15 May 2024
For many participants of the conference it was today that they first heard of the Sámi people and why the Sámi are a topic at a conference on Early Modern Christianity
Daniel Lindmark ( Unmeå University) answered this question in his plenary lecture on encounters between the Swedish Lutheran Church and the original inhabitants of the region that was known as Lapland, so northern Scandinavia. The Protestant Reformation intensified missionary activities and the encounters resulting from that were highlighted in Lindmark’s paper.
The topics of the other two plenaries dealt with encounters between Christianity and Islam (Jan Loop, University of Copenhagen) and between various catholic legal traditions (Laura Beck Varela, Universidad Autónomica Madrid). Both scholars demonstrated how valuable and how necessary it is to work from the sources to find new things but also to challenge older standpoints.
One of the annual highlights of the REFORC-conference is the announcement of the winner of the book award. Again many great books had been submitted – and each one can be seen here, but the award could only go to one book and that was Kilian Schindler’s book on Religious Dissimulation and Early Modern Drama. It was a pleasure for all to se the joy of the winner and to hear his enthusiasm when he gave a summary of the contents of his book.
Encounters in history was audible and visible in all of the many shortpapers in the sense that various disciplines encounter in a fruitful way. The interconfessional and interdisciplinary focus of REFORC became very clear in the various sessions where also a stimulating exchange between junior and senior scholars took place.
And this all ended in the most productive encounter at the end of the day: productive in the sense of producing calories at the wonderful reception with all that delicious Sicilian food.
