Gender and Medieval Studies conference

The 2009 Gender and Medieval Studies conference will be held at King's College London, January 9-10 2009, and follow the theme of 'Locating Gender'.

This conference aims to explore conceptions of location, temporality, geography, belonging and association in relation to the study of medieval genders and sexualities, and we invite proposals (max. 250 words) for twenty-minute papers from all disciplines and inter-disciplines within Medieval Studies. Plenary lectures will be given by James A. Schultz (UCLA) and Diane Watt (Aberystwyth).

GMS welcomes proposals for Locating Gender from all medievalists, including postgraduate students and early career researchers. Some financial support for postgraduates’ travel costs is available through the Kate Westoby fund: if funds permit, applications for support will also be considered from unwaged independent scholars. Please forward abstracts to locating.gender@gmail.com by 1 September 2008.

Further information can be found at www.medievalgender.co.uk

Digital Classicist/Institute of Classical Studeies Work in Progress

Digital Classicist/Institute of Classical Studeies Work in Progress
Seminar, Summer 2008

Friday 27th June at 16:30, in room 218, Chadwick Building, UCL
**Note the new venue, for today only**

Bruce Fraser (Cambridge)
'The value and price of information: reflections on e-publishing in the
humanities'

ALL WELCOME

The paper attempts a change of focus from the single project to a
broader range of e-publishing, considered by content and by target
audience. The discussion covers both complex html-publications and
scholarly papers. Potential fragilities are noted in the infrastructures
which support each type, and consideration is given to current
developments in archiving which aim to rectify them.

The seminar will be followed by wine and refreshments.

For more information please contact Gabriel.Bodard@kcl.ac.uk or
Simon.Mahony@kcl.ac.uk, or see the seminar website at
http://www.digitalclassicist.org/wip/wip2008.html

--
Dr Gabriel BODARD
(Epigrapher & Digital Classicist)

Centre for Computing in the Humanities
King's College London
26-29 Drury Lane
London WC2B 5RL
Email: gabriel.bodard@kcl.ac.uk
Tel: +44 (0)20 7848 1388
Fax: +44 (0)20 7848 2980

http://www.digitalclassicist.org/
http://www.currentepigraphy.org/

FINAL STATEMENT FOR MOR JACOB OF EDESSA SYMPOSIUM

THE FINAL STATEMENT FOR MOR JACOB OF EDESSA SYMPOSIUM HELD IN ALEPPO, JUNE 9 – 12, 2008





The Symposium commemorating the 1300th anniversary of the passing away of Mor Jacob of Edessa, the prominent Syrian polymath was held in Aleppo, Syria, June 9 – 12th, 2008.



The Participants who came from Austria, Canada, Germany, Netherlands, Turkey, United Kingdom and the United States as well as Lebanon and Syria enjoyed the papers presented at the Symposium, included contributions from scholars and specialists in Syriac studies. The se contributions, which included twelve papers that were delivered in five sessions, discussed the writings of the celebrated scholar Mor Jacob of Edessa as a chronicler, man of letters, grammarian, exegete, theologian, and as a major contributor to church liturgy and canon law.



The proceedings of the Symposium also included an opening session in which a welcoming address was delivered by Mor Gregorios Yohanna Ibrahim, Metropolitan of Aleppo and a keynote lecture by Prof. Dr. Malphono Sebastian Brock, as well as a final session.



The Symposium programme included visits to a number of archaeological locations of Syrian monasteries that for centuries were beacons of knowledge. These included the Monastery of Tell’Ada, where Mor Jacob lived the last ten years of his celebrated life, and where he died and was buried on June 5th, 708; the Monastery of St. Simeon the Stylite, a major fifth century cathedral that was named after St. Simeon the Stylite, the founder of the Stylite Monastic practice; the recently uncovered Monastery of Qenneshrin, which was founded by Yohanna Bar Aphtonia in 538 and which remained active up to the thirteenth century; and the town of Mabug, the birth place of Theodora, the Syrian Queen, and the seat of Mor Philoxenus of Mabug ( + 523).



In its final session, the Symposium resolved the following:

1. The proceedings of the Symposium will be published in English by Gorgias Press and in Arabic by Mardin Publishing House. The full texts of the papers should be submitted to Gorgias Press by October 1st, 2008 and the Arabic translation of the texts to be completed by March 1st, 2009.

2. Encouraged by the immense success of the Symposium and in order to promote continuity in the study of the Syriac literary heritage, and in recognition of Aleppo’s special place in this heritage, it was decided to hold a series of colloquia, each under the title Aleppo Syriac Colloquium (A.S.C.), every two years. Each colloquium will be devoted to one theme or studying the works of one renowned historic Syriac Scholar. The subject of the colloquium will be defined one year in advance and expert scholars will be invited to participate. In this respect it was resolved to hold the next colloquium during the second half of June, 2010 in Aleppo and will address the work of the outstanding Syrian polymath Mor Gregorios Yohanna Abu al-Faraj Barhebraeus (+1286).

