Call for Papers – Rethinking Sacred Images as the “Book of the Illiterate” (Rome, 4-5 June 2026) Call for Papers

Call for Papers

Rethinking Sacred Images as the “Book of the Illiterate”: An Early Modern, Global, and Auditory Perspective
Academia Belgica, Rome, 4–5 June 2026
Submission deadline: 30 September 2025

This conference aims to reconsider the notion of Catholic images as the “Book of the illiterate” (Liber idiotarum), traditionally attributed to Gregory the Great, through an early modern, global, and auditory perspective. What does sound – understood as a medium of expression that connects bodies, images, objects, and spaces – reveal about the nature, function, and reception of sacred images at a time when the Roman Church was rethinking its stance on the figurative within an increasingly global landscape? We welcome papers from diverse methodological and disciplinary perspectives, including art history, history, philosophy, literary studies, musicology, and anthropology, that offer new ways of rethinking the relationship between the visual and the auditory in early modern Catholic art.

Keynote speaker: Wietse de Boer (Miami University)
Organizers: Marta Battisti (Center for Early Modern Cultural Analysis / UCLouvain – LARHRA) and Ralph Dekoninck (Center for Early Modern Cultural Analysis / UCLouvain)

This event is part of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie project AurArt – Rethinking Images as the Book of the Illiterate: Towards a New Acoustic Understanding of Religious Art (1550–1650).

Full details are available here
To apply, send a 500-word abstract and a short CV to aurartconference -at- gmail.com by 30 September 2025. Notification of acceptance: 15 October 2025.