Chaired by Ingrid Eskild
This panel is brought to you by "Translatio," an interdisciplinary research group studying notions of time and history and temporal arrangements in medieval Europe. Its members have backgrounds in intellectual history, theology, and art history. The group aims to achieve a richer understanding of how medieval people constantly created and explored potential pasts and futures in textual and visual media, negotiating the present through such explorations. We look to medieval time constructions with a contention that the past is a resource of sustainable knowledge. And through case studies and comparisons, we seek to deepen our understanding of medieval Europe, but also to contribute to shed critical light on time constructions in contemporary society. In this panel we explore time before mechanical clock time thinking. The medieval period offers rich possibilities for exploring the entanglements of timescales. An important premise for these entangled scales of time was the concept of eternity which was based outside time itself.
Eivor A. Oftestad: Medieval temporalities and the celestial bodies
Modern science teaches us that the universe is 13,4 billion years old. As species inhabiting the earth, we are dependent on our star, the sun. All human cultures have however experienced this dependency on the celestial bodies. The main question of this paper is how premodern Christianity was based on entanglements between the human life cycle and the time scales of the universe. The dependency of the times of the Sun within medieval liturgy is the starting point of the discussion.
Bio: Eivor A. Oftestad is a church historian and medievalist. She defended her PhD at the University of Oslo in 2010, and was appointed Professor of History of Christianity at Innland University of Applied Science in 2022. Her research explores religious thought, liturgy and devotional practices, crusade ideology, and concepts of births and deaths, in the medieval and early modern periods (12th-17th centuries).
Kristin B. Aavitsland: The crucifixion of Christ and the ultimate entanglement of lifetimes
At the heart of Christian medieval (and postmedieval) culture lies the Golgotha event: the death of Jesus Christ on the cross. This executed man claimed to also be God, and the implications of his death collapsed the temporal order in which it took place. Medieval thinkers, artists, and religious practitioners repeatedly and creatively processed the consequences of the Golgotha event for human and non-human life and for the whole created cosmos. This paper offers some striking examples of this and suggests a model for understanding the multitemporality of medieval time constructions.
Bio: Kristin B. Aavitsland is an art historian and medievalist. She graduated from the University of Oslo in 2002 and was appointed Professor of Medieval studies at MF Norwegian School of Theology, Religion and Society in Oslo in 2014. Since 2021 she holds the position as Director of the Norwegian Institute in Rome (Istituto di Norvegia). Her research explores visual rhetoric, religious thought, liturgical art, and devotional practices in the medieval and early modern periods (12th to 17th centuries), with two geographical foci: Rome and Scandinavia.
Line Cecilie Engh: Imagining the Future. Liturgy, typology, prophesy
How did medieval people imagine the future? This paper argues that in medieval intellectual cultures the temporal categories of past, present, and future were entangled and their boundaries permeable and contingent. Time was not only non-chronological but coinciding: medieval monastics spoke of remembering the future. Hermeneutically and liturgically, the past and the future were contained in a “thick present”. The paper interrogates how writers such as Bernard of Clairvaux, William of St. Thierry, and Joachim of Fiore explored possibility spaces, immersing and blending themselves into open-ended narratives and potential selves.
Bio: Line Cecilie Engh is a medievalist and intellectual historian. She was awarded her PhD from the University of Oslo in 2011. In 2017 she was appointed Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy, Classics, and History of Art and Ideas at University of Oslo. Her research interests and publications focus on monastic writing, hermeneutics, rhetoric, liturgy, drawing on gender perspectives and cognitive theory.