Michael Wuk awarded Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship

Michael Wuk, a former ICS Early Career Research Associate, has recently taken up Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Freie Universität Berlin, where he has been based since September 2023. We offer him congratulations on his fellowship.

Michael will be undertaking research into the rites of passage used to mark entrance into monastic groups in Late Antiquity (broadly, the fourth to seventh centuries CE). These ceremonies were meant to bind novices to their new lives, efface their prior identities, and enforce obligations to their abbots and abbesses. Although the scholarship on medieval monasticism is extensive, the relationship between ascetic authority structures and the membership rituals imposed on new male and female monastics has received little recent substantial attention. Michael’s project will investigate this relationship from the first recorded appearance of monastic groups in the fourth century to their widespread multiplication across the Mediterranean by the seventh century.

In doing so, this research will analyse how and why these ceremonies changed, how they supported or challenged late-antique discourses about monastic obligations and identities, and (perhaps most importantly) how these rituals were related to other analogous rituals and processes. Michael’s work will also contribute to the increasing scholarly interest in medieval monastic perspectives beyond the Benedictine and support ongoing epistemological reconsiderations of authority, identity, and obligation, even into the modern day.