Events Archive - 2018
The Council of Chalcedon (451 CE) led to a split in the eastern church that remains until today. This talk traces the early decades of this schism through the powerful narratives of those who ultimately lost imperial support. It argues that in this era of political and religious upheaval, skillful stories of violent persecution challenged the…
Discussion on Byzantine Cappadocia by Professor Robert Ousterhout
The lecture will be a synthetic exposition of the main arguments of my current book project. The title of the book, "The Slow Fall of Babel," means to be a metaphor for what I think happened to the linguistic views of Christians in Late Antiquity. Babel, in this case, is not just a reference to a biblical story about a single dramatic event in…
Egypt has been widely recognized in scholarship as one of the most economically important provinces of the Roman Empire. However, it was not before the reform of Diocletian in 297/98 that non-Egyptian coins were offi cially allowed in the province, providing the first opportunity to analyze Empire-wide circulation patterns. An analysis of over…
Reading "A Book of Psalms from Eleventh-Century Byzantium" by Crostini-G. Peers
This week, faculty, students, fellows, and staff gathered for the Committee for the Study of Late Antiquity’s 2018-2019 welcome party.
Christian rites elaborated on the Bible through hymns, sermons, and prayers. Together they created a narrative environment that added elements to the sacred story. Modern studies of fictionality offer insights into how late antique Christians came to know their Bible in ways that deviated from the text of scripture and generated new forms of…
In most scholarship on Byzantium, the Roman aspects of its civilization are confined to the upper echelons of state power and court ideology. The culture of the majority, by contrast, is defined by popular Orthodoxy and the vernacular Greek language. This talk will look at aspects of vernacular Greek in Byzantium, which was called the Romaic…
HIS / CCHRI Multidisciplinary Colloquium
A Conference in honor of Professor John Haldon
Throughout his career, Professor John Haldon has been a hinge between different academic cultures, methods, and disciplines. A true scholar of Byzantine society, he has combined meticulous work on texts and material evidence with a holistic approach to social history that…
The recently discovered History of the Episcopate of Alexandria implies an early and swift expansion of Christianity along the main traffic arteries of Egypt and confirms indirectly the anecdotes narrated by Eusebius about thriving Christian communities in the Egyptian hinterland from the times of Demetrius (189-232) on. The scattered and late…
A team of international scholars will guide an exploration into ancient Jewish and Christian texts that intersect with what we may call “science.” In a text-based workshop setting, we will explore the place of natural observation and knowledge in some of the classical works of the period, as well as the more specialized texts dedicated to the…
Over the last few decades, early Islam has become increasingly ‘Late Antique’. In the fields of legal and religious history, recent research into early Islam has begun to draw new and exciting points of comparison and contrast between early Christian, Jewish (Rabbinic) and early Islamic law and legal practice. Deliberately taking early Islam as…
- Ra'anan BoustanAffiliationResearch Scholar, Program in Judaic Studies
- Karen BrittAffiliationWestern Carolina University
Respondent: Helmut Reimitz, History
Over the past twenty years a much clearer picture has emerged of nature of the economy and society that underpinned the Eastern Roman Empire in Late Antiquity…