Events Archive
Six Latin sermons attributed to the fourth-century Syrian theologian Ephrem the Syrian (c. 306-373) circulated in western Europe from the sixth century onwards. These sermons share common themes, including the need for compunction and repentance motivated by fear of the Last Judgment and the value of weeping and contrition to temper God’s…
Please join us for a symposium honoring the life, work, and legacy of Boethius on the occasion of the (supposed) 1500th anniversary of his death!
Short talks and discussions will be led by
Claire Apostoli (Department of Classics)
…
Do you use Syriac in your research? Join us on Thursday, December 5 for a three-hour workshop
led by George Kiraz exploring the research functionality of current Syriac text databases. George will
give us a hands-on introduction to the most important digital tools in the field, including the very
newest iteration of his database Simtho…
This talk will assess the contemporary significance of the invention of the Slavonic letters in Eastern Europe, and the consequences this has had for the (academic and other) readings of our medieval texts. It will then seek to propose a new reading of the two hagiographies which provide us with the earliest narrative accounts of the invention…
This paper will toggle between modern and late ancient explanatory frameworks for material disasters, with the goal of gaining further insight into how late Roman authors interpreted how, why, and for what reasons ruinous events like earthquakes, plagues, and urban sieges damaged and disrupted their communities. Among other interventions,…
Lecture: Wednesday, November 6, 2024
Lev Weitz, “On the Edge: Muslims, Christians, and the State in the Fatimid Countryside?”
4:30 p.m.; 219 Aaron Burr Hall
How far did the reach of the medieval…
The Virgin Mary enjoys pride of place among the saints of Coptic (Egyptian) Christianity. Historians often explain this prominence as a reflexive absorption of goddess worship, especially of the Egyptian Isis, and as a response to Christological controversy—above all, the “heresy” of docetism. In contrast, this presentation will highlight ways…
2024 Medieval Studies Graduate Student Conference
Keynote Lecture: "Ordinary Things: People and their Possessions in Conversations with the Medieval State" by Anne E. Lester, Johns Hopkins University
Our perception of the pre-modern world is often shaped by the creative expressions of its contemporaries, such as…
The investigations carried out over the last decades in various archaeological sites across Egypt and the discovery of mortuary written artefacts in their original settings are shedding new light on the complexity of the funerary practices performed in the aftermath of the Roman conquest. When recontextualized inscribed coffins, shrouds,…
This talk grapples with the impact of Christian ideas about grace and free will on the sexual exploitation and experiences of women in service in the late antique West. Theological debates in this period shaped how Christians thought about both freedom and sexual consent. What were the implications for women in service, who were sometimes faced…
The past five years have seen multiple breakthroughs in establishing the past as a key dimension for global change researchers and highlighting the need to bring environmental history, archaeology, environmental humanities, environmental science disciplines together with nonacademic holders of local and traditional knowledge and practitioners…
Register to attend: Here
Bernhard Palme, Professor of Ancient history and the Director of the Papyrus collection of the Austrian National Library.
AnneMarie Luijendijk, the William H. Danforth Professor of Religion.
In the first part of this lunch, they will present their respective perspectives on present trends in…
By the fourth century CE there circulated a collection of texts in Greek arranged to serve the study of astronomy. Contemporary manuscript evidence for this curriculum is not extant, but what survives after the ninth century CE are the echoes of this collection in later Greek manuscripts and a corresponding curriculum, the Middle Books, in…
The acquisition of two major coin collections (Peter Donald and Chris and Helen Theodotou), has placed Princeton in the forefront of institutions supporting research in Byzantine Numismatics. Both of these purchases were made with the help of generous support of the Friends of the Princeton University Library and the Seeger Center for Hellenic…
During the Rabbinic period of Jewish history, the land of the Hebrew Bible was, so to speak, reconfigured in a plethora of statements transmitted in the two building blocks of the literature of the sages, in Talmud and Midrash. In this paper I will discuss the land according to a literary genre that is thought to be characteristic of the later…
Contemporary scholars are fascinated by the interplay of Christian content and pagan literary forms in the writing of fourth-century theologian Gregory of Nazianzus. This intersection emerges from Gregory’s treatment of examples from myth, which are often qualified as πλάσμα (“fabrication”) and μῦθος (“story”), in opposition to ἀλήθεια,…
Please join us for a lecture by Professor Matthew Milliner, titled “The Mary Underground: Subterranean Global Virgins.” Milliner’s presentation will view Mary as a cipher for the politics and theology of global Christianity, and will examine a history of neglected “underground” Marys as a corrective to overly exalted practices of veneration and…
Fragmentary papyri that seem inconspicuous at first glance sometimes contain important historical information — like this hastily written list of the names of soldiers from the two legions that were stationed in Egypt in the Roman imperial period: legio III Cyrenaica and legio XXII Deiotariana. In this lecture I will try to show that the…
Beginning with an introduction to early global trade, my paper traces the arrival of monotheism in the Red Sea region through a comparative approach taking into account other nodal first-millennium regions (e.g., Central Asia) to reframe the complex interweaving of faith, identity, and economic activity during Late Antiquity.
…
Contemplative reading is a spiritual practice developed by Christian monks in the early Middle Ages. This talk traces the history of monastic reading in sixth- and seventh-century Mesopotamia. Ascetics belonging to the Church of the East pursued a form of contemplation which moved from reading, to meditation, to prayer, to the ecstasy of divine…
Register Here
In the 5th century Syriac scribes began to use dots in order to document the oral reading traditions of the Bible. Some dots were used to vocalise words and differentiate between otherwise identical words. Another set of dots is the topic of this lecture. These dots, often called accents, were used to mark rising and falling tones, as…
Faculty, students, fellows, and staff gathered for the Committee for the Study of Late Antiquity’s welcome party.
