2025 Conference
Gender: Charity and Care
Christ Church University, Canterbury
2nd – 5th July 2025
Call for Papers
Celebrate GMS’s great reputation for kindness, inclusivity and friendliness at next year’s
conference with the theme of Gender: charity and care in the global Middle Ages. Be inspired by love, charity and care to consider gendered literary, political/historical, and theological texts
and responses, all forms of religious belief and none, and social/socio-economic, and
environmental explorations of the subject from caring to apocalyptic climate emergency.
Topics might include:
- Religious devotion and almsgiving globally (including generosity in Hinduism, Sikhism, Jainism and Buddhism (d̄āna),
- Jewish philanthropy (tzedakah) and Islamic charitable giving (sadaqa)
- Gift-giving and donations in texts, documents, material culture, drama and depictions (e.g., Master of Alkmaar, fl.1504, Seven Works of Mercy, oil on panel, Rijksmuseum, above), from saints to chuggers, lay piety, and non-normative medieval beliefs, including the opposites of charity and care – cupidity and neglect.
- Charitable locations: leperhouses, hospices and hospitals, and the care of the sick and dying, childbirth and childcare.
- Charity in urban and rural domestic settings and gardens, guilds, church ales and help ales.
- Charity and care for bodies, feelings and nature: emotions, senses, sensualities, sex, chastity, and inclusive genderings.
Abstracts should be 200 words max (+ bio) for 20 minute papers. Panels, poetry, performance, posters and art also welcome
Send abstracts and questions to GMS 2025 Liaison Dr Diane Heath, (Diane.Heath@ScienceMuseum.ac.uk). Please put ‘GMS ABSTRACT’ in the email subject heading.
Deadline: Monday 31 March 2025
Convenor: Dr Sheila Sweetinburgh, Centre for Kent History & Heritage, Canterbury Christ Church University
And ECR travel bursary is available on receipt of tickets (post attendance) via the Kate Westoby Fund.
The conference begins Wednesday 2 July, with a dinner on Thursday, and ends Saturday am.
Extra Special Afternoon: Saturday 5 July: Canterbury Medieval Pageant and Family Heritage Trail 11-5, with free visits to 20+ medieval heritage sites.
Welcome to this year’s Gender and Medieval Studies Group Annual Conference. Our venue is Canterbury Christ Church University, built fifty years ago on the site of St Augustine’s Abbey and close to Canterbury Cathedral. We are very grateful to the GMS Steering Committee, the CCCU Centre for Kent History and Heritage, and the School of Humanities for all their support.
Our theme is ‘Gender, Places, Spaces, and Thresholds’ and our papers explore the relationships between gender and medieval geographical, cultural, social, spatial, and imagined locations as well aspects of gender and liminalities. In viewing the materiality of place and space through the lens of gender we shall investigate both cross- and trans-disciplinary discourses concerning how gender is rendered stable and unstable via networks, individuals, communities, and exchanges in the Middle Ages.
The conference has three keynote lectures, a plenary and twelve panel sessions, a practitioner-led dramatization of the Bayeux Tapestry, and a visit to the Cathedral Archives and Library. There will be opportunities to explore Canterbury’s unique standing archaeology and also to attend Cathedral Evensong (the modern equivalent of the medieval monastic office of Compline).
I wish you an exciting and absorbing time of discourse and debate.
