About the lecture
Metaphors of travel and journeying are everywhere in medieval literature, from Augustine, Bonaventure, and Dante to concepts of mental pilgrimage and the homo viator motif. This talk more specifically focuses on texts that connect monastic pedagogy/didactics and liturgy through travel imagery and more generally through temporal-spatial movement and mental navigation and orientation. Two central treatises on didactics and the liberal arts in the 12th century, Honorius Augustodunensis’ De exilio et patria animae and Hugo of St. Victor’s Didascalicon, present the path to wisdom (sapientia) as a path from exile to homeland, to salvation and God. Engh argues that this temporal-spatial movement mirrors the structure and dynamics of the liturgy and that this mirroring is by no means accidental but rather points to how the liberal arts and liturgy are integrated through wayfinding as a cognitive and didactic concept.
About the lecturer
Line Cecilie Engh is a professor of intellectual history. Her research encompasses themes such as gender, intertextuality, and performativity, with a particular focus on how liturgy contributes to identity formation. She has also written about Bernard of Clairvaux and Cistercian writing, as well as explored key aspects of late antiquity and medieval Rome. She has lived, carried out research and given lectures in and about Rome for many years, specialising in the intellectual history and textual cultures in the Latin middle ages. Engh has also served as a member of the Council of the Norwegian Institute in Rome.
Interested in attending?
You can participate both in person and online.
For in-person participation in Rome, please register by Tuesday 25 November at noon:
https://nettskjema.no/a/eveninglecture
To participate via Zoom, it is sufficient to follow this link:
https://uio.zoom.us/j/68136500105