3. The participants expressed their profound appreciation and thanks to the host of the Symposium, Mor Gregorios Yohanna Ibrahim, for his initiative to hold the Symposium, for his tireless efforts, which ensured its complete success, and for the generous hospitality. As a token of this a ppreciation, the participants presented His Eminence with a book authored by George Kiraz that included on its initial pages hand written notes that expressed their appreciation. The participants also expressed their deep thanks to the secretariat of the Symposium, to the monks and deacons and members of the different working groups of the Aleppo Syrian Orthodox Archdiocese, particularly the board of trustees of St George Church in Hay Al-Syrian, which accommodated the venue of the Symposium.



LIST OF THE SCHOLARS



1. Metropolitan Mar Gregorios Yohanna Ibrahim (Syria)
2. Prof. Dr. Malphono Sebastian Brock (UK)
3. Fr. Dr. Abdo Badwi (Lebanon)
4. Prof. Dr. Khalid Dinno (Canada)
5. Prof. Dr. Theresia Hainthaler (Germany)
6. Prof. Dr. Amir Harrak (Canada)
7. Dr. Andrea Juckle (Germany)
8. Dr. George Kiraz (USA)
9. Rev. Dr. Richard Price (UK)
10. Prof. Dr. Alison Salvesen (UK)
11. Dr. Aho Shemunkasho (Austria)
12. Rev. Dr. Columba Stewart (USA)
13. Jack Tannous (USA)

CFP

PLS POST THE FOLLOWING CALL FOR PAPERS FOR COLLEGE ART ASSOCIATION'S ANNUAL CONFERENCE IN FEBRUARY, 2009 (LOS ANGELES, CA)
CALL FOR PAPERS: CAA ANNUAL CONFERENCE, Los Angeles, CA, FEB.’09

Session Title: Taking it to the Streets: The Theatre of Public Piety
Chair: Prof. Tina Waldeier Bizzarro, Rosemont College, Rosemont, PA
ATSAH Affiated

Roadside shrines of saints and other members of the heavenly Christian
community punctuate Italy’s streets and alleyways. Anchored and vigilant just above the pedestrian’s eye-level, these effigies are often graced with fresh flowers and ex-votos, as they guard and protect their neighboring communities. Even today, prophylactic effigies housed in edicole throughout Sicily become the dramatis personae of the sacred drama during weeks of festa or celebrations of the lives of saints and the Holy Family. Specially dressed and accoutered for these events—much like their neighbors within local churches—the statues descend from their niches, awakening to participate in and celebrate the feasts of their birth and death as well as those parts of the liturgical year which commemorate the Christian foundation mythology of their communities. Their passage is signaled by a panoply of ritualized events that submerge the participants in sacred time.

These street shrines lie at an interesting juncture of portrait and iconic art, popular culture, and the faith ritual of pilgrimage, conversion, and renewal, springing from ideas regarding the inherent power of the effigy and its link to the bearer via verisimilitude. This session proposes to explore the performative role of popular shrines and images, constituting their own officially sanctioned but liminal sacred space, in the multi-layered and ritually-centered faith system of civic life, in which festa and pilgrimage are central. This session welcomes papers which explore church ritual which spills out from the walls of the church into the democratized and popular spaces of the square and street, e.g. festa, procession, pilgrimage, from the eleventh through the eighteenth centuries. While concentrating on Western European phenomena, studies of Latin American ritual are also welcome.

Pls send proposals to: rosieselavy@yahoo.com

A Must

Timothy Graham's lecture on The Book of Kells, Tim is one of the best, I miss learning from him.

CFP: Law and the End of Empire

Projet Volterra II: Law and the End of Empire
Workshop on the afterlife of Roman law 2
Monday-Tuesday 15-16 September 2008
History Department
University College London

Projet Volterra II, an AHRC-funded project based in the History
Department of UCL, is examining the post-imperial afterlife of Roman
law (initially to the Carolingian period). Over the two days of 15 to
16 September 2008, we are hosting a small colloquium-cum-workshop,
organised loosely around the themes 'Authorities and Subjects' and
'Manuals and Jurisprudence'. For an introduction to the project and
its aims, see www.ucl.ac.uk/history/volterra/pv2.htm .

Confirmed speakers include Professors Santiago Castellanos, Michael
Crawford, Gero Dolezalek, Wolfgang Kaiser, Dario Mantovani, and Drs
Simon Corcoran, Magnus Ryan, and Benet Salway but we welcome offers
of other papers. Preference will be given to those related to our
themes but contributions outside the themes but still relating to the
survival/reception of Roman law in the early medieval period are also
most welcome.

