Time: Friday 5.00 – 7.00 pm, Weeks 1, 3, 5, 7

Venue: Trinity College (Sutro Room), Broad Street, Oxford OX1 3BH

Convenor: Efthymios Rizos

Week 1 (19 January) (OCLA Special Lecture)

Susanna Elm (Berkeley)

Eutropius the Consul – Power, Ugliness, and Late Roman Imperial Representation

Week 3 (2 February)

Mary Cunningham (Nottingham)

“Garden without Seed”: The Virginal Motherhood of Mary, the Theotokos, in Byzantium

Week 5 (16 February)

Matthieu Pignot (Brussels)

Cult in Latin Martyrdom Accounts from Italy before 700. An Overview

Week 7 (2 March)

Raúl Villegas Marín (Barcelona)

Processus and Martinian: From African Montanist Martyrs to Roman Wardens of Peter and Paul

Michaelmas Term 2017

Friday 5.00 – 7.00 pm

Venue: Sutro Room, Trinity College, Oxford

Convenor: Efthymios Rizos

Week 1 (13 October)

Efthymios Rizos (Linacre)

Debating the Cult of Saints in Late Antiquity: Critics and Defenders

Week 3 (27 October)

Lorenzo Livorsi (Reading)

Power, Praise and Prayer in Venantius Fortunatus’ Life of St. Martin

Week 5 (10 November)

Susan Walker (Ashmolean), Maria Lidova (Wolfson), Jaś Elsner (Corpus Christi)

Saints and Salvation: the Wilshere Collection of Gold-glass, Sarcophagi and Inscriptions from Rome and Southern Italy

Week 7 (24 November)

Edward Schoolman (Nevada)

Saints for Every Age: A Hagiographic Stratigraphy of Ravenna

For more information please contact efthymios.rizos@history.ox.ac.uk

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.

The Institute of History, University of Warsaw, is seeking to recruit a post-doctoral researcher  for a position in the project The Cult of Saints: a Christendom-wide study of its origins, spread and development. The Project is supported by an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council under Grant Agreement Number 340540 and is based at the University of Oxford with a partnership at the University of Warsaw. The successful candidate will work as part of a team of seven post-doctoral researchers reporting to the Principal Investigator, Prof. Bryan Ward-Perkins (University of Oxford), but under direct supervision of Dr. hab. Robert Wiśniewski  (University of Warsaw). The postholder will have responsibility for collecting Latin evidence consisting mostly of literary texts, within an electronic searchable database. The postholder is also expected to produce sole-authored articles on aspects of the cult of saints in the West.

This is a full-time time position for 12 months, starting on 1 November 2017 or soon thereafter. The postholder will be offered the salary of about 2 700 Euros per month.

The full call for candidates can be seen here. The closing date for applications is September 30th 2017.

If you have any questions about the project or the recruitment procedure, please address them to Robert Wiśniewski (r.wisniewski@uw.edu.pl)