A conference to be held at St Edmund Hall, University of Oxford 16-18 September 2010

The theosophical works of Jacob Boehme [or Jakob Böhme] (1575–1624), the ‘inspired cobbler’ of Görlitz, have influenced modern Western culture in diffuse and complex yet profound ways, from the radical sects of the English Civil Wars to the German Idealists and twentieth-century Russian Orthodox theology. This interdisciplinary conference will draw on the insights of literary, philosophical, theological and historical scholarship to illuminate Boehme’s thought and trace its reception over four centuries. We invite proposals which aim to:

• renew our understanding of Boehme’s system;
• explain its resonance within different contexts and discourses;
• assess its contribution to processes of historical and intellectual change.

We would particularly welcome papers on the legacy of the Radical Reformation and the sixteenth-century anticlerical tradition, alchemy, Hermeticism, medicine, mysticism, radical religious ideas during the English Revolution, John Pordage, the Philadelphian Society, Pietism, William Law, Emanuel Swedenborg and the Swedenborgians, William Blake, Friedrich Christoph Oetinger, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Martin Heidegger, American Transcendentalism and Eastern Orthodox sophiology.

Confirmed speakers include: Vittoria Feola, Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, Ariel Hessayon, Glenn Magee, George Pattison, Marsha Keith Schuchard, Jane Shaw, Nigel Smith, Arthur Versluis, and Andrew Weeks.

Proposals for papers (maximum 300 words) are invited, and should be sent by 15 January 2010 to either Ariel Hessayon of Goldsmiths, University of London; or Sarah Apetrei of Keble College, Oxford University.

Further information, including how to register, will be available on the conference website in due course.