Desire and Disunity explores the struggles of Christianising late ancient sexuality in the late Roman West. Through an examination of fourth to sixth century sermons, letters, laws, and treatises in ...Latin-speaking communities, the difficulties of late antique clerics in moving ascetically influenced sexual ideals into wider practice become evident. Western clerics faced challenges on several fronts: the dedication and devoutness of lay Christians varied, while the military-political upheavals of the fifth century created new challenges and opportunities for influencing one’s flock. Furthermore, Roman sexual norms continued to inform the thinking of many clerics and lay figures alike, even when in opposition to more scripturally based moral reasoning. Problems of bigamy, concubinage, sex work, incest, homosexual acts, adultery, and more troubled western Christian communities, with contradicting rules and traditions on what was acceptable and what was not. What reach did elite clerical perspectives on sexual norms have amongst the non-elite? How did clerics navigate tensions between the idealisation of Christian communal purity and the actions of congregants that fell short of these ideals? What influenced clerical perceptions of sex and how did they articulate these ideas to their audiences? Clerical sources of this time reflect these challenges as well as varying church attempts to reform the sex lives of their congregants – and, indeed, church failure in doing so.
"This volume is dedicated to the cultural and religious diversity in Jewish communities from Late Antiquity to the Early Middle Age and the growing influence of the rabbis within these communities ...during the same period. Drawing on available textual and material evidence, the fourteen essays presented here, written by leading experts in their fields, span a significant chronological and geographical range and cover material that has not yet received sufficient attention in scholarship. The volume is divided into four parts. The first focuses on the vantage point of the synagogue; the second and third on non-rabbinic Judaism in, respectively, the Near East and Europe; the final part turns from diversity within Judaism to the process of ""rabbinization"" as represented in some unusual rabbinic texts. Diversity and Rabbinization is a welcome contribution to the historical study of Judaism in all its complexity. It presents fresh perspectives on critical questions and allows us to rethink the tension between multiplicity and unity in Judaism during the first millennium CE. L’École Pratique des Hautes Études has kindly contributed to the publication of this volume."
The preliminary results of a comprehensive survey of Sīnīya Island in the Khawr al-Bayḍāʾ of Umm al-Quwain are presented here. The onset of human occupation remains to be confirmed, with scarce ...evidence for limited activity in the late pre-Islamic period (LPI, c. 300 BC – AD 300). The first major phase of occupation dates to the seventh and eighth centuries (early Islamic period) when a monastery and settlement were established in the north-east of the island. Probably the peak occupation falls between the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when the stone-town of Old Umm al-Quwain 1 was built, followed by the eighteenth to early nineteenth century when the settlement moved to neighbouring Old Umm al-Quwain 2. The town was destroyed by the British in 1820 and moved to the facing tidal island, where Old Umm al-Quwain 3 (the modern city of the same name) developed. This resulted in an emptying of the landscape, and Sīnīya Island was little visited in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, except for the estate of the ruling Āl Muʿallā represented by the Mallāh Towers.
The present volume collects most of the contributions to the plenary sessions held at the 24th International Congress of Byzantine Studies, and incisively reflects the ever increasing broadening of ...the very concept of ‘Byzantine Studies’. Indeed, a particularly salient characteristic of the papers presented here is their strong focus on interdisciplinarity and their breadth of scope, both in terms of methodology and content. The cross-pollination between different fields of Byzantine Studies is also a major point of the volume. Archaeology and art history have pride of place; it is especially in archaeological papers that one can grasp the vital importance of the interaction with the so-called hard sciences and with new technologies for contemporary research. This relevance of science and technology for archaeology, however, also applies to, and have significant repercussions in, historical studies, where – for example – the study of climate change or the application of specific software to network studies are producing a major renewal of knowledge. In more traditional subject fields, like literary, political, and intellectual history, the contributions to the present volume offer some important reflections on the connection between Byzantium and other cultures and peoples through the intermediary of texts, stories, diplomacy, trade, and war.
