Report on six paper sessions and the round table “The Future of Prayer Studies”
6 and 9 July 2026, Leeds | Written by Carolin Gluchowski

On 6 and 9 July 2026, COST Action CA23143 PRAYTICIPATE hosted six paper sessions and a round table at the International Medieval Congress (IMC) in Leeds. Responding to the congress’s special thematic strand, “Temporalities,” the programme brought together scholars working on manuscripts, literature, images, liturgy, theology, music, digital methods, and religious experience. The sessions were organised by Youri Desplenter (Ghent University), Anna Dlabačová (Leiden University), Carolin Gluchowski (University of Hamburg), and Thor-Oona Pignarre-Altermatt (UCLouvain).

The programme began from a deceptively simple premise: prayer does not merely occur in time. It also produces temporal structures and experiences. Prayer can divide the day into hours, return communities to the same feasts and narratives, make past events present, anticipate the end of time, or seek to move beyond ordinary chronology altogether. These temporalities are never shaped by words alone. Books, calendars, rubrics, poetic forms, images, sculptures, sounds, gestures, bodies, and institutional routines all help to determine how prayer is performed and experienced.

Across the two conference strands—“Private Prayer Across Time and Media in the Late Middle Ages” on Monday and “Religious Temporalities and Liturgical Prayer Books” on Thursday—the papers repeatedly challenged any straightforward opposition between private and communal, textual and material, liturgical and devotional, or historical and timeless prayer. The round table “The Future of Prayer Studies” placed these case studies within a wider discussion of the field’s blind spots, methods, and possibilities.