Brepols Online Books Medieval Miscellanea Collection 2023 - bob2023mime

This volume, the third in the series MediTo, investigates the changing landscapes of Tuscany during Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. Through a selection of thematic case studies, presented initially during the second International workshop held in Paganico (Grosseto, Italy) in June 2019 and here further developed, the volume explores the concepts of settlement, economic, and societal changes in both Tuscany and its broader Mediterranean context over the course of several centuries. Together, the contributions gathered here showcase how cities and rural settlements, when studied in their archaeological and historical context, shed light on a dynamic landscape in which natural resources played a crucial role in defining the success or later abandonment of sites.

This volume explores how knowledge was made in the early medieval book in the Latin West through two interrelated practices: collecting and concealing. The contributions present case studies across cultures and subject areas, including exegesis, glossography, history, lexicography, literature, poetry, vernacular and Latin learning. Collectio underpinned scholarly productions from miscellanies to vademecums. It was at the heart of major enterprises such as the creation of commentaries, encyclopaedic compendia, glosses, glossaries, glossae collectae, and word lists. As a scholarly practice, collectio accords with the construction of inventories of inherited materials, the ruminative imperative of early medieval exegesis, and a kind of reading that required concentration. Concealment likewise played a key role in early medieval book culture. Obscuration was in line with well-known interpretative practices aimed at rendering knowledge less than immediate. This volume explores the practices of obscuring that predate the twelfth-century predilection, long recognised by historians, for reading that penetrates beneath the “covering” (integumentum, involucrum) to reveal the hidden truth. Cumulatively, the papers spotlight the currency of two crucial practices in early medieval book culture and demonstrate that early medieval authors, artists, compilers, commentators, and scribes were conspicuous collectors and concealers of knowledge.

This book offers new and innovative perspectives on the archaeology of consumption in Byzantine cities and their hinterlands. Case-studies range from towns in eastern Macedonia, north-western and central Greece, and Crete to urban centres in Serbia, Bulgaria and western Turkey. The archaeological data and historical insights presented in this volume are always of great interest, often exciting, and more than once outright astonishing. The commodities discussed in the volume are dated between the 6th and the 16th century CE and include pottery (e.g., glazed table wares, amphorae, cooking pots, storage jars), textile fragments, metal objects, bronze and golden jewellery, marble carved slabs and columns.

Feeding the Byzantine City sheds compelling light on a world which was much more complex and interconnected than has often been assumed, which makes it essential reading for scholars and a larger audience alike.

Que brûle une ancienne cathédrale, et soudain l’église redevient maison commune. Pour mieux comprendre ceci, qui s’est singulièrement manifesté lors de l’incendie de Notre-Dame de Paris en avril dernier, l’Institut d’Études Médiévales souhaite croiser les regards de diverses spécialités sur l’église cathédrale, telle qu’elle nous vient des temps médiévaux. Quel est son mystère ? Comment comprendre son indéniable puissance de signification et d’attachement ? D’où lui vient cette aptitude à rassembler un peuple, fût-il au comble de la désunion, et à susciter l’émotion par-delà toutes les frontières ? Quels sont les enjeux techniques, liturgiques, théologiques, spirituels, artistiques, juridiques et politiques qui s’enchevêtrent quand la cathédrale a souffert et qu’il faut la rénover, la restaurer, voire la reconstruire ? À quoi tient l’identité profonde d’un bâtiment, qui n’a cessé de changer au cours des âges ? Quelle restauration respecte sa nature, quelle autre au contraire la défigure ? Comment les cathédrales meurent-elles, ou restent-elles vivantes ? Sur toutes ces questions actuelles, on a pensé que les médiévistes pouvaient apporter l’éclairage de leurs divers savoirs, qu’ils soient historiens de l’architecture, de la liturgie, de la théologie, de l’Église ou du fait religieux.

This publication brings together essays by scholars of both medieval and contemporary art, offering a cross-disciplinary approach of both periods. It investigates how contemporary artists and contemporary art historians perceive medieval art, and, reciprocally, how medieval art historians envisage the echoes of medieval artforms and esthetics in contemporary art. The volume follows on from the symposium organized in conjunction with the exhibition "Make it New: Carte Blanche à Jan Dibbets" that was held at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (Paris) in 2019, and which presented side by side Hrabanus Maurus’s De Laudibus Sanctae Crucis (In Praise of the Holy Cross), a masterpiece of Carolingian art, with works by artists associated with conceptual art, mininimal art, and land art.