The colloquium is supported by the AHRC and we will be able to
contribute towards speakers' travel and accommodation expenses.

Those interested in offering a paper should contact Dr Benet Salway
by Friday 1 August 2008.

-- Dr Simon Corcoran
Senior Research Fellow
"Projet Volterra"
Department of History
University College London
Gower Street
London WC1E 6BT
emailto:s.corcoran@ucl.ac.uk
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/volterra

Michael Hendy, Byzantinist, obituary

The Times carried an obituary on 12 June 2008 for our late Fellow Michael
Hendy (1942–2008), economic historian and expert on the coinage of
Byzantium, who died of a heart attack on 13 May 2008, aged 66, from which
the following extracts are taken.

‘Michael Hendy was a precocious scholar who reshaped our entire
understanding of the economy of medieval Byzantium and made a lasting
contribution to the history of coinage and monetary studies. Born in
Newhaven, East Sussex, in 1942, the son of a merchant sea captain, Michael
Hendy graduated from Oxford in 1964. As an undergraduate at The Queen’s
College, he once went to Cambridge to look at Byzantine coins in the
Fitzwilliam Museum and expressed such an unusual interest in those minted
by the Comnenian and Palaeologan emperors that the great numismatist and
historian Philip Grierson, FSA, kept in touch with him, even inviting him
to a feast at his college, a privilege generally reserved for
distinguished academics.

‘More importantly, Grierson also recommended him for a two-year fellowship
at the Dumbarton Oaks Centre for Byzantine Studies, Washington, and a
five-year assistant curatorship at the Fitzwilliam Museum, 1967–72. In
1964–5 a British Council scholarship had enabled Hendy to study coin finds
in Bulgaria, which proved to be the starting point for the large volume,
Coinage and Money in the Byzantine Empire (1081–1261), published by
Dumbarton Oaks in 1969, when he was only twenty-seven.

‘This pathbreaking and revolutionary study brought order to the previously
misunderstood coinage of this period. Where the British Museum catalogue
saw a chaotic series of debased coins of varying intrinsic value, Hendy
identified a decisive monetary reform that replaced the debased issues of
the late eleventh century with a new system of denominations, including a
restored pure gold coin, the hyperpyron, at the top. He solved the mystery
of the elusive coinage of the Latin Empire of Constantinople (1204–61) by
identifying and dating, on the basis of coin finds, small bronze pieces
that imitated, more or less faithfully, twelfth-century Byzantine types
that had previously been confused with Comnenian issues.

‘Such discoveries went far beyond the “internalities” for which Hendy
later blamed numismatists; they allowed a reassessment of the economy of
Byzantium in the first stages of the so-called “commercial revolution”
that opened up the Mediterranean market. Hendy argued rightly that the
economy was expanding and not in decline. This proved a turning point in
Byzantine historiography.

‘In 1972 he moved to Birmingham where he became curator of the important
Byzantine coin collection in the Barber Institute. From 1978 until 1987 he
was lecturer in Numismatics in the University’s Department of Medieval
History. During that period he often travelled to and from Dumbarton Oaks,
as visiting Fellow in 1976 and as associate adviser for Byzantine
Numismatics in 1980–1 and 1982–4; his second great book was researched on
both sides of the Atlantic.

‘This other magnum opus, Studies in the Byzantine Monetary Economy c
1300–1450 (Cambridge University Press, 1985), was not only a detailed
history of Byzantine money, its production, circulation and the
administration of mints but also an economic assessment of the role of
money in the economy. Twenty-five years later it remains an often-cited
reference work. Under the influence of the “Cambridge school”, notably of
Hugo Jones, Moses Finley and Philip Grierson, to all of whom he
acknowledged his scholarly and intellectual debt, Hendy systematically
downgraded the role of cash and exchanges and the level of monetisation of
Byzantium, although that is now believed to have been relatively high for
the period and one of the great strengths of the empire.

‘With these credentials, enhanced by the publication of a volume of
collected studies that included several unpublished chapters (The Economy,
Fiscal Administration and Coinage of Byzantium, Ashgate, 1989) and his
important fieldwork on the coin finds from the excavations at Aphrodisias,
Saraçhane (Saint Polyeuktos) and Kalenderhane in Istanbul, and Kourion in
Cyprus, he might have been expected to start a new career after his
voluntary severance from Birmingham. In 1987 he moved to Princeton and
then joined his partner and future wife, Professor Meg Alexiou, in Harvard
in 1989.

‘But perhaps as the unhappy consequence of an unusual personality, his
aversion to the demands of daily professional responsibilities and
general contrariness, which contrasted with his culinary skills and
generous hospitality, he never received the high academic recognition
he deserved.
He felt unappreciated. The scientific loss that his death brings to the
field of Byzantine studies is irreparable.’