Christians were debating the aesthetics and morality of music more than a millennium and a half before the Satanic panic. But their debates weren't solely or even mostly about the putatively demonic properties of music. They were also anchored in the conviction that music had serious psychological and behavioral ramifications, and this talk…
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
Workshop, May 19-20, 2023
Louis A. Simpson Building, Room A71
Friday, May 19, 2023
Session 1 (9:00 am – 11:15 am) Chair: Ida Toth, (University of Oxford)…
The modern legal system rests on several pillars of legal thought. Gaius’s Institutes, the only surviving record of Roman law, is taught at universities across the world. Unfortunately, the only manuscript of it is a severely damaged palimpsest. In the Islamic tradition, the Quran serves as the legal template. The oldest Quran, however…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Rather than provide a definitive answer to this question, this talk defines the parameters of the debate and proposes ways of thinking about what it would mean to engage seriously with the Byzantine Studies's political and intellectual genealogies, hierarchies, and forms of exclusion. In doing so, we will both propose a way of understanding…
Founded by the Roman emperor Justinian in the sixth century, the Monastery of Saint Catherine in the Sinai is one of the most famous monasteries in the world and a place whose celebrated manuscript collection is of profound importance for a number of academic fields. A series of workshops at Princeton will highlight the recent,…
When the Roman Emperor Flavius Claudius Julianus—better known to many as Julian the Apostate—perished on a Persian battlefield in 363 CE, his efforts to turn back the tide of Christianizing efforts within the Roman Empire died with him. In the final decades of the fourth century, subsequent Christian emperors only further solidified the…
- AffiliationPostdoctoral Research Associate, Stanley J. Seeger '52 Center for Hellenic Studies, funded by the Committee for the Study of Late Antiquity
- AffiliationAssociate Professor of Classics and the Stanley J. Seeger '52 Center for Hellenic Studies
Scholars have long shown how the churches of the Armenian Bagratid kingdom (10th-11thc) find their sources in local buildings of earlier centuries. Yet few have explored the evidence which connects Bagratid-era elites most directly to their earlier built landscape: the royal inscriptions recording donations, tax exemptions, and…
Howard Crosby Butler Memorial Lecture
We remember Howard Crosby Butler on the one-hundredth anniversary of his death in 1922 and celebrate his life. Born in 1872, Butler received his MA at Princeton in 1893 and after completing a professional course in architecture, joined Princeton faculty in 1895. He became the first Master in…
Faculty, students, fellows, and staff gathered for the Committee for the Study of Late Antiquity’s welcome party.
Pre-registration is required and will be confirmed by email.
Register to [email protected]
Yedidah Koren is a Rothschild postdoctoral fellow and a visiting scholar at the Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University. Yedidah received her PhD in Talmud and Ancient Jewish Culture from Tel-Aviv University on the topic of lineage and blemished pedigree. Her current research project focuses on…
“On the Borders of the Realm” eschews the customary focus on Paris and the triumphalist narrative of the rise of the Capetian monarchy, to take up the history of medieval France from the perspective(s) of the principalities and regions which formed it…
“On the Borders of the Realm” eschews the customary focus on Paris and the triumphalist narrative of the rise of the Capetian monarchy, to take up the history of medieval France from the perspective(s) of the principalities and regions which formed it…
The metal Aramaic amulets from Late Antique Palestine, a trove of Jewish texts, have to date only been partially published. As such, they potentially hold many new discoveries for a number of fields, including ancient Jewish magic, Palestinian Aramaic language, ancient medicine, and more. In this presentation, I will demonstrate how amulets can…
Our knowledge about Syriac manuscripts in the United States is unacceptably poor. This has to do with two main reasons. First, many collections kept at the university libraries have been badly cataloged and some have not been cataloged at all. Second, in the course of the 20th century multiple transfers took place: some small institutes were…
Christian Sahner is an associate professor of Islamic History at Oxford University. Christian did his PhD here at Princeton and was part of both CSLA when he was a graduate student and CSLA’s predecessor, GSLA (the Group for the Study of Late Antiquity).
Pre-registration for in-person is required. Registrations…
Our discussion will revolve around a set of readings from the recently published The Invention of Byzantium in Early Modern Europe, edited by Nathanael Aschenbrenner, an Seeger fellow with us this year, and Jake Ransohoff, who will be joining us for the occasion. Included in the readings is a chapter by our very own Anthony Grafton…
How did upper-class Christians understand the virtue of humility in Late Antiquity? How did their practice of humility affect their attitudes towards their social and economic inferiors? Was it more difficult for them to renounce prestige than to give up their wealth? This paper will address these questions by examining several case studies of…
This conference will bring together an international group of scholars who have worked on Princeton’s FLAME project, as well as leading scholars on the late antique and early medieval economy worldwide (4th-8th centuries CE). Over three days, speakers will present new findings centered on the research priorities of the FLAME project…
Professor Herrin will reflect on 35 years since the publication of her book “The Formation of Christendom” (Princeton University Press, 1987, republished as a Princeton Classic, 2021). Discussion will follow.
Judith Herrin was educated at the universities of Cambridge and Birmingham, and received additional training…
Image: Paten with the Communion of the Apostles, Dumbarton Oaks
Recent years have seen a dramatic increase in the number of publications directly or indirectly dealing with liturgy in the late antique world. While most of the twentieth-century scholarly editions, manuals and monographs on early Christian and medieval liturgy were…