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Appel à contribution – Scientific Writings from the Ancient and Medieval World

Scientific Writings from the Ancient and Medieval World
Series Editor: John Steele

Series description

Scientific texts provide our main source for understanding the history of science in the ancient and medieval world. The aim of this series is to provide clear and accurate English translations of key scientific texts accompanied by up-to-date commentaries dealing with both textual and scientific aspects of the works and accessible contextual introductions setting the works within the broader history of ancient science. In doing so, the series will make these works accessible to scholars and students in a variety of disciplines including history of science, the sciences, and history (including Classics, Assyriology, East Asian Studies, Near Eastern Studies and Indology). Thus, the series will be of use both in the teaching of history and the history of science and for researchers on ancient science. In addition, the series will provide a venue for the publication of original research on early scientific texts, in particular through the commentaries.

Texts will be included from all branches of early science including astronomy, mathematics, medicine, biology, and physics, and which are written in a range of ancient languages including Akkadian, Arabic, Chinese, Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit. Priority will be given to the publication of texts which have either not previously been translated into English or where the existing translation and/or commentary has been rendered significantly out of date by more recent research.

Each volume will be devoted to a particular text and will contain the following elements:

1. An extensive introduction (ca. 20,000 words) to the text, its author, and its place in the history of science. This introduction will also include discussion of the sources in which the text is preserved. The introduction should be accessible to readers from outside the discipline.

2. An edition of the text. (To be omitted if there already exists a standard edition on which the translation is based.)

3. English translation of the text.

4. Commentary. The commentary will include both textual and scientific aspects.

Please email John Steele (Professor and Chair, Department of Egyptology and Assyriology, Brown University) at john_steele@brown.edu if you would like any further information about the series or if you are interested in contributing.

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Appel à contribution – Managing Emotion: Passion, Emotions, Affects, and Imaginings in Byzantium

Managing Emotion: Passion, Emotions, Affects, and Imaginings in Byzantium
December 12–13, 2014 | Byzantine Studies Colloquium

Byzantinists were early into the field of the study of emotion with Henry Maguire’s groundbreaking article on sorrow, published in 1977. But since then classicists and western medievalists have developed new ways of understanding how emotional communities work and where the ancients’ concepts of emotion differ from our own. It is time perhaps to celebrate Maguire’s work, but also to look at what is distinctive about Byzantine emotion. We encourage speakers to focus on a single emotion and to use it as a vantage point to investigate central aspects of the Byzantine worldview. We want to look at emotions as both cognitive and relational processes. Our focus is not only the construction of emotions with respect to perception and cognition; we are also interested in how emotions were communicated and exchanged across broad (multi)linguistic, political and social boundaries. We expect to receive comment from classics, western medieval studies, philosophy, and psychology. The comparative stance will help us disclose what is peculiar to the Byzantine “emotional constellation.” Priorities are twofold: to arrive at an understanding of what the Byzantines thought of as emotions and to comprehend how theory shaped their appraisal of reality.

Registration Form here. For the program and abstracts see http://www.doaks.org/research/byzantine/events/managing-emotion-passion-emotions-affects-and-imaginings-in-byzantium

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Appel à contribution – Late antique hagiography as literature

Call for papers: late antique hagiography as literature
Colloquium at the University of Edinburgh, 20th-21st May 2015

Texts about ‘holy’ women and men grew to be a defining feature of the culture of Late Antiquity. There is currently an increasing interest among scholars from different disciplines (history, theology, languages, and literature) in these hagiographical writings. But more can be done to find ways to systematise our understanding of the literary affiliations, strategies and goals of these extraordinarily varied texts, which range from the prosaic and anonymous narrations of the martyr passions to the Classicising poems of Paulinus of Nola and the rhetorically accomplished sermons of John Chrysostom.

This colloquium is designed to bring together students and scholars working on a range of aspects of literary hagiography, to share insights, and to consider approaches for the future. We hope to situate late antique biographical production in relation to Classical literary sensibilities, as well as considering non-classical influences, and thus to identify areas of continuity and gradual development as well as areas of abrupt change in the form and function of such literature. While our emphasis is deliberately literary, historical and theological questions which feed into the significance of these works should not be ignored.

 We understand ‘hagiography’ in the non-technical sense of ‘writings about (the lives of) saints’. The concept of ‘saints’, likewise, is here taken in a broad way to mean remarkable and exemplary Christian figures (whether real or fictional); the field is not restricted to those who at some point were officially canonised by the Church. This colloquium is seeking to explore issues like the following:

 * The definition of sainthood, e.g. through comparisons with texts about non-Christian saint-like figures (the ‘pagan martyrs’, Apollonius of Tyana).

* The portrayal of a saint in different texts; how are saints portrayed in their own writings compared to those of other authors about them?

* Characterisation, e.g. individuality and stereotyping: to what extent can a reader empathise or identify with a saint?