How and why has medieval art, and particularly early medieval art, inspired contemporary artists since the 1950s? What has medieval art contributed to contemporary art? How has medieval art’s treatment of figures, color, space, geometry, and rhythm provided inspiration for contemporary artists’ experiments with form? In what way does contemporary artists’ engagement with the topics of formatting, writing, semiosis, mimesis, and ornamentation draw inspiration from medieval models? To what extent and in what sense are the notions of authorship and performativity relevant for understanding conceptions of artmaking in both periods? Rather than focusing on medievalism and citational practices, or on the theory of images—both approaches having already produced an important body of comparative readings of medieval and contemporary art—the essays in this volume address the question of medieval art’s contemporaneity thematically, through three trans-chronological topics: authorship, semiosis and mathematics, and performance. Engaging the artists’ works as well as their writings, these studies conflate conceptual and esthetic perspectives.

This volume brings together a collection of essays that delve into the shifts in ideas, roles, and practices of masculinities and male attitudes during the transition from late Antiquity to the early Middle Ages. This period was marked by significant changes, including the collapse of Roman political authority in the West, the fragmentation of imperial universalism in polities, and the rise of Christianity, which all challenged the gender roles inherited from Antiquity.

Within this historical context, the book explores the evolution of men’s privileges, responsibilities, and burdens through eleven case studies focusing on different categories of men and manly behaviour. The volume brings to life husbands and fathers, kings and workers, clerics and warriors from both the East and the West, as revealed through contemporary textual and material sources and preserved in the physical remains of male bodies and actions. In doing so, this volume will bring to the fore new perspectives on masculinities and gender history.

The papers gathered in this volume focus on ‘Medieval Translations and their Readership’, the special strand of the 11th Cardiff Conference on the Theory and Practice of Translation in the Middle Ages. The volume discusses the role of the reader in the process of translation, communities of readers and their active participation in translators’ choices, and the translation as a result of a dialogue between author, text and its reader.

Translations of works of theology and religious education, the focus of most of the contributions to this volume, constitute excellent material for research into medieval lay audiences. Vernacular religious educational texts from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century show a great deal of conformity. Individual authors resorted to similar strategies and techniques to meet any translation challenges, to fulfil educational aims, or to relate to their readers and to accommodate their expectations. Simultaneously, the readers played a crucial role as they shaped the production of texts in many ways.

Research into Middle English pastoral and devotional literature and the conditions of its production still dominates scholarly work in the field. Religious texts in vernaculars other than Middle English have so far received little attention. This volume tries to tackle this lacuna by offering a careful comparative analysis of relevant vernacular texts across Europe, including Slavonic works, using historiographical, philological, and linguistic methods as well as literary scholarly approaches.

The sixteen chapters are organized in three sections. The first one, ‘Authors and Readers’, brings together articles examining the idea of a model reader as expressed in translations of biblical texts and texts of religious instruction. The contributions in the second section, on the ‘Dissimination of Knowledge’, focus on how translators addressed readers, how people read, and how they used the manuscripts and printed books made for them. The target audience or model reader of the first section is here put into perspective with the help of discussions of reading practices. The last section, ‘Religious Education in Transition’, comprises contributions which focus on textual material from the period when printed books gradually changed, the relationship between languages, texts, authors, and readers.

L’orientation vers les convergences, échanges et confrontations dans l’histoire monastique du grand Ouest européen au Moyen Âge permet de porter un regard nouveau sur la dynamique de divers établissements en observant les relations qui s’y sont développées tant au sein des communautés, qu’avec la société environnante. Les influences externes subies par les monastères et les conflits internes qui s’y jouent, les échanges dus aux pèlerinages, aux rouleaux des morts et aux confraternités sont au nombre des thèmes explorés.

Long-distance ties connecting Europeans from all geographical corners of the continent during the fifteenth and sixteenth century facilitated the sharing of religious texts, books, iconography, ideas, and practices. The contributions to this book aim to reconstruct these European networks of knowledge exchange by exploring how religious ideas and strategies of transformation ‘travelled’ and were shared in European and transatlantic cultural spaces. In order to come to a better understanding of Europe-wide processes of religious culture and religious change, the chapters focus on the agency of the laity in ‘new communities of interpretation’, instead of intellectual elites, the aristocracy, and religious institutions. These new communities of interpretation were often formed by an urban laity active in politics, finance, and commerce. The agency of religious literatures in the European vernaculars in processes of religious purification, reform, and innovation during the long fifteenth century is still largely underestimated. ‘Networking Europe’ aims to step away from studying ‘national’ textual production and consumption by approaching these topics instead from a European and interconnected perspective. The contributions to this book explore late medieval and early modern networks connecting people and transporting texts following three main axes of investigation: ‘European Connections’, ‘Exiles, Diasporas, and Migrants’, and ‘Mobility and Dissemination’.

