Seminar series: The Cult of Saints in the First Millennium – Hilary Term 2018

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

Database launch

The ERC Cult of Saints in Late Antiquity project invites you to the launch on All Saints Day of its on-line database

Wednesday 1st November 5pm

Ioannou Centre for Classical and Byzantine Studies

66 St Giles’, Oxford

There will be introduction to the database, followed by a celebratory drink.

Seminar Series: The Cult of Saints in the First Millennium

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

Cultic Graffiti across the Mediterranean and Beyond

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.

Call for Papers: Remembering and forgetting saints in Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages (IMC, Leeds, July 2018)

The Cult of Saints is a major ERC-funded research project, which is investigating the origins and early development of the cult of saints in all the cultural zones of ancient Christianity. The forthcoming International Medieval Congress in Leeds (2-5 July 2018) has ‘Memory’ as its special thematic strand. The Project will therefore be running a series of sessions on how saints were remembered in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. As specific topics for these sessions, we have chosen: ‘Adapting Memory’, on how the hagiography of some saints evolved in response to changing circumstances and needs; ‘Annual Remembrance’, focused on the regular annual cycle of remembering the saints, as documented in texts such as Martyrologies; and, finally, ‘Forgetting’, on saints who once attracted cult, but then slipped quietly into oblivion. Those interested in presenting papers at these sessions, particularly if focused on the period before c. AD 1000, are requested to send a short abstract (100 words) to Robert Wiśniewski (r.wisniewski@uw.edu.pl) and Bryan Ward-Perkins (bryan.ward-perkins@history.ox.ac.uk) by 15 September. Please note that the project, sadly, cannot cover conference fee and travel expenses.

Call for candidates for a post-doctoral researcher (Latin evidence)

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)

 

The Cult of Martyrs in the Fourth Century

In mid July, Research Associate Gesa Schenke was invited to participate in a conference on Innovations in the Veneration of Martyrs in the Fourth Century CE, a conference of the cluster of excellence “Religion and Politics”, taking place at the University of Münster in Germany, 14–15 July 2017. In her paper entitled From Veneration to Expectation: The Use of Martyrs in Personal Conflict Management, she discussed some of the fourth century evidence available from Egypt in the form of papyri, which clearly testify to a cult of martyrs in the second half of the fourth century, an institution complete with critics, such as Athanasius of Alexandria, and enthusiasts.

The conference programme can be read here: Innovations in the Veneration of Martyrs in the Fourth Century CE.