Dominican Culture, Dominican Theology: The Order of Preachers and Its Spheres of Action, 1215-c. 1600

In the high Middle Ages, a novel concept of religious community overran the occidental world: the Dominican Order. Unlike earlier religious orders who confined monks to the purview of praying the liturgy and living a life of contemplative seclusion, the Dominicans focused on engaging with the broad community beyond the convent walls. The result was a hitherto unseen interpenetration of a religious order into the intellectual as well as cultural realities surrounding it. This conference aims at generating new insights into the Dominican importance by stimulating interdisciplinary debate on Dominican culture and Dominican theological thought as two aspects of the same medieval and early modern reality.