History, Society and the Sacred

The Ninety-First Annual Meeting of the American Catholic Historical Association will be held in Boston on January 6 to 9, 2011, held conjointly with the American Historical Association. The theme of the AHA Boston Meeting is “History, Society, and the Sacred.”

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An overview of this year’s theme

“History, Society, and the Sacred”

By Michael H. Fisher and Barbara H. Rosenwein

(from the AHA’s September 2009 Perspectives on History)

The 2011 annual meeting convenes in Boston, a location redolent of numerous sacred sites and practices: churches of many denominations, patriotic landmarks, memories of witch trials. Our program’s theme, “History, Society, and the Sacred,” calls for papers that consider the many ways in which society and the sacred have converged and diverged and to trace those connections and disconnections over time. It invites presenters to consider the topic with all the interdisciplinary tools available to scholars today, to bring history, geography, archaeology, anthropology, literature, and many other fields into fruitful conversation.

The term “sacred” points to domains of life, spaces, thoughts, and practices that—in every time and place—have the charged meaning of the numinous. The word “society” calls attention to the lived context in which the sacred takes on meaning—where it is fostered, contested, elaborated, and rejected, whether by specialists or “laypeople.” “History” reminds us that both the sacred and society change over time. It invites us to consider as well the historiography of the subject—how historians and other scholars have approached the social side of the sacred and the sacred side of the social.

The Program Committee seeks panels exploring such issues as the history of piety and impiety, death and burial, material relics and immaterial mysticism, and religious thought and sentiment across all places and times. We invite comparative analyses of sacred spaces and their meanings. We welcome sessions that consider how the sacred has (and has not) been located in the human, the dead, nature, the state, memorials, churches, and gods. We encourage panelists to interrogate the nature of the sacred and its relationship to society, power structures, economic institutions, class, gender, and race. In short, “History, Society, and the Sacred” invites explorations both microhistorical and on a grand scale.