David Carrillo-Rangel – författare

Birgittine Acts of Memory begins from a simple but insistent premise: memory is not something that is stored, but something that happens. Focusing on the Birgittine Order across late medieval Europe, modern Europe, and contemporary spaces, the volume explores how remembrance takes shape through gestures, materials, voices, and spaces. Moving beyond static notions of preservation, it approaches memory as an active, embodied, and relational process, entangled with questions of authority, devotion, and communal life, and unfolding across liturgy, objects, and affective practices.Bringing together interdisciplinary contributions, the book moves across manuscripts, liturgical performance, visual culture, queer theory, and testamentary bequests, attending to the acts that sustain and transform memory. Birgittine communities emerge not as passive repositories but as dynamic sites where memory is continuously produced, negotiated, and reconfigured. What is at stake is not only what is remembered, but how memory circulates, how it attaches itself to bodies and objects, and how it opens different temporalities within enclosed and public life. Memory, in this sense, is not merely retrospective but generative, shaping identities, communities, and devotional experience across time and space.This volume will be of interest to scholars and students of medieval studies, religious history, memory studies, art history, and manuscript studies, as well as to readers engaged with material religion, monastic culture, and interdisciplinary approaches to the premodern archive.

This book addresses the history of the senses in relation to affective piety and its role in devotional practices in the late Middle Ages, focusing on the sense of touch. It argues that only by deeply analysing this specific context of perception can the full significance of sensory religious experience in the Late Middle Ages be understood. Considering the centrality of the body to medieval society and Christianity, this collection explores a range of devotional practices, mainly relating to the Passion of Christ, and features manuscripts, works of devotional literature, art, woodcuts and judicial records. It brings together a multidisciplinary group of scholars to offer a variety of methodological approaches, in order to understand how touch was encoded, evoked and purposefully used. The book further considers how touch was related to the medieval theory of perception, examining its relation to the inner and outer senses through the eyes of visionaries, mystics, theologians andconfessors, not only as praxis but from different theoretical points of view. While considered the most basic of spiritual experience, the chapters in this book highlight the all-pervasive presence of touch and the significance of ‘affective piety’ to Late Medieval Christians.Chapter 3: Drama, Performance and Touch in the Medieval Convent and Beyond is Open Access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com

This book addresses the history of the senses in relation to affective piety and its role in devotional practices in the late Middle Ages, focusing on the sense of touch. It argues that only by deeply analysing this specific context of perception can the full significance of sensory religious experience in the Late Middle Ages be understood. Considering the centrality of the body to medieval society and Christianity, this collection explores a range of devotional practices, mainly relating to the Passion of Christ, and features manuscripts, works of devotional literature, art, woodcuts and judicial records. It brings together a multidisciplinary group of scholars to offer a variety of methodological approaches, in order to understand how touch was encoded, evoked and purposefully used. The book further considers how touch was related to the medieval theory of perception, examining its relation to the inner and outer senses through the eyes of visionaries, mystics, theologians andconfessors, not only as praxis but from different theoretical points of view. While considered the most basic of spiritual experience, the chapters in this book highlight the all-pervasive presence of touch and the significance of ‘affective piety’ to Late Medieval Christians.

Chapter 3: Drama, Performance and Touch in the Medieval Convent and Beyond is Open Access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com