The research group Religion at the Leibniz Institute of European History is pleased to announce a pre-Christmas guest lecture. Prof Dr Alex Fisher, University of British Columbia, Canada, will speak on his research topic ‘Sound and the Body in the Lenten Devotions of Counter-Reformation Germany’. The event will take place in presence in the conference room of the IEG. Event language is English. By 1600 the period of Lent, and Holy Week in particular, provided rich opportunities for intermedial forms of devotional culture in Catholic Germany. Aiming to convert Protestants and reinforce the identity of Catholics, Jesuits and Capuchins in particular promoted forms of demonstrative, indeed theatrical, rituals that courted both fascination and revulsion. Lenten penitential gatherings involving the performance of Psalm 50, Miserere mei Deus, and Good Friday processions conducted under torchlight were often marked by displays of self-flagellation in which devotees enacted Christ’s sufferings. This presentation explores how the sonic dimensions of these Lenten devotions may have interacted with these intermedial displays of embodied penitence, and contextualizes these practices within a rising tide of published musical settings of the Miserere and supplicatory litanies. Alex Fisher is Professor of Early Music and Musicology, Renaissance and Baroque Studies at the University of British Columbia. Please send registrations to info@ieg-mainz.de. Picture credits: private