Pastoralia–the corpora of catechetical, homiletic and pastoral texts designed to aid in teaching the tenets of Christianity to the laity –flourished in the wake of the Fourth Lateran Council’s plea for the clergy to take their pastoral duties more seriously, and the subsequent ecclesiastical legislation enacted to implement this. In England, Pecham’s Lambeth Constitutions (1281) outlined the pastoral syllabus that was to be taught in the province of Canterbury, whilst similar legislation was enacted to cover the province of York. In recent years, a great deal of scholarly attention has begun to focus on the surviving texts that were composed to help the clergy carry out these pastoral duties. This conference seeks to investigate the utility and efficacy of pastoralia, and the ways in which the laity responded to these developments. Papers might consider:

•   Evidence of manuscript transmission: production, acquisition, and circulation; individuals, institutions, and networks.
•   The transmission of ideas: from the university to the parish, the cloister to the tavern.
•   Translatio and its many interpretations: contemporary translations of Latin texts into the vernacular, and vice versa; modern principles of translating and editing texts.
•   Teaching: the efficacy of pastoralia as a catechetical tool; how pastoral discourse was controlled, appropriated, and contested.Keynote papers by Prof. Ralph Hanna and Prof. John Arnold Deadline for Abstracts: 18 March 2016. Contact: pastoralia2016@gmail.com