Events Archive
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…
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…
During the first half of the seventh century, the Byzantine state was affected by various disasters which were the result of political missteps, natural catastrophes, famines and plagues as well as military defeats. Lost battles against the Persians in particular were perceived as devastating events for…
Robert S. Nelson, one of the foremost art historians and Byzantinists, who is currently resident at the Institute for Advanced Studies, will lead the discussion. This will circle around the numerous art historical, historical, and philological issues that pertain to a mosaic icon of St. Demetrios that traveled from Byzantium to Renaissance…
In the course of writing Ravenna. Capital of Empire, Crucible of Europe, I realised that the concept of Late Antiquity was inadequate. It looked backwards to the past, rather than forward to a newly Christianized universe, manifested by the inhabitants of fifth-seventh century Ravenna. Investigating the…
Our first, fully vaccinated, workshop will take place on Sunday, Oct. 10, 12-2pm, in Scheide Caldwell 103 (or under the tent in front of the building, weather permitting). To kick things off, we have decided to discuss parts of the recently published “Byzantium Unbound,” by Anthony Kaldellis, PDFs of which you will find below…
In this online workshop, we aim to situate the transmission of Arabic science into Greek in a broader context. Toward this goal, the papers will investigate a number of related questions, including how Arabo-Greek scientific translation related to Graeco-Arabic scientific translation in Baghdad, what were the connections between these Arabo…
The workshop will pivot mainly from the Vatican Library's Greek manuscript collection and cover the gamut of palaeographical skills and analyses required to conduct research on various aspects of mediaeval books and literature. We will survey the main mediaeval Greek scripts and the characteristics which enable us to date codices; we will…
Kate Cooper, Historian, will meet with students and speak to them about her work and their graduate work.
How did environmental and climatic changes, whether sudden high impact events or more subtle gradual changes, impact human responses in the past? How did societal perceptions of such changes affect behavioral patterns and explanatory rationalities in premodernity? And can a better historical understanding of these relationships inform our…
George A. Kiraz is the founder and director of Beth Mardutho. He founded Beth Mardutho in 1992 as an institution dedicated to furthering the study of Syriac and the Syriac tradition throughout the world. He has personally directed many projects through Beth Mardutho, and his own personal library forms a significant portion of the Beth Mardutho…
Carceral studies tends to operate with a model that imagines the birth of the prison and the limited-term prison sentence as happening in the late 18th century in Europe and North America. This lecture challenges this model by showing evidence of limited-term sentences of incarceration in Late Antiquity. It explores the historical context of…
The Kurt Weitzmann Memorial Lecture Series in Late Antique, Early Christian, Byzantine, and Early Medieval Art was endowed by a bequest from the estate of Professor Kurt Weitzmann and Josepha Weitzmann-Fiedler.
Kurt Weitzmann joined Princeton University’s Department of Art and Archaeology in 1935 and spent the remainder of his…
My current research interest is violence, including structural and environmental violence, which is measured by broad outcomes related to public health and the environment. In this paper, I shall limit my observations to the natural and environmental consequences of metallurgy, including the mining and smelting of ores, and artisanal production…
This lecture considers relationships between identity, memory, and clothing in group portraits of wall painting programs of Late Antique Egyptian monasteries. In these portraits, dress figured monastic identity, forged links across monastic society and through the generations of monastic fathers, and fueled contemplation of the fathers’…
This lecture considers relationships between identity, memory, and clothing in group portraits of wall painting programs of Late Antique Egyptian monasteries. In these portraits, dress figured monastic identity, forged links across monastic society and through the generations of monastic fathers, and fueled contemplation of the fathers’…
This paper will discuss the relation of power between Sicily and Rome in the seventh and eighth centuries. The island was for centuries one of the main grain suppliers for the old capital and a place where Roman aristocrats held large estates. However, in the second half of the seventh century the social vacuum caused by the disappearance of…
Re-Imagining Byzantium Series
The paper presents the problems of writing a history of Byzantine literature in the context of postmodern anxieties about canonization, authority and narrative histories of literature. An essential difficulty for such a project is the fact that Byzantine literature has been viewed as a continuation of or…
This presentation offers a brief overview of Manichaeism, introducing newly edited Coptic texts that help to provide a clearer perspective on its position within the religions of Late Antiquity. It will then apply this perspective to the Manichaean account of Adam and Eve and its antecedent traditions, including novel interpretations of…
Sasanian Iran (c. 220–651 CE) was the last great imperial polity of the Ancient Near East. After coming to power in a violent revolution, the Sasanian family firmly established its supremacy over a vast, multiethnic empire, Eranshahr. For four centuries, Sasanian monarchs transmitted their royal power to successors from the family,…
The Greek word parrhesía, usually translated with “frankness”, has a long history in Antiquity. Its first known mention is in one of Euripides’ works; he defines parrhesía as a crucial prerogative of the Athenian citizens who are allowed to contribute to debates in the popular assembly.
During Late Antiquity, the term is…
The (Legacy) of the relics of saints were instrumental in the formation of the Christian communities at the frontiers of the Byzantine and Sasanian Empires. In this talk, I will argue that the flow of the relics was mostly from the Sasanian Iran to regions outside the empire. Predominantly to the recently Christianized areas in the borderlands…
This talk explores methodological issues pertaining to the history of emotions and Islamic (Arabic) Tradition-based literature, including the literature of 'Religious Merits' and other pietistic or devotional genres.
Nancy Khalek is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Brown University and specializes in…
Program:
Friday
1:30: Welcome and Workshop Introduction
2:00-3:15: Material Culture and Identity
Merle Eisenberg (Princeton University): Copy and Paste? Imitative and Pseudo-Roman Coinage in the Visigothic Kingdom
Cecily Hilsdale…