On Saturday, 14 January the EHS held its virtual Winter Conference on the theme ‘The Church and Hypocrisy’. This was the second conference on the theme, following our Summer Conference in York this past July.
This online conference was arranged by our fantastic Conference Secretary, Professor Elizabeth Tingle (De Montfort University) and the hardworking EHS Committee. Due to their assiduous planning, the conference programme was packed with interesting and educational talks. There were so many speakers this year that we had to run three simultaneous panels all day!
The conference began with an introduction from EHS President Professor Katy Cubitt (University of East Anglia). Dr Sophie Lunn-Rockliffe (University of Cambridge) then kicked off our plenary talks of the day with her talk on ‘The Devil as “Father of Lies”: Ideas of Diabolical Dissimulation in Late Antiquity’. After Dr Lunn-Rockliffe’s plenary we had two sessions of papers, which took us up to our lunch break for the day.
Coming back from lunch, we were thrilled to announce this year’s co-winners for our 2022 Book Prize: The Homiliary of Paul the Deacon: Religious and Cultural Reform in Carolingian Europe by Revd Dr Zachary Guiliano and Biographies of a Reformation: Religious Change and Confessional Coexistence in Upper Lusatia, 1520-1635 by Dr Martin Christ. Congratulations to both of our winners on their fantastic publications!
Our second plenary talk by Professor John Sabapathy (University College London) kicked off our afternoon sessions. Professor Sabapathy’s talk on ‘Cannibal, Scorpion, Horse, Owl: Institutional Hypocrites in the early fourteenth-century Church’ set the stage for the interesting talks that happened in the final two sessions of the conference. After one final coffee break, we heard our last (but certainly not least!) plenary speaker, Professor Dennis Dickerson (Vanderbilt University). Professor Dickerson spoke on ‘Humanity Defined, Hypocrisy Defied: Sacralizing the Black Freedom Struggle, 1939–1960’ (a preview of which you can find in one of our previous blog posts, ‘Humanity Defined: Hypocrisy Defied: Sacralising the Black Freedom Struggle’).
The EHS would like to thank all of our speakers for a wonderful 2023 Winter Conference on ‘Hypocrisy and the Church’. If you would like to join in our next Summer Conference on the theme ‘Margins and Peripheries’, please visit our website for more details on how to propose papers and register.
Ecclesiastical History Society 