Just over a fortnight ago, over the last weekend of April, the second annual Ceræ conference was conducted online with attendees and presenters from sixteen countries across eleven different timezones! Repeating our unique format from last year with a continuous single-stream over 32 hours, our presenters not only came from a multitude of institutions, but also represented the spectrum of career stage from distinguished professor to junior graduate student, and everyone in between. All our presenters were united through the theme of the conference – Dreams, Visions, and Utopias – which once again will also be the theme of volume 12 of our journal this year.
Docent Jesse Keskiaho (University of Helsinki) kicked off proceedings with an engaging keynote paper on early medieval theological and intellectual theories around dreams and visions. We learned not just about the content of these dreams and visions, but also about who was considered qualified to interpret them and how to know when dreams were true and to be trusted.
This thread concerned with the legitimacy of dreams and visions continued throughout the next ten thematically clustered sessions, which asked questions about the use of visions as a political tool or a literary device, of visions as true premonitions of the future or wishful thinking, and even to occasionally use the foreshadowing of future events to consciously step away towards a different future for the dreamer(s).
A number of the presenters introduced sub-themes of sensory experiences within dreams, and how that can reinforce the illusory environment of visions to enhance the veracity and believability of the dream narrative/experience, while others brought forth non-human interactions and manifestations as both allegorical and substantive markers within dreams and visions.
Another unifying thread from the conference, one whole third of our theme, was how the concept of utopia predates the coining of the term by Thomas More in 1516, being, as one presenter put it, “a basic human condition to dream of an ideal world”. Utopian visions can be found within many medieval and early modern texts, though many of the earlier medieval utopias seem to have been located within a parallel otherworld, while many of the early modern ones existed in a future state of existence, which could often be the ‘real world’.
Our final keynote from Assoc. Prof. Chloë Houston (University of Reading), took up this last thread and delivered a truly fascinating examination of early modern utopianism, and how its idealistic advocates used it to call for an accelerated shift within society towards an ideal society for all people not as a heavenly reward but as achievable in this world and this lifetime.
If you were not able to attend the conference, or would like to listen to the recordings, you will be pleased to know that you can still ‘register’ for a reduced amount of just $10 AUD and be able to view all the session recordings on our website. For all previously registered conference attendees, you will shortly receive the password to unlock all 12 sessions of conference papers on our website for a limited time until 30 June 2025.
From the everyone at the Ceræ committee, thank you to all of our wonderful presenters and audience members for a thoroughly enjoyable conference with a dazzling variety of thought-provoking papers, a number of which we hope to bring you in the form of full-length articles when Volume 12 of our journal is published in the northern winter/southern summer of 2025-26. A special thank you to my fellow committee members who helped to put this event together from the CFP to the programme and the chairing, and especially to my co-convenors Erika Dell’Aquila, Julián Giglo, and Michele Seah – it was a dream working with you all.
We also hope to see many of you on our screens again next year when we will return for the third Ceræ conference in early 2026.
Erica Steiner
University of Sydney
Featured image: Humankind before the Flood (central panel detail), c. 1503, The Garden of Earthly Delights, Hieronymus Bosch; Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid/Taschen