BOB2022MIOT

The Diyala region in eastern Iraq has long been a focal area of study for scholars of the Bronze Age, thanks both to its long history of human occupation, and its position as a site of strategic importance. Drawing on this strong tradition of scholarship and the results of numerous excavations and collections in the area, the seven contributions gathered in this volume aim to offer new insights into the cultures and societies of the Bronze Age Diyala by proposing new questions, problems, and approaches. Exploring subjects as widespread as architecture and iconography, cultural and economic history, the study of social networks, historiography, and the identification of ancient cities, these chapters explore the richness of the Bronze Age Diyala from a range of perspectives, and together offer important new insights into our understanding of the area.

The myth of Europa, first attested in the eighth century bce in Homeric Poems and Hesiod’s Theogony, shapes new visions, figures and images in European literary productions as well as in artistic circles from Graeco-Roman antiquity to the present day. It is an enigmatic journey whose true beginnings cannot be determined and whose end is probably still far off. The centre of attention in this volume is Europa, Phoenician princess, and not Europe, geopolitical idea. With a multidisciplinary and diachronic view, this book explores different facets of the reception of the myth. The contributors offer reflections on the characterization of the mythical figure of Europa, for the archaic and classical periods, and on the reworking of the myth in the Hellenistic and humanistic period. The investigation extends to the study of the persistence of the myth of Europa in the art and literature of modern and contemporary times.

This volume presents the proceedings of the conference Materiality and Conversion: The Role of Material and Visual Cultures in the Christianization of the Latin West organized by the Centre for Early Medieval Studies in 2020. Its contributions thus focus on the Christianization of the Roman Empire between the fourth and sixth centuries. The studies examine the religious change through the “material turn” approach, building on the material and sensorial dimension of Christian conversion and especially the baptismal rite as one of the key components of the process. The material and visual cultures are regarded as vectors and witnesses of conversion to Christianity, while human body is viewed as one of the agents in ritual actions. The volume covers a wide range of topics, including the prebaptismal purification, the moment of immersion in the baptismal font, the postbaptismal alteration of perception, as well as the continuous changes in funeral forms. As such, the papers attempt to shed more light on the role of materiality in the complex and rapid conversion to Christianity in Late Antique West.

Disagreement, rivalry and dispute are essential to any intellectual development. This holds true for ancient cultures no less than for us today. From the classical period to the Hellenistic age and to Late Antiquity, competition and polemics have shaped the course of intellectual history in Antiquity. Polemical encounters and controversies are often linked to group identities and intellectual networks such as philosophical schools, textual traditions, artistic circles and religious communities. This collection of studies sprang from the ambition to study the interplay between polemics and intellectual networks from a variety of perspectives and disciplines.

The volume gathers fifteen case studies by leading scholars and young researchers alike. They address a wide range of topics, from the Old Academy and the Hellenistic schools to the Neoplatonic commentators of Late Antiquity, from biographical literature to literary criticism, from artistic manuals to scientific treatises, and from pagans to Christians. As multi-sided as the picture that emerges from these case studies may be, they all testify to the fact that implicit and explicit polemics are ubiquitous in ancient Greek and Roman literature and have served as triggers of intellectual progress across times and disciplinary boundaries.

In spite of its importance, Theodore Anagnostes’ Church History has attracted only little scholarly attention so far. To a large extent, we still rely on the assertions of philologists and historians from around the turn of the 19th to the 20th centuries, and the authoritative edition of the text is still the one published by C. G. Hansen in 1971, which for the most part remained unchanged in its 1995 reissue. The studies collected in this volume aim to fill this gap in the literature and to answer three main questions: (1) How can Theodore’s working method and the aim of his work be reconstructed? (2) To what extent can the Church History be considered a reliable historical source? And (3) which impact did the work have on contemporary and later historiography? In close connection with the bilingual (Greek-English) edition of the Church History that was recently published, the present volume thus aims to provide a closer and more differentiated appraisal of Theodore Anagnostes and his historiographical project.

The sixteenth century in Europe was a time of profound change, the threshold between the ‘medieval’ and the ‘modern’, as new technologies were introduced, distant lands explored, oceanic trade routes opened, and innovative ideas pursued in fields as varied as politics, science, philosophy, law, and religion. But sweeping transformations also occurred in the rural world, profoundly altering the countryside in both appearance and practices. Crucially for historians, there is abundant documentary evidence for these changes but, while they are less well-documented, their impact can also be traced archaeologically.

This cutting-edge volume is the first to explore the archaeology of the rural world across the ‘long’ sixteenth century and to investigate the changing innovations that were seen in landscape, technology, agriculture, and husbandry during this period. Drawing together contributions from across Europe, and from a range of archaeological disciplines, including zooarchaeology, archaeobotany, landscape archaeology, material culture studies, and technology, this collection of essays sheds new light on a key period of innovation that was a significant precursor to modern economies and societies.

The studies collected in this volume highlight the rising of an ecumenical consciousness within the Catholic Church in the early twentieth century. The Catholic paths, suggested in view of the hoped-for Christian unity before the Second Vatican Council, were different but complementary: the path of prayer and liturgy, that of theological refl ection, that of fraternal witness and that of martyrdom. The text offers valuable contributions on all these paths, written by specialists in the history of ecumenism.