Ce volume regroupe les contributions de vingt-deux chercheur.es universitaires, collègues et ami.es de Claude Lafleur, qui ont voulu lui rendre hommage à l’occasion de son départ à la retraite en tant que professeur titulaire à la Faculté de philosophie de l’Université Laval. La diversité des aires géographiques et la pluralité des strates générationnelles auxquelles appartiennent les chercheur.es qui ont contribué à ce livre témoignent éloquemment de l’envergure de la « sphère d’influence » des productions intellectuelles de Claude Lafleur.

Les textes réunis relèvent des principaux champs de recherche que leur ami et mentor a patiemment labourés au cours de sa carrière académique : histoire des corpus et des manuscrits; transmission des textes philosophiques et de leurs notions fondamentales, de l’Antiquité au Moyen Âge; éditions critiques de textes issus des Facultés des arts et de théologie de l’Université de Paris aux xiiie-xive siècles; enseignement de la philosophie au xiiie siècle à la lumière des textes didascaliques; histoire des pratiques discursives dans les Facultés des arts médiévales; étude de concepts clés de la pensée de Thomas d’Aquin; discussion médiévale sur les universaux; philosophie de l’histoire des médiévistes contemporains.

Ce recueil d’études souhaite ainsi se faire le reflet de certains des intérêts heuristiques, des orientations méthodologiques et des thématiques historico-philosophiques que Claude Lafleur a poursuivis, explorées et étudiées dans ses propres écrits, ayant toujours été convaincu « qu’il n’y a pas de statut plus excellent que de vaquer à la philosophie ».

The purpose of this volume is to explore, re-interpret and re-contextualise the various natures of practices performed by the Orthodox and Catholic pilgrims in Balkan countries in their devotional ʽpath to touch the sacred and holyʼ through the prism of pilgrimage contents, and their articulating, using, and handling strategies. Inter- and transdisciplinary perspectives constitute a strong point for exploring the essence of this collective practice of worship, which is theoretically and critically interpreted, and chronologically and diachronically analysed. Therefore, the various visions of the authors, formed on the basis of qualitative and critical analysis of primary (ethnographic and folkloric data from field interviews, archive documents, samples, etc.) and secondary sources, come to fill a gap in research on pilgrimage in southeast Europe, and especially on pilgrimage practices in Eastern Orthodoxy. Particularly, the ritual practices, sacred places in contemporary Balkan societies, religious folklore, divine intervention stories, miracle-working icons, relics and reliquaries as part of the structure of pilgrimage are discussed.

The authors explore the context in which the Christian shrines in the Balkans are spaces where the ethnic and denominational patterns in pilgrimage are revealed openly on multiple levels; they delve into how the correlative effects between politics and religion are manifested. In this volume, which is the result of a project initiated by the Balkan History Association, the authors focus on theoretical analysis, stressing the historical and contemporary behaviour performed by the Christian pilgrims, and highlighting the fact that the motivations for going to the sacred places can vary, from seeking and obtaining Divine help to leisure, religious/faith tourism, etc.

Il regno di Pipino, figlio di Carlo Magno, è stato a lungo trascurato dalla ricerca storica, nonstante la sua importanza per l’Italia, le regioni transalpine e il mondo carolingio nel suo insieme. I contributi qui raccolti, esito di due convegni tenutisi a Trento e a Vienna, mettono in luce con approcci diversi e innovativi i molteplici aspetti della cultura del suo regno, la sua azione politica e militare e la rappresentazione che ne diedero i contemporanei. Questo volume, pertanto, offre un sguardo inedito su Pipino; nuove prospettive di ricerca su un sovrano dimenticato.

This book explores the viewing and sensorial contexts in which the bodies of kings and queens were involved in the premodern societies of Europe, Asia, and Africa, relying on a methodology that aims to overcoming the traditional boundaries between material studies, art history, political theory, and Repräsentationsgeschichte. More specifically, it investigates the multiple ways in which the ruler’s physical appearance was apprehended and invested with visual, metaphorical, and emotional associations, as well as the dynamics whereby such mise-en-scène devices either were inspired by or worked as sources of inspiration for textual and pictorial representations of royalty. The outcome is a multifaced analysis of the multiple, imaginative, and terribly ambiguous ways in which, in past societies, the notion of a God-driven, eternal, and transpersonal royal power came to be associated with the material bodies of kings and queens, and of the impressive efforts made, in different cultures, to elude the conundrum of the latter’s weakness, transitoriness, and individual distinctiveness.

