Why literature? Literary Approaches to the Sacred

17-18 juin 2025

Sangam MacDuff, Maître assistant Ambizione FNS, Université de Lausanne

Prof. Christiania Whitehead, Privat-docent/SNSF Senior Research Fellow, UNIL

Mme Caromai Bouquet, Mindfulness and meditation trainer,

Mme Marie-Elsa Roche Bragg, author, teacher, and priest

Pr Renevey Denis, UNIL

Pr Christiania Whitehead, UNIL

Pr Simon Swift, UNIGE

This two-day residential workshop will explore contemplative and devotional literature from the Middle Ages to the present, including medieval prose and poetry from the Christian and Islamic traditions, and Romantic, modern and contemporary responses to the sacred, nature writing, and ecocriticism. The workshop, co-organised by CUSO and the English Department at UNIL, will be held over two days at Chemin Dessus in June 2025.

It is likely to appeal to a wide range of CUSO doctoral students in English Medieval studies, where five PhD candidates at the universities of Lausanne and Fribourg are currently working on negative theology, spiritual meditations and remedies, mysticism and travel, and Christian/Islamic religious drama. It will also appeal to CUSO doctoral students of Early Modern literature and theology, Romantic poetics and natural philosophy, American Transcendentalism, modernist aesthetics and contemporary ecocritical writing. Its immersive approach, placing academic responses to literature in the context of bodywork and stillness, should be helpful for doctoral students encountering problems of stress or burnout in relation to their intellectual work.

The workshop will include a variety of sessions that combine works of devotional literature with meditative, contemplative or embodied exercises, inviting participants to respond to the texts presented in a variety of ways.

Caromai Bouquet, a mindfulness teacher and practitioner, will invite us to contemplate the poetry of Thich Nhat Hanh, a Zen Buddhist poet, teacher and activist, through guided meditation, as well as close reading and analysis.
Marie-Elsa Bragg, an author, teacher, and priest, will present the ritual of the Eucharist alongside poetry, memoir and fragments of unsent letters. Denis Renevey and Christiania Whitehead will lead a practical workshop on The Cloud of Unknowing, a work of medieval English mysticism which encourages its readers to pursue the negative path to enlightenment by emptying the mind and co-ordinating one-word prayers with the breath. This will be complemented by mystical poetry from the Islamic tradition and a yoga workshop based on St Francis's thirteenthcentury
'Canticle to the Sun'.

Finally, by reading ecocritical poetry as we walk through the beautiful woods and alpine meadows around Chemin Dessus, Simon Swift will allow us to experience first-hand how nature writing can resonate with the sacred.

Martigny

14