What does it mean to pray in time — to mark time, inhabit time, resist time, or even step beyond it?

At this year’s International Medieval Congress in Leeds, PRAYTICIPATE will explore precisely these questions through a rich programme of sessions and one roundtable devoted to prayer, temporality, media, and devotional practice. Bringing together scholars working on manuscripts, images, liturgy, theology, poetry, digital methods, and religious experience, the programme asks how prayer shaped the rhythms of medieval and early modern life.

Across the sessions, we will move from monastic practices of continuous prayer to vernacular Marian devotion, from psalters and glosses to prayer books, rubrics, rosaries, lyrics, and images. We will consider prayer not only as a text to be read, but as something performed, repeated, remembered, visualised, sung, embodied, and shared.

The programme also includes the roundtable “The Future of Prayer Studies”, which opens a broader conversation about how prayer might be studied as an interdisciplinary field: across languages, traditions, objects, communities, and media.

We warmly invite everyone attending the IMC to join us in Leeds for these conversations — and to think with us about prayer as one of the most dynamic practices of medieval and early modern religious life.