Publié le

Appel à contribution – Act of the Scribe: Interfaces between scribal work and language use (Athènes, 6-8 avril 2017)

Call for Papers

Act of the Scribe: Interfaces between scribal work and language use

A Workshop

Date: April 6–8, 2017 (+ excursion on Sunday, April 9, to be informed later)

Venue: The Finnish Institute at Athens (Zitrou 16, GR-117 42 Athens)

The project Act of the Scribe (Academy of Finland) organises a workshop for scholars discussing various aspects of scribal work and how these relate to language use and language change in Graeco-Roman Antiquity. Currently, we see a growing interest on scribal practices and their role in language change, and an on-going tradition of (socio)linguistic studies has been established in the field of Classical languages. However, some fields of study are still under-represented and hinder the ability to form a comprehensive general picture of the linguistic situation at hand; for example, studying the multilingual situation in especially Egypt from the Ptolemaic to the Byzantine times continues to be challenging due to a gap between the disciplines of Greek and Latin on the one hand, and Demotic and Coptic research on the other. One of the aims of this workshop is to promote dialogue between the various written languages in Antiquity to be able to enhance the picture of ancient scribal practices. The general focus of the workshop lies in studying the interface between scribal work, including its technical properties, and language use.

Confirmed speakers with provisional titles include

·         Rodney Ast (Heidelberg): Professional Literacy in Late Antiquity

·         Klaas Bentein (Ghent): Documentary papyri as « multimodal » texts: Some observations on the interrelationship between language choice, linguistic register and handwriting in the Nepheros archive (III – IV AD)

·         Jenny Cromwell (Copenhagen): Terminological and palaeographic innovations among scribes in the administration of early Islamic Egypt

·         Katherine McDonald (Cambridge): The goddess Reitia and learning to write in the Veneto

·         Timo Korkiakangas (Oslo):  Relationship between spelling correctness and morphosyntactic conservativeness – a corpus study of early medieval Italian charters

·         Tonio Sebastian Richter: TBA

·         MariaChiara Scappaticcio (Naples): A Babrius’ Latin translation (P.Amh. 26): authors, scribes, and ‘mistakes of mistakes’

·         Joanne Stolk (Oslo/Ghent): Scribal corrections in Greek papyri from Egypt

·         Nicholas Zair (Cambridge): Old-fashioned spelling and sub-elite education in the Roman Empire

We invite interested scholars to submit abstracts (max. one page) by October 31, 2016 at the latest (actofscribe-athens2017@helsinki.fi). Topics that are of interest to the workshop include, but are not limited to, e.g.

•           scribal education in Graeco-Roman Antiquity

•           writing and copying methods affecting linguistic output

•           written standards, substandard and register

•           cross-cultural effect on second language use: transfer of linguistic elements, scribal practices and orthographic conventions

•           the role of the scribe in language change and development

•           the varying treatment of loanwords in contact situations

Organizing committee :
Martti Leiwo – Sonja Dahlgren – Hilla Halla-aho – Marja Vierros

 http://blogs.helsinki.fi/actofscribe/

Publié le

Call for papers – Special session (2), Medieval Congress (Leeds, 3-6 July 2017)

Call for papers

Grey-zone saints in Late Antiquity and early Middle Ages

Medieval Congress – Leeds, 3-6 July 2017

The Cult of Saints is a major five-year research project, based at the University of Oxford, which is investigating the origins and development of the cult of saints in all cultural zones of ancient Christianity up to around AD 700. At the forthcoming Medieval Congress in Leeds (3-6 July 2017) the project-team is organising a strand on grey-zone, or marginal, saints in Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages. A limited number of Christian heroes, mostly New Testament figures and martyrs, were renowned across Christendom. Many more struggled hard to gain a wider prominence, or even local recognition, and often remained saints only in the eyes of single partisans or restricted groups. Their sainthood was suggested but not fully accepted, or promoted but contested; their cults almost succeeded, but finally failed. Sometimes their very existence was put into question. Those interested in presenting papers on such saints and their cults, particularly if focused on the period before c.900, are requested to send title and short abstract (c. 100 words) to Bryan Ward-Perkins (bryan.ward-perkins@history.ox.ac.uk) or Robert Wiśniewski (r.wisniewski@uw.edu.pl) by 20 September. Please, note that, sadly, the project is unable to fund speakers’ expenses.

