Colloquium on Sin and Forgiveness, January 24, 2003

Schedule of Speakers

UCSB Medieval Studies is proud to present this year's collquium on the topic of sin and forgiveness. In the past few years, a number of scholars working on premodern Europe have turned to the history of the emotions: anger, grief, fear, guilt and contrition. This is part of a borader turn towards new ways to think about subjectivity in the past. Sin and forgiveness are particularly revealing of medieval understandings of emotion because the Church required that sinners experience contrition, an inner transformation, in order to be forgiven and have a chance at salvation. Represenations of sin and forgiveness allow glimpses of the complex ways in which late medieval people understood interior experience. The speakers are a historian of theology and popular religion, on the history of the Church's teaching on deathbed forgiveness; an Anglo-Saxonist, on the dynamics of forgiveness, understood as an exchange; an Italianist, on public representations of the sins, performed by the boys in a late medieval Florentine confraternity; an art historian on sixteenth-century wax devotional images of sinners in hell and Purgatory. The format will be lectures and then comments by UC faculty from different perspectives, including psychoanalysis and gender studies.