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Seminar: Religion, Politics and Power. Death and Dying in the Premodern World
On 9 April, the Yearly Seminar of the Utrecht University Centre for Medieval Studies (UUCMS) marks the launch of the new thematic focus ‘Religion, Politics and Power’. With ‘Death and Dying in the Premodern World’ as its inaugural topic, the seminar invites attendees to reflect on one of the most pervasive yet challenging dimensions of premodern life. As in previous years, the seminar will bring together scholars and students for an interdisciplinary exchange of ideas.
Death and dying
In premodern societies, death was never a purely private or biological event. It was shaped, mediated, and made meaningful through religious beliefs, ritual practices, law, political authority, and social hierarchy.
From responses to illness, ars moriendi (‘the art of dying’) treatises, and funerary sermons to burial practices and commemorative rituals, judicial executions, and communications with the afterlife: death functioned as a site where power was negotiated. At the same time, dying raised questions about salvation. This links individual experiences to larger structures of belief and governance.
Religion, politics and power
Recent scholarship has emphasised the need to move beyond uniform views of premodern attitudes to death. Taking into account interdisciplinary insights from modern death and grief studies, scholars have shown how the meaning of dying is always context-dependent, socially stratified, and entangled with (institutional) authority.
In the premodern period, religious prescriptions coexisted with local practices, normative discourses with lived experience, and political decisions with personal anxiety and hope. Death thus offers us a lens through which to examine the intersections of religion, politics, and power in the premodern world.
Multidisciplinary conversation
The aim of this Yearly Seminar is to open up a multidisciplinary conversation on how death and dying were framed, regulated, represented and experienced in the premodern world. Particular attention will be paid to the ways in which religious beliefs influenced dying, how medicine sought to control death, and how texts, images, rituals, and material culture mediated encounters with death.
By bringing together different sources, methodologies and disciplines, the seminar aims to rethink death as an important social and cultural process embedded in structures of power.
Date and time: 9 April 2026 – 10.45-16.00
Location: Janskerkhof 2-3, room 0.19
Registration: Register by sending an email to ucms@uu.nl before 30 March.
More information: Read more about the Utrecht University Centre for Medieval Studies