Looking Back on Our International Conference in Mainz, 17–20 June 2024:

Creating Holiness: Books, Scrolls and Icons as Carriers of Sacredness

When we launched the organization of this conference with a call for papers last October, we were overwhelmed by the large number, high quality and, above all, the incredible thematic breadth of abstracts. It was virtually impossible for us to select only a limited number of speakers based on this rich pool of submissions. This is why we decided to turn our idea of holding one conference into two: an in-person event in Mainz and a virtual conference slated for September. At this point, we would again like to express our gratitude to all the researchers from Algeria, Azerbaijan, Brazil, Canada, Egypt, European countries, Ghana, India, Iran, Israel, Turkey, the USA and Vietnam who are involved in making these two conferences possible. Thanks to all of them, we were able to put together two incredibly rich and diverse programs.

Fast forward to four days in June 2024, which were devoted to questions about how a book, a scroll, a woodblock or an icon can become a sacred object for a particular community and how sacredness is connected to the material used for manufacturing them. What rituals are associated with these extraordinary artefacts during their production and handling? What stories are told about them and their manufacturers? What place do the materials, the script or the layout occupy in the cultural memory of religious communities or within secularized societies?

Scholars presented research on what makes books, icons, woodcuts, inscriptions, banners and sutras sacred artefacts. Some asked how narratives, rules and customs surrounding writing tools and materials have evolved. What emerged from the panels and discussions is that all these sacred objects under investigation are somehow connected to script and text respectively.

Link to the complete blog post.