Diane Heath
GMS 2017 Conference Organiser
Assistant Lecturer in Medieval and Early Modern History,
Centre for Kent History and Heritage, School of Humanities,
Canterbury Christ Church University, North Holmes Road, Canterbury
Gender, Spaces, Places, Thresholds Programme
Thursday Afternoon
Registration: noon
Location: Old Sessions House Foyer, Old Sessions House, Longport, Canterbury
Sandwich Lunch: 12.00-13.00
Location: Old Sessions House, First Floor Seminar Room Of50
Plenary Session: 13.00-14.00
Dr Sheila Sweetinburgh, Canterbury Christ Church University
‘Religious women in the landscape: their roles in medieval Canterbury and its hinterland’
Location: Old Sessions House, Lecture Theatre Og46
Tea / coffee 14.00-14.25
Location: Old Sessions House, Of50
Short Parallel Sessions 1 and 2: 14.25 and 15.25
Session 1: Literature and Landscape
Location: Old Sessions House, Of50
Gillian Adler, St Peter’s University, NJ:
‘The Vision and Revision of History in Christine de Pizan‟s Le Livre de la Cité des Dames’
Michael Bintley, Canterbury Christ Church University,
‘Gender and Urban Space in Old English Poetry’
Session 2: Monastic Landscapes
Location: Old Sessions House, Of42
Tracy Collins, Aegis Archaeology,
‘Space and Place: Archaeologies of female monasticism in later medieval Ireland’
Kimm Curran, University of Glasgow, Theology & Religious Studies,
‘Female religious houses and reassessing definitions of gendered landscapes’
Cathedral Archive and Library Visit: 15.45-16.45
Optional attendance at Canterbury Cathedral Evensong: 5.15
Friday Morning’s Programme
Parallel Sessions 3 and 4: 9.15-10.45
Session 3: Elite networks
Location: Laud, Seminar Room Lg25
Alison Creber, King’s College London,
‘Adelaide of Turin‟s female network, and the spread of reformed monasticism from northern Italy into Germany’
Rachel Delman, Oxford University,
‘Between Women: Enclosed Gardens and Female Networks in Late Medieval England’
Santa Jansone, University of Latvia,
‘Scandinavian Women in Grobina: Merely Wives and Passive Members of the Household?’
Session 4: Bodies, Sex and Death
Location: Laud, Seminar Room Lg45
Lucy Allen, Cambridge University,
‘Walled Desire and Lesbian Anxiety in Chaucer’s Legend of Thisbe’
Carla Cannalte, Colorado University,
‘Corruption Contained: The Enshrinement of Body in Pearl’
Martin Laidlaw, Dundee University,
‘’Thou woldest ben a trede-foul‟: Sacerdotal Celibacy in The Canterbury Tales’
Tea/coffee 10.45-11.15
Location: Laud, Seminar Room Lg45
Plenary Session: 11.15-12.30
Professor Anthony Bale, Birkbeck, University of London
‘The Invention of Virginity: The Virgin of Bethlehem and other stories’
Location: Ramsey Lecture Theatre, Rg38
Lunch 12.30-14.00
Location: Laud, Seminar Room Lg45
Friday Afternoon’s Programme
Parallel Sessions 5 and 6: 14.00-15.30
Session 5: Liminalities: Margery Kempe
Location: Laud Seminar Room Lg25
Einat Klafter, Tel Aviv University,’The Feminine Mystic –Margery Kempe‟s Pilgrimages to Rome and Jerusalem in the footsteps of Holy Mothers’
Laura Varnam, Oxford University,
‘“Thu hast many awngelys abowte the, to kepyn the bothe day and nygth”: Margery Kempe‟s Body as Sacred Space’
Laura Kalas Williams, Exeter University,
‘Between Two Deaths: The Liminal Threshold of Mystical Death and the Medical ‘synges of deth’ in The Book of Margery Kempe’
Session 6: Bedrooms
Location: Laud Seminar Room Lg45
Roisin Donohoe, Trinity College Dublin,“…unbynde her anoone”: The Lives of St Margaret of Antioch and the Lying-in Space in Late Medieval England‟
Kathryn Loveridge, Swansea University,
‘Gendered spaces, Messianic prophesies and female filth: the case of Aude Fauré
and an unnamed Jewish prophetess’
Amy Morgan, University of Surrey,
‘Transgressing Boundaries: The Queer Bedchamber in
Bisclavret’
Tea/Coffee 15.30-16.00
Location: Laud Seminar Room Lg45
Plenary Session 7: Nuntastic!
