2011 IAS Conference

International Anchoritic Society Conference September 16-18, 2011 University of North Dakota Grand Forks, North Dakota, USA

The International Anchoritic Society aims to support and promote the academic study of medieval anchoritism and other forms of religious reclusion in the Middle Ages. It convenes biannual international conferences and sponsors annual sessions on anchoritic and associated topics at the international medieval congresses of Kalamazoo, Michigan and Leeds, UK.

This will be the first conference sponsored by the IAS held in the United States. The conference theme will be “Liminality and the Wilderness,” which captures both the anchoritic vocation and North Dakota, melding them together in an interesting fashion. Grand Forks, ND was chosen as the site of the first American conference because the Conference Host, Michelle M. Sauer, is both a founding member of the Society as well as the Vice President.

Keynote Speaker: Michael G. Sargent

"Scale I: Walter Hilton's Book to an Anchoress"

Michael Sargent teaches in the English Department of Queens College, City University of New York (CUNY), and in the doctoral program in English at the CUNY Graduate Center. He did his graduate work in the University of Toronto's Centre for Medieval Studies, with his doctoral thesis on the manuscript annotations of a late medieval Carthusian monk, James Grenehalgh. Sargent continues to work, primarily, on the history and writers of the Carthusian Order, including Nicholas Love. He is at present working toward the completion of a critical edition for the Early English Text Society of The Scale of Perfection.