Committee for the Study of Late Antiquity

The Committee for the Study of Late Antiquity (CSLA) fosters interdisciplinary discussion and cooperation among University members who study the period extending from 200 to 800 CE in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East.

Comprised of specialists in history, classics, religion, art and archaeology, and Near Eastern studies, the CSLA provides a forum for discussion among students, faculty, visiting scholars, and members of the Institute for Advanced Study and Princeton Theological Seminary. The committee also organizes a program of public lectures, often in collaboration with other departments and programs.

The CSLA is under the aegis of the Council of the Humanities.


Upcoming Events

Lecture: Ian Wood, "The Rise of the Christian Economy in the post-Christian West"
Tue, Apr 11, 2023, 4:30 pm6:00 pm

Join us on April 11 for a lecture with Ian Wood, scholar of early medieval history and Professor emeritus at the University of Leeds, on the Christian economy of the early medieval west.

In recent years a number of historians, most notably Peter Brown, have drawn attention to ‘the spiritual economy’.  They have pointed to…

Location
East Pyne 010

Speaker

Lecture: Meron Piotrkowski, “Who Reads Greek in 3rd Century CE Oxyrhynchus?: The Jewish Community of Oxyrhynchus Before and After 117 CE”
Thu, Apr 13, 2023, 4:30 pm6:00 pm

Within the framework of his research project at Princeton University, Piotrkowski examines Jewish papyri discovered at Oxyrhynchus and seeks to test, inter alia, the generally accepted hypothesis that Egyptian Jews and Judaism were completely annihilated as an immediate outcome of the Jewish Diaspora Revolt (115-117 CE). In this lecture, which…

Location
Scheide Caldwell House 103

Speaker

Lecture: Ian Wood, "The Wealth of Merovingian Bishops: the Case of the Desiderii"
Fri, Apr 14, 2023, 2:30 pm4:00 pm

This seminar will expand on ideas presented in Ian Wood’s lecture “The Rise of the Christian Economy in the post-Christian West

” held on Tuesday, April 11 at 4:30 pm in 010 East Pyne.

Scholars…

Location
Scheid Cladwell House, room 103
Lecture: Gregory Heyworth, "The Undiscovered Country: Ancient Texts and Modern Technologies"
Wed, Apr 19, 2023, 12:00 pm1:30 pm

Over the last six months, scholars have recovered a host of unknown, damaged, or lost texts, that are changing the canon, among which Hipparchus’s star chart, a commentary by Apuleius on Plato’s Republic, Book 10, the lost ending to the Old Irish Bricriu’s Feast, and the provenance of the Sarajevo Haggadah. This lecture gives…

Location
Joseph Henry House, room 16
Lecture: Gregory Heyworth, "Manuscripts at the Foundations of Modern Law: Multispectral Imaging, Artificial Intelligence and the Recovery of Gaius’s Institutes and the oldest Koran"
Thu, Apr 20, 2023, 4:30 pm6:00 pm

The modern legal system rests on several pillars of legal thought. In the West, Gaius’s Institutes, the only surviving record of Roman law, is taught in every introduction to legal studies at universities across the world. Unfortunately, the only manuscript of it is a severely damaged palimpsest. In the Eastern tradition, the Koran…

Announcements

“A Hidden World Revealed: The Palimpsests of Saint Catherine’s Monastery on Mount Sinai” synaxis and workshops cosponsored by the Seeger Center 

 Twelve hundred years ago, a scribe in a secluded monastery took a piece of parchment laboriously inscribed with a religious text—and erased it.

Parchment was scarce in the Egyptian desert during the medieval era, prompting the erasure and reuse of manuscripts.

Beneath the new writing, however, traces of the original…

Peter R. Brown Prize 2022

Yitz Landes, a graduate student in the Department of Religion, won the prize for his paper "The Rise of the Jewish Patriarchate and the Dissemination of Rabbinic Literature". The prize is given annually to the best graduate student essay on any subject relating to the study of Late Antiquity.

Peter R. Brown Prize

We would like to invite applications for this year’s Peter R. Brown Prize.
 
The Committee for the Study of Late Antiquity sponsors the annual Peter R. Brown Prize for the best graduate student essay on any subject relating to the study of Late Antiquity. The prize…