From feisty female saints to the complex links between science and religion

These are just some of the religion-centred debates at this year’s Cambridge Festival, which runs from 17th March to 2nd April and is one of the largest festivals of its kind in the country, featuring over 360 mostly free events.

In 'Lady, have mercy!' The violent power of early England’s female saints, Professor Rosalind Love, Elrington and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon in the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic Studies at the University of Cambridge, will present unpublished research which overturns stereotypical views of saints as meek, self-denying, Christ-like figures.  Early medieval accounts of the female saints of England do depict women bound by the conventions of the society they lived in, a society in which women were relatively powerless, treated as commodities or confined to playing minor roles, stripped of real agency or power.  The monastic life, however, offered women an escape from society’s expectations of them as wives and mothers and, in the hands of their holy biographers, female saints could gain power from another marriage, to Christ, which allowed them to take a position of spiritual superiority to men in life and to harness divine power in death. The hagiographies show them using rhetoric to deflect and deflate the men around them and, after death, being able to punish the living, sometimes even to rise from the grave and punish them literally, if necessary. One story involves a long-dead female saint who rose from her grave to administer a good slapping to a monk who had disrespectfully fallen asleep when he was supposed to be keeping watch at her shrine.

Professor Love says: “Our contemporary view would perhaps be that this is just another form of collusion with patriarchal structures, yet the ability to choose the path of self-denial and purity became its own form of power.” [18th March]

Religion and its relationship with science feature strongly at the Festival.

In Quintessence of dust: science, religion, history, and the human, Dr Nick Spencer, Visiting Research Fellow at the Faiths and Civil Society Unit, Goldsmiths, University of London, will introduce his new book Magisteria: The Entangled History of Science & Religion [out next month] which sheds new light on the complex, troubled human history of science and religion, from eighth-century Baghdad to the frontiers of AI today, via medieval Europe, nineteenth-century India and Soviet Russia. It catalogues the role of religion in inspiring, and strangling, science before the scientific revolution, charting the eccentric faith and the quiet, creeping doubts of the most brilliant scientists in history - from Galileo, Newton, Faraday and Darwin to Maxwell and Einstein. The book rejects the thesis that science and religion are inevitably at war and shows how the links between the two have shaped human history. Ultimately, the book is about what it means to be human and who gets to say – a question that is more urgent in the twenty-first century than ever before. The talk is organised by the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion. [21st March]

In Mr Darwin’s Tree, Cambridge University Libraries present an acclaimed one-man play about Charles Darwin written and directed by Murray Watts and starring Andrew Harrison. Produced by Scholarship & Christianity In Oxford (SCIO), the UK Centre of the Council for Christian Colleges & Universities (CCCU), and underwritten by the Templeton Religion Trust and The Blankemeyer Foundation, the play explores the life and work of Charles Darwin and his impact on science and religion. It was originally commissioned to mark the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin and was premiered in Westminster Abbey. The play has been performed in many countries, including China, South Korea, and throughout the US.[23rd March]

There are several events for children. In Big world, big questions: is there space for faith in a scientific world? - aimed at Key stage 2 children - experts from the Youth and Schools team at the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion address questions including  Does science disprove God? Could robots or aliens be religious? And what really makes me ‘me’? In an interactive session, they consider whether we need more than science to understand the world around us and whether scientific discoveries can fit with belief in God. Steph Bryant, who has a degree in Natural Sciences, coordinates the three main strands of the Youth and Schools Programme at the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion.Cara Parrett, who studied marine biology and oceanography, is a conservationist and Christian. [26th March]

In The Big Questions of religion, philosophy and ethics, experts from the Faculty of Divinity and Cambridge in Your Classroom answer the Big Questions of philosophy and religion in a series of thought-provoking videos aimed at teenagers and young people. Questions include: What is Truth? Who is God? Can philosophy teach us about God? Can we prove God's existence? [17th March to 2nd April]

Several events focus on religious relics around Cambridge. The 50 religious treasures of Cambridge trail is a self-directed tour across Cambridge which aims to show how religion is intimately linked to art, history, music and science and to uncover little known works. It will include religious artefacts and monuments from Ancient Rome to the present day. There is an accompanying online Treasure Quest for younger explorers. [From Friday 17th March until Sunday 2nd April]

In Paradise Lost and the 50 religious treasures of Cambridge, Dr Renie Chow Choy, a historian of Christianity currently working on participatory heritage interpretation, will be giving the Annual Lecture on the 50 Religious Treasures of Cambridge. Dr Choy is the author of Ancestral Feeling: Postcolonial Thoughts on Western Christian Heritage and a research monograph on early medieval monasticism. She recently led a participatory heritage project on London’s iconic churches and sits on several committees responsible for the conservation of the Church of England’s historic buildings. [17th March] 

Other religion-inspired events include:

• Objects across religious boundaries: a storytelling workshop features six scholars of religion telling short stories about the peculiar lives of dynamic, boundary-crossing objects they have encountered during their research. These objects speak of interfaith relations, shared rituals, ambiguity and mixture, challenging researchers of religion to find new methods and methodologies. They include a menorah that Anastasia Rachel Badder, a Research Associate at the Cambridge Interfaith Programme in the Faculty of Divinity, received during her fieldwork with Jewish communities in Luxembourg.  She says: “While on the face of it, a menorah isn’t a particularly novel or unexpected Jewish object, this menorah stands out to me because unlike many other meaningful objects, people, identities, and ethics circulating within various Jewish spaces in Luxembourg, the menorah was able to travel across otherwise fraught and impassable boundaries between different congregations, denominations, and social realms.  The menorah was often surprisingly plastic in its meanings, in the relations it facilitated, and the impact it had on users and viewers.” [25th March]
• Wonders of creation: across societies and seas  introduces the Islamicate wonders-of-creation books, also referred to as natural histories or cosmographies. These densely illustrated encyclopaedic works show how pre-modern philosophers and artists imagined everything in the universe from the deceptively mundane to the uncanny. [21st March]

To view the full programme and book events go to the Festival website: www.festival.cam.ac.uk