* Life imitating hagiography and resulting problems.

* What can hagiography tell us about non-elite ‘popular’ literary culture?

* How have different genres given shape to hagiographical texts (from Damasus’ epigrams to the epic poems of Fortunatus and Paulinus of Périgeux), as well as texts resisting generic categorisation? E.g. is the so called Life of Malchus a vita or a diegesis?

* Intertextuality as an aesthetic and ideological strategy.

* The emergence of stable hagiographical conventions, whose influence grew so powerful that it is often difficult to distinguish one saint from another.

* What, if anything, can hagiography learn from panegyric?

* Literary approaches to un-saintly behaviour (trickery, committing suicide, etc.) of saints.

* To what extent does a text’s rhetorical purpose undermine the author’s credibility as an honest record-keeper?

* Assessing the historicity of hagiographical texts.

* Transmission and textual problems of hagiographical texts.

* Reception and changes in the perception of authority (e.g. saints who wrote about saints, such as John Chrysostom and Augustine).

Proposals for 25-minute papers, in the form of abstracts between 200 and 400 words in length, should be submitted to Thomas Tsartsidis (T.Tsartsidis@sms.ed.ac.uk) or Christa Gray (christa.gray@gla.ac.uk) by 15th January 2015.

Postgraduate students are particularly encouraged to contribute to this event.

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Appel à contribution – Conference: Epigraphy on Ceramics

Conference: Epigraphy on Ceramics – Call for Papers

Ghent University, in cooperation with the Université libre de Bruxelles, plans to organise on the 17th and 18th December 2015 a conference on the specific problems of Epigraphy on Ceramics. The aim of this conference is to prepare a synthetic volume on this topic of research. The contributions should provide a first basis for a collective analysis of this particular type of inscriptions. The acts of the conference will thereafter be structured as a single and detailed companion to Epigraphy on Ceramics.

 In all periods from the Bronze Age to the Late Antiquity, throughout the Mediterranean Basin, ceramics were frequently used as a material support for inscriptions. Precise genres of texts used to be written on ceramics, painted or engraved either before or after firing, as for example economic or more widely speaking administrative data, religious dedications, marks of property. These so-called minor genres are well documented, but, partly because the corresponding texts are short and often difficult to read, the inscriptions of ceramics have not been as thoroughly studied in past research as other epigraphic genres, especially monumental inscriptions.

 At least five kinds of approaches should be followed in the analysis of inscriptions on ceramics. First of all, the texts whose content can be broadly classified as administrative provide important data for the history of ancient economies. Furthermore, as many of these texts were written on the behalf or within the frame of ancient armies, they are also a major source for military history with all its components, from the study of Rangordnung to the analysis of the movements and strategies of ancient states. A third approach takes into account the inscriptions found in sanctuaries, mainly religious dedications, as a source for the history of religion. Two other genres, marks of property and gift dedications, allows for significant conclusions on the social structures and relationships in various societies. Last of all, independently from the epigraphic genre of the texts, inscriptions on ceramics are also an important source for the linguistic and sociolinguistic study of ancient societies.

 The conference and the subsequent volume should include synthetic reports on the main aspects of these topics of research in the geographical and chronological frame of the Mediterranean Basin in antiquity. Keynote speakers will read general introductions to each of these five issues. Scholars who should be interested in any of these five paths of research are kindly invited to submit an abstract for a synthetic talk, taking into account either a wide geographical area or a particularly relevant period or a significant transversal feature shared by all or by many of the inscriptions in question. As the conference is organised as a preliminary step to the publication of a collective synthesis, the participants should send a first version of their paper to the organisers before the conference itself; this preliminary text should circulate among the participants, in order to develop further discussion, before the participants provide a definitive version of the chapter they have undertaken to write.

 Gent, the 6th November 2014
Wim Broekaert (UGent), Alain Delattre (ULB), and Emmanuel Dupraz (ULB)

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Deadlines

 Submitting of the abstracts: 31th January 2015
Selection of the abstracts: 31th March 2015
Submission of a preliminary text (to be circulated): 30th November 2015

Conference: 17th and 18th December 2015

Definitive version of the papers: before the 31th January 2016

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Appel à contribution – UBA Byzantine Colloquium

First UBA Byzantine Colloquium
« BYZANTINAI AKOAI: Reading and Writing in Byzantium »


20th-21st August 2015, Buenos Aires

The aim of this international colloquium is to explore the ways of reading and writing in the Byzantine Empire. Special attention will be paid to the material production and circulation of texts, the emergence of a specifically Byzantine readership, the role of education and rhetoric in the constitution of such a readership, and the reception of classical genres. We particularly encourage presentations that underscore the perspective of the reading public.

For more information, please consult the flyer (in Spanish) or contact the organizing committee. Abstracts and presentations in English or other languages are warmly welcomed; however, the default language of the colloquium will be Spanish.