Dr Gustav Zamore

Medieval religious culture and social history of the High and Late Middle Ages. I am in particular interested in episcopal authority, dissent and violence.

My current project challenges our understanding of medieval sacred spaces––churches, chapels, shrines, and processions between them––by arguing that they functioned not only as spaces of worship but as arenas of political conflict in England and Europe between ca. 1250 and 1450. This transformational period follows the fourth Lateran council and the Church’s inauguration of a powerful pastoral programme that sought to foster (and control) lay participation in the church, and ends with the crisis of authority following the social transformations and calamities of the fourteenth century. I argue that the ritual symbols and practices that defined sacred spaces were harnessed in tactical and opportunistic acts that challenged the social hierarchies and power relations that sacred spaces reflected and legitimised. By considering sacred spaces as deeply intertwined with structures of power and authority, this project will transform scholarship that has thus far largely focused on ‘secular’ areas as the main sites of social conflict. I will integrate a wide variety of sources to examine how class, social status, and gender shaped acts of disruption that contested the social hierarchies and power relations that were expressed and legitimised through sacred spaces, thus refuting the projection of strict modern boundaries between sacred and profane onto the medieval past.