of place in shaping practices of sacrality in, on, and around themselves, many Euro-American scholars of religious studies have resisted such views as “anthropomorphizing” or “emic,” imagining that to accord a measure of agency to terrestrial locations means attributing human thought and emotions to places. In this paper, I look at an Icelandic sacred place—Helgafell (“Holy Mountain”)—in its hosting of first pagan and then Christian populations from the tenth to thirteen centuries. I argue for recognition of the place’s agency in its history of sacralization, and I suggest that thirteenth-century Christian monastics recognized such agency as well, in a manner that reflected a level of comfort regarding the notion of sacred places in both pagan and Christian traditions.
About: Tom DuBois is the Halls-Bascom Professor of Scandinavian Folklore, Folklore, and Religious Studies in the Department of German, Nordic and Slavic. His research focuses on the ways in which people think about and use the idea of tradition in their lives, with particular attention to Finnish, Sámi, and medieval Nordic cultures, as well as Indigenous Wisconsin communities and communities of people descended from Nordic settlers in North America and the British Isles. His various books look at the Finnish national Epic Kalevala, Viking Age religion, medieval saints’ lives, medieval sagas, lyric and narrative song, shamanism, literature, wood carving, sacral landscapes, and the workings of social media.
Open to all! Please share widely with anyone who might be interested.