The ERC-StG PRAYER project is organizing the conference ‘Bound for Devotion: The Prayer Book as Object and Practice, 1300–1800’, which will take place 1-3 July 2026 in Leiden and aims to shed new light on prayer across late medieval and early modern Europe by exploring the broader ecosystem of prayer books. See the call for papers for more information and send us your abstract by 1 October 2025.
This three-day international conference, hosted at Leiden University by the PRAYER project (ERC Starting Grant), with keynotes by Walter S. Melion (Emory University) and Kathryn M. Rudy (University of St Andrews), aims to bring together researchers working on books that were (intended to be) used in any form of prayer practice in the late medieval and early modern era (up to the eighteenth century). This conference aims to shed new light on prayer across late medieval and early modern Europe by exploring the broader ecosystem of prayer books. This includes a wide range of interactions between the material book, texts and images disseminated through it (and their connections to other types of objects, such as rosaries, small pipe clay figures, and single-sheet prints), the devotions inspired by these texts and images, the producers and buyers/readers of the books, and the communities they belonged to.
For more information on the symposium and the full CFP, please click here.
