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April 16, 2025. 12pm – 6pm

University of Toronto, Trinity College, Combination Room
6 Hoskin Ave, Toronto, ON M5S 1H8

Early modern prophetic imagination – i.e., the imaginative faculty allegedly inspired by God – shaped new forms of agency in Christian Europe, as it called on human actors to take an active role in history in order to realize the divine will. The struggle to inform political decisions through theological and intellectual principles manifested in the dramatic civil conflicts of early modern era. What happens if we look at this struggle, that peaked in the Early modern global reformations, from the standpoint of female prophets and from a transnational perspective? Although they were sometimes persecuted, women prophets and visionaries often put in place common mechanisms to sway religious and political leaders and claim authority by bridging intellectual and spiritual knowledge. They blurred the lines between orthodoxy and heresy and Protestantism and Catholicism.

Different types of networks – female networks, networks based on kinship, and also those of the religious orders – together with the circulation of relics, images, artistic objects and hagiographies, and with virtual and real pilgrimages – connected women, and linked them to their male counterparts, in material and intellectual ways. Models of female prophecy in early modern religion had a global impact and shaped genealogies of women as well as political and theological conceptions, complexifying the way in which we understand reform, visionary practices, intellectual and polemical needs. From France to Canada, from Spain to Japan, a transnational perspective is fundamental to grasp the features of a mode of authority, of discourse production and literary innovation. Female spirituality, relationships of power and authority, mobility and missions, exchanges and negotiations between religious and political subjects: how do female prophetic ideas engage with these questions from South to North and thus affect a reconceptualization of political theology in early modern times?

This International symposium, sponsored by the European Union and funded by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellowship, will bring together scholar from various disciplines and areas of interest. The event is free and open to the public, please fill out our registration form so that we can keep track of numbers for refreshments.

Speakers

Alan Verskin (University of Toronto)

Emma Anderson (University of Ottawa)

Laura Ingallinella (University of Toronto)

Eleonora Cappuccilli (University of Toronto and University of Oslo)

Haruko Nawata Ward (Columbia Theological Seminary)

Venerable Miao Guang (Fo Guang Shan Institute of Humanistic Buddhism)