19 October 2022

09:15 am – 11:45 am
Hybrid format | Strohsack, 4.55 and via zoom

Our Senior Research Fellow Sita Steckel will give a presentation on her research project “Beyond church and state. Re-assessing the emergence of secularities in the European Middle Ages”. A key aim of her work is to revisit narratives and historical processes of a separation of ‘church’ and ‘state’.

Given the continuing prevalence of master narratives of an early emergence of secularity in Europe, particularly in the form of a narrative of separation of church and state, Sita engages in a detailed critical analysis and historicization of late nineteenth-century and twentieth-century historiography of medieval secularities (often: secularisation theories), including current debates as far as they touch on the European Middle Ages.