Publié le

Call for papers – Special session, Medieval Congress (Leeds, 3-6 July 2017)

Call for papers

Session on the income and property of the clergy

Medieval Congress – Leeds, 3-6 July 2017

 

At the forthcoming Medieval Congress in Leeds (3-6 July 2017) the team of the ‘Presbyters in the Late Antique West’ Project, based at the University of Warsaw, organises a strand on the income and property of clergy. In most literary and normative sources we usally see clerics entirely dependent on diverse types of subsidies related to their ecclesiastical office. But some casual remarks and documentary evidence show that the reality was more complicated. The actual sources of income of clerics were diverse. This session will seek to answer the following questions:

·      How much did the clerics rely on church property and revenues?

·      What were other sources of their income, either those linked with the religious expertise or unconnected with ecclesiastical activity?

·      How the frontiers were fixed between the private property and revenues of clerics and those of the church, but also between the resources of diverse groups of clerics?

Those interested in presenting papers on such topics, particularly if focused on the period before c. 900, are requested to send the title and a short abstract (c. 100 words) to Robert Wiśniewski (r.wisniewski@uw.edu.pl) by 20 September. Please, note that unfortunately the project is unable to fund speakers’ expenses.

Publié le

Appel à contribution – International Workshop on Platonism and Christian Thought in Late Antiquity, Université d’Oslo

Appel à contribution

International Workshop on  Platonism and Christian Thought in Late Antiquity

Department of Philosophy in the University of Oslo,

Oslo, in December 2-3, 2016

The Workshop is an opportunity especially for early career researchers (PhD, postdocs, young scholars).

The deadline for submitting Abstracts is: August 10, 2016.

Publié le

Appel à contribution – conférence ‘Varieties of Post-classical and Byzantine Greek’, Université de Gand

Call for papers

Conference ‘Varieties of Post-classical and Byzantine Greek’

Ghent University, December 1-2, 2016

For a large part of the twentieth century, linguistic variation has received little attention. With the work of William Labov and others, however, heterogeneity in language again became a topic of interest: within the newly founded discipline of sociolinguistics, scholars have investigated the correlationship between linguistic variants and contextual variables such as age, gender, social class, social distance, etc. In actual language use, however, variants (and to some extent, variables) do not occur in an isolated fashion; rather there is patterned heterogeneity. In this spirit, scholars have described the existence of various ‘lects’ such as chronolects, dialects, idiolects, ethnolects, genderlects, regiolects, sociolects, technolects, etc. in a great number of languages.

The aim of this conference is to investigate varieties of Post-Classical and Byzantine Greek, a topic of considerable interest among various members of the Greek section at Ghent University. Whereas some research has been done in this area, especially when it comes to Post-Classical Greek (e.g. Janse 2007 on New Testament Greek, Horrocks 2007 on levels of writing, Torallas-Tovar 2010 on Greek in Egypt, Nachergaele 2015 on idiolect, Bentein 2015 on register), a more systematic  discussion of these varieties has yet to take place – despite the great potential of our Post-Classical and Byzantine sources.

The organisers invite all Greek linguists to submit a one-page English abstract to varieties@ugent.be (please use a Unicode-based font for Greek text) by September 1, 2016 at the latest. Notification of acceptance will be given by the end of September. Next to the discussion of specific varieties, we consider the following issues of particular interest:

* What linguistic models can be used for the description and analysis of varieties?

* What is the relationship between different dimensions of variation, for example between the diachronic and the diastratic dimension?

* What role do idiolects play for the description of language variation?

* To what extent do non-congruent features (i.e. features belonging to different, or even opposed varieties) occur in texts?

* What is the relevance of and relationship between documentary and literary texts as sources of variety?

* At which linguistic levels (phonological, morphological, syntactic, lexical) can varieties be described?

For further information please contact klaas.bentein@ugent.be