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)

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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…

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.

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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…