The article examines the principal English-language studies of the last century focused on exploring the personality of Macrobius (5th century) and his works — Saturnalia (Saturnalia ed. Willis, ...1963), Commentary on the 'Dream of Scipio' (Commentarii in Somnium Scipionis ed. Willis, 1963), and On the differences and similarities of Greek and Latin verbs (De verborum graeci et latini differentiis vel societatibus excerpta ed. De Paolis, 1990), written for educational purposes and representing a compendium of Greek knowledge. Interest in Macrobius's creative legacy notably intensified towards the end of the 19th century, a trend linked to the release of critical editions of Macrobian texts and their subsequent translations into French. In particular, the study analyzes the research of Thomas Whittaker (Macrobius; or philosophy, science and letters in the year 400; published in 1923), William Harris Stahl (Macrobius, Commentary on the ‘Dream of Scipio’, published in 1952), Alan Cameron (The date and identity of Macrobius published in 1966 and Macrobius, Avienus, and Avianus published in 1967), Herman De Ley (Macrobius and Numenius. A study of Macrobius, ‘In Somn.’ I, c. 12; published in 1972), Stephen Gersh (Middle platonism and neoplatonism, the Latin tradition; published in 1986), Roger A. Pack (A medieval critic of Macrobius’ cosmometrics; published in 1981), Alison Peden (Science and philosophy in Wales at the time of the Norman conquest: a Macrobius manuscript from Llabadarn; published in 1981), among others. It highlights the primary issues that researchers have focused on when studying Macrobius's literary legacy, identifies the challenges in analyzing his works, and acknowledges the contribution of English-speaking scholars to the global historiography.
The article examines the official image of the Roman emperor Julian (Caesar 359-361; Augustus 361-363), known to us mainly from numismatic evidence. The analysis of the changes in Julian’s appearance ...over time, accompanied by the reading of some key passages of the emperor’s own writings, shows how his portrait was transformed through the main steps of his career, in close connection with the development of his political, philosophical, and religious programme.
"Written forms of Arabic composed during the era of the Ottoman Empire present an immensely fruitful linguistic topic. Extant texts display a proximity to the vernacular that cannot be encountered in ...any other surviving historical Arabic material, and thus provide unprecedented access to Arabic language history. This rich material remains very little explored. Traditionally, scholarship on Arabic has focussed overwhelmingly on the literature of the various Golden Ages between the 8th and 13th centuries, whereas texts from the 15th century onwards have often been viewed as corrupted and not worthy of study. The lack of interest in Ottoman Arabic culture and literacy left these sources almost completely neglected in university courses. This volume is the first linguistic work to focus exclusively on varieties of Christian, Jewish and Muslim Arabic in the Ottoman Empire of the 15th to the 20th centuries, and present Ottoman Arabic material in a didactic and easily accessible way. Split into a Handbook and a Reader section, the book provides a historical introduction to Ottoman literacy, translation studies, vernacularisation processes, language policy and linguistic pluralism. The second part contains excerpts from more than forty sources, edited and translated by a diverse network of scholars. The material presented includes a large number of yet unedited texts, such as Christian Arabic letters from the Prize Paper collections, mercantile correspondence and notebooks found in the Library of Gotha, and Garshuni texts from archives of Syriac patriarchs."
The subject of this book is the discourse of persecution used by Christians in Late Antiquity (c. 300-700 CE).
Through a series of detailed case studies covering the full chronological and ...geographical span of the period, this book investigates how the conversion of the Roman Empire to Christianity changed the way that Christians and para-Christians perceived the hostile treatments they received, either by fellow Christians or by people of other religions. A closely related second goal of this volume is to encourage scholars to think more precisely about the terminological difficulties related to the study of persecution. Indeed, despite sustained interest in the subject, few scholars have sought to distinguish between such closely related concepts as punishment, coercion, physical violence, and persecution. Often, these terms are used interchangeably. Although there are no easy answers, an emphatic conclusion of the studies assembled in this volume is that "persecution" was a malleable rhetorical label in late antique discourse, whose meaning shifted depending on the viewpoint of the authors who used it.
This leads to our third objective: to analyze the role and function played by rhetoric and polemic in late antique claims to be persecuted. Late antique Christian writers who cast their present as a repetition of past persecutions often aimed to attack the legitimacy of the dominant Christian faction through a process of othering. This discourse also expressed a polarizing worldview in order to strengthen the group identity of the writers' community in the midst of ideological conflicts and to encourage steadfastness against the temptation to collaborate with the other side.
Abstract
This contribution sets the Christian widows in Rome in the late fourth century CE and their agency within their social milieu: the Roman elite. In doing so, it argues (a) that the agency of ...these widows built on class-specific dispositions rather than genuinely 'female' or religious dispositions, and (b) that such agency allowed these women to establish a network of influence and power that even threatened the episcopal power.
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