Bryan Ward-Perkins writes: ‘In November I visited Mainz and Heidelberg to give general introductory talks about our project at the two universities’ Ancient History seminars. Such talks are largely given to spread the word that a big project is underway, and to explain how we are setting about collecting and tagging the evidence from all six languages of early Christianity and across all types of evidence – from passing references to shrines in papyrus documents to full-blown Lives of saints, by way of dedicatory inscriptions, martyrologies, homilies, etc. But it is also very useful to address different audiences from different scholarly traditions, to see how we need to refine our own approaches, or, at the very least, justify the limitations on our project that the pressures of time dictate. In producing a searchable corpus of all the available evidence up to c.700 AD (or at least of as much of it as possible), we are inevitably having to cut some corners, since completeness in this context is more important than perfection – but, at the same time, these corners need to be cut in a suitably scholarly way! There is no better way of refining our thinking on how to do this than to talk to as many established scholars, students, and members of the wider public as possible.’
Category Archives: Uncategorized
The Cult of Saints in the First Millennium seminar series
Time: Friday 5.00 – 7.00 pm
Venue: Trinity College (Sutro Room), University of Oxford
Convenor: Efthymios Rizos
Week 1 (28 April)
Conrad Leyser (Worcester College)
Through the Eyes of Two Deacons: Church Property, Clerical Office, and the Cults of Stephen and Laurence in Fifth-Century Rome
Week 3 (12 May)
Gesa Schenke (Oxford)
Invoking Martyrs for Justice, Expecting Healing through Saints: a Glimpse into the Early Realities of Cult through Greek and Coptic Documentary Evidence
Week 5 (26 May)
Aude Busine (Brussels)
Saints Basil and Basilissa at Ancyra
Week 7 (9 June)
Leslie Brubaker (Birmingham)
Mary at Daphni
‘Saints at the Margins’ panels series, IMC 2017
The Cult of Saints project has organised a series of four sessions at this year’s International Medieval Congress in Leeds (July 2017) which will explore the lower reaches of sainthood: men and women who nearly, but didn’t quite, make it into sainthood; and those who just succeeded in being accepted as saints, sometimes only to sink back into oblivion. The session organisers are Bryan Ward-Perkins (University of Oxford) and Robert Wiśniewski (Instytut Historyczny, Uniwersytet Warszawski), and full details of the sessions can be found in the IMC programme available here.
Workshop: Rulers and Saints
A workshop on Rulers and Saints: Concepts of `dynasty` and `sanctity` from Late Antiquity to the Late Middle Ages has been organised by the research fellows of the `Cult of Saints` and the `Jagiellonians` research projects and will take place in Oxford on Friday 13th May 2016. A full programme is available here: Rulers and Saints.
Presentations at Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies
On 18-20 March Paweł Nowakowski and Efthymios Rizos participated in the 49th Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, Inscribing Texts in Byzantium: Continuities and Transformations (Exeter College, Oxford).
Paweł’s paper began with the presentation of the search engine of our database and its functions especially useful for epigraphists, e.g.: browsing inscriptions attesting to the cult of saints, searching for the epigraphic evidence for the cult of a given saint, reading an inscription’s card, etc. The second part of the paper dealt with the changes in the use of inscriptions as a peculiar instrument of cult between the late antique and middle Byzantine period, including the growing dossier of epigraphically venerated saints, the sophistication of saints’ epithets (probably modelled on the epithets of the elite), the appearance of explicit references to emotions of donors, and the introduction of new forms of old types of inscriptions.
Efthymios spoke about inscribed imperial letters, as examples of the institutional transformations of imperial and municipal government from the Principate to Late Antiquity. His talk focused especially on inscriptions from the Christian shrines of Ephesos.
Seminar Series: The Cult of Saints in the First Millennium
Trinity Term (April – June 2016)
Friday 5.00 – 7.00 pm, Weeks 1, 3, 7
Venue: Radcliffe Humanities Building – Collin Matthews Room (Ground floor)
Convenor: Efthymios Rizos
Week 1 (29 April):
Mark Laynesmith (The Archbishop’s Examination in Theology, Lambeth Palace)
“The Cult of St Alban of Verulamium: Romano-British, Merovingian and Anglo-Saxon devotion, c. 400-800″
Week 3 (13 May):
– No seminar –
Week 5 (27 May):
Simon Loseby (University of Sheffield)
“Thinking about saints with Gregory of Tours”
Week 7 (10 June):
Robert Wiśniewski (University of Warsaw)
“The burials ad sanctos”
Gesa Schenke discusses evidence for martyr veneration at monastic shrines
Gesa Schenke, our Coptic specialist, gave a paper on Egyptian Hagiotopography: Documentary and Literary Evidence for Martyr Veneration at Monastic Shrines at a symposium held in Oxford on Monastic economies in Egypt and Palestine 4th–8th centuries CE (Oxford, 16–17 March 2016). Gesa argued that many of the famous martyr and healing shrines might have been run by monasteries located in the vicinity, a symbiosis advantageous to both institutions.