Utrecht University, Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies

June 2 & 3, 2025

This workshop explores the intricate relationships between materiality and text across
various forms of materiality and diverse textual practices. Texts can be broadly
understood as a woven “tissue of words,” as anthropologist Karin Barber (2007) describes.
They materialize and mediate their content in multiple ways—verbal, aural, written, visual,
and tactile—shaping how they are produced, transmitted, and engaged with.
Religious texts serve as significant media, rendering the sacred tangible to practitioners,
communicating religious ideas, and forming integral components of religious
worldbuilding. Experienced through the senses and used in ritual practices, their
materiality influences how religious practitioners encounter and interpret them. The way
texts exist in physical form affects the “physiology and experience” (Cummings 2020) of
engagement, impacting meaning-making processes.

This workshop adopts a broad perspective on religious texts, extending beyond scripture
to encompass a wide range of textual forms, including those not traditionally considered
sacred or authoritative. Whether examining a traditional hymn, a contemporary worship
song, a Torah scroll, or a Christian self-help bestseller, the key premise remains the same:
religious texts, regardless of genre or medium, exist within the physical world and are
produced and engaged with by embodied agents who actively interact with them. An
embodied engagement with a material text is thus more than reading; it includes
performing a text, chanting and even consuming a text—wether by eating or drinking it.
Through interdisciplinary discussions of theoretical approaches and case studies,
participants will critically engage with the ways in which materiality shapes textual
practices and religious experiences. The workshop is a timely intervention in debates
about the materiality of texts in particular and of the materiality of religion more
generally.

Conveners
Katja Rakow, Jip Lensink, and Birgit Meyer

Venue:
June 2: Universiteitsmuseum Utrecht, Lange Nieuwstraat 106
June 3: Ravenstijnzaal, Utrecht University, Kromme Nieuwegracht 80