Victoria Blud, University of York,
‘Soul Sisters: Medieval Mystics, Recusant Readers and Women‟s Literary Communities’
Philippa Byrne, Oxford University,
‘Making space for leprous nuns: Matthew Paris and foundation of St Mary de Pre, St Albans’
Louise Campion, Warwick University,
‘Shopping or Scrimping? The Contested Space of the Household in Middle English Devotional Literature’
Location: Laud Seminar Room Lg45
Conference Dinner:18.00-21.00
Location: Claggett Auditorium, Canterbury Lodge
The Conference Dinner is preceded by
Dr Daisy Black’s Bayeux Tapestry Dramatization
Saturday Morning’s Programme
Plenary Session: 9.30-10.45
Dr Leonie Hicks, Canterbury Christ Church University
‘In and Out of Place: Gender and Landscape in Norman Chronicles’
Location: Laud Lecture Theatre Lg16
Tea/Coffee 10.45-11.15
Parallel Sessions 8 and 9: 11.15-12.45
Session 8: Gendering Medieval Spaces
Location: Laud Seminar Room Lg48
Claire Kennan, Royal Holloway College, London,
‘On the Threshold? The Role of Women in Lincolnshire‟s Late Medieval Parish Guilds’
Hanna Kilpi, University of Glasgow,
‘The space and place of lesser aristocratic women landholders in twelfth-century England’
Katherine Weikert, University of Winchester,
‘A Day in the Life of the Men on the Watch: Motte d‟Olivet, Normandy, 1040s-1050s’
Session 9: Gender, Places, and Spaces from Art History Perspectives
Location: Erasmus Seminar Room Eg01
Pamela Bianchi, University of Paris VIII Vincennes–Saint Denis,
‘The figurative Dimension of Pictorial Space in the Late Italian Middle Ages’
Kristen Streahle, Cornell University,
‘A mirror for princes and rebels: The painted ceiling of the Palazzo Chiaramonte-Steri’
Jayne Wackett, University of Kent,
‘Women in the medieval wall-paintings of Kent‟s cathedrals’
Lunch 12.45-14.00
Location: Laud Seminar Room Lg48
Saturday Afternoon’s Programme
Parallel Sessions 10 and 11: 14.00-15.30
Session 10: Mapping, Drama, Movement
Location: Laud Seminar Room Lg48
Daisy Black, Swansea University,
‘Commanding Un-Empty Space: Silence, Stillness and Scopic Authority in the York Trial Plays’
Franc Ruvolo, Scuola Secondaria, Milano,
‘A new Jerusalem in Eustochia Messina and Antonello’
Hannah Shepherd, University of Edinburgh,
‘Physical boundaries and gendered movement: windows, doors and gateways in saints‟ vitae from the thirteenth-century Low Countries’
Session 11: Gendered Networking
Location: Erasmus Seminar Room Eg01
Ana Del Campo, University of St Andrews,
‘The Gendered Role and Position of Women and Men in Late Medieval Funerals of the Iberian Peninsula’
Anne Foerster, Kassel University,
‘Gendering the king‟s widow: Behind closed doors and on open stages’
Delfi Nieto-Isabel, University of Barcelona,
‘Gendered networks: The Role of Men and Women in the Shaping of the Beguin Movement of Languedoc’
Tea/Coffee 15.30-16.00
Location: Laud Seminar Room Lg48
Parallel Sessions 12 and 13: 16.00-17.30
Session 12: Romance Landscapes
Location: Location: Laud Seminar Room Lg48
Sari Katajala-Peltomaa, University of Tampere, Finland,
‘Overcoming Liminality? Pilgrimages and Demonic Possession in Late Medieval Hagiography’
Hannah Piercy, Durham University,
‘Safe spaces? Medieval Romance, transgression, and enclosure‟
Grace Timperley, University of Manchester,
‘Landscapes of exile: women and disinheritance in medieval romance’
Session 13: Gender and Punishment
Location: Erasmus Seminar Room Eg01
Eivor Bekkhus, University of Oslo,
‘“Why shouldn’t you take women on your island?” Pilgrimage and punishment at sea in early medieval Ireland’
Inna Matyushina, University of Exeter,
‘Place as Punishment in Medieval Chastity Tests’
Patricia Turning, Albright College, PA,
‘From Gate to Gate: Forging Connections between Gender, City Space and Punitive Spectacle in Late Medieval Toulouse’
Wine Reception: 17.30-18.00
Location: Laud Seminar Room Lg48
Optional Film showing and critique: 18.00-20.00
Location: Laud Seminar Room 45
Eric Rohmer, The Romance of Astrea and Celadon
Sunday’s Programme
Brunch from 11.30
Closing Roundtable Discussion 12.00-13.00
Business meeting 12.30-13.00
Walking tour of Canterbury 13.00-14.30
Cathedral freely open to visitors: 14.30