The Cult of Saints project has close ties with the University of Bari ‘Aldo Moro’, through the Epigraphic Database Bari, with its unique expertise in early Christian epigraphy and in digital epigraphic scholarship.

From September 27th – September 29th, the Cult of Saints project and the University of Bari ‘Aldo Moro’ will be hosting a joint conference exploring an aspect of cultic epigraphy. The theme is cultic graffiti, the informal scratchings or writings of individual devotees, almost always travellers or pilgrims, which are known from all over the late antique world. These constitute a unique first-hand testimony to devotion, which we can normally only access through much more formal documents.

In order to explore these graffiti in their fullest possible context, the conference, while
focused primarily on the Christian graffiti of Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages, will also examine earlier ‘pagan’ practice, and the very active cultic graffiti of early Islam.

The full conference programme can be read here.