Current Issue
This special issue reveals the complexity of gender dynamics in ritual enactment, which has not yet received the scholarly attention it deserves. The issue’s articles show that medieval rituals served several gender-specific needs and purposes. They were used to teach men and women how to perform their gender; to establish and confirm an individual’s manhood or womanhood; to discipline and punish individuals who did not conform to their assigned gender roles; to sustain the gender binary and validate gender inequalities; to empower women in a male-dominated world; to release men’s and women’s anxieties; and to initiate individuals to male and female forms of piety and asceticism and to gender-specific dynastic and family traditions. The present special issue also points to the key similarities between (medieval) ritual and gender that reveal the gendered aspects of ritual and the ritual dimensions of gender, both in the present and the past.
Articles
Eventum aims to reposition the arts and rituals of these medieval traditions and to provide an international and congenial forum for the presentation and discussion of research on:
- all medieval arts in and as rituals; and
- the initiators, participants, spaces, forms, structures, and artistic dimensions of all medieval rituals.
Furthermore, Eventum provides a platform for the examination of the relationship between medieval, later, and contemporary arts and rituals, bringing to the fore the rich cultural heritage of the Middle Ages for a better understanding of both the past and the present.
For Eventum’s purposes, the term "medieval" is used in its broader sense, covering Byzantine, Western European, Coptic, Syriac, Hebrew, Arabic, Armenian, Georgian, and Slavic cultures from the 4th to the 15th centuries.
Eventum is a diamond open-access journal. Open Access is not an infringement on copyright. Authors (or their institutions) own the original copyright to their research.