Written transmission relies on the fact of ‘publication,’ the step between the authorial process and reception. But what does ‘publishing’ mean in the context of a manuscript culture, in which books were copied slowly and singly by hand? This is a fundamental question. If one fails to appreciate the act of publication, one’s understanding of any authorial work and its reception from any period will remain defective. The case studies in this volume ask what it meant for medieval and renaissance authors and their associates to publish. The contexts under scrutiny range from England to Italy, from hagiography to literary criticism, and from Carolingian monasteries to renaissance libraries. Medieval publishing remains undiscovered territory in the main. This volume constitutes a first effort towards a long-term narrative, from the ninth to the sixteenth century.

This volume proposes a framework for reflection on practices of writing personal names in medieval sacred spaces, uniting historians, art historians, and specialists in written culture (both epigraphers and palaeographers). It traces the forms and functions of names that can be found within the space of early medieval churches and cemeteries, focusing mainly, but not solely, on inscriptions. By examining names written in various kinds of media, from liturgical books to graffiti and more formal inscriptions, the contributors investigate the intentions and effects of the act of writing one’s own name or having one’s name written down. Their interest resides less in the name itself than the interactions it had with its spatial, iconographic, linguistic, ritual, and cultural context, and what this indicates about medieval graphical practices. What is a name from a graphic point of view? What are the specificities of the epigraphic manifestations of names? By whom were names written, and for whom were they intended (if they were even meant to be accessed)? Addressing these and other questions, this volume shows the importance of inscriptions as historical sources and the contribution they give to the study of medieval societies at the intersection of history, anthropology, archaeology, linguistics, and semiology.

Compiled between 1262 and 1272 in Toledo under the patronage of Alfonso X, the Castilian Alfonsine Tables were recast in Paris in the 1320s, resulting in what we now call the Parisian Alfonsine Tables. These materials circulated widely and fostered astronomical activities throughout Europe. This resulted in a significant number of new works, of which there are a few hundred, extant in more than 600 manuscript codices and dozens of printed editions. These manuscripts and imprints, broadly contemporary to the works they witness, comprise the written record of Alfonsine astronomy and provide the focus of this volume.

A first series of essays examines individual manuscripts containing Alfonsine works. The authors seek to reconstruct, from the manuscript evidence, the cultural, astronomical and mathematical worlds in which the manuscripts were initially copied, compiled, used and collected. A second series of essays turns from the particular codex to the individual work or author. These contributions ask how particular works have been transmitted in surviving manuscript witnesses and how broader manuscript cultures shaped the diffusion, over two centuries, of Alfonsine astronomy across Europe. A final essay reflects on the challenges and opportunities offered by digital humanities approaches in such collective studies of a large manuscript corpus.

This volume concentrates on how the sermon, a pivotal element in mass communication, aimed to shape the people of Europe. Rather than setting up the usual binary divides, it highlights the linguistic complications, the textual inter-relationships, the confessional cross-currents, and the variations between public and private sermon dissemination operating at different rates and with variable results throughout Europe. Effectively the emphasis here is on how Catholic preachers and Catholic preaching carried on in the period between the handwritten and the printed sermon, a time when not only the mode of production was changing but when the very purpose and meaning of preaching itself would soon alter in a western Christian world that was becoming no longer completely Catholic. By examining case-studies chosen from countries with contrasting manuscript and printing traditions (Denmark, England, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, the Low Countries, Romania, Spain, and Sweden), we aim to examine some of the main historical, literary, and theological factors in the development of the sermon in Latin and the vernaculars, which is itself in the process of changing formats, and sometimes languages, at a time of religious ferment from the advent of print to the death of Martin Luther. These essays, which are effectively in dialogue with each other, are divided into geographical/linguistic sections organized along broadly chronological lines. They circulate from the peripheries of Europe to the centre, moving from areas where evidence is now scarce to situations of thriving production.

Ever since the Christianization of the planetary week in Late Antiquity, the notion of Sunday as a day of rest, as well as the rhythm of a seven-day week, has been a constant. Yet the cultural history of Sunday in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages is complex. Detailed research reveals a greater diversity than appears at first glance. For example, Sunday did not simply replace the Sabbath, nor was the Jewish Sabbath commandment directly adopted. Furthermore, the Sunday laws of Emperor Constantine officially gave the inhabitants of the Roman Empire a day of rest free of work, but the effect and reception of the laws is hard to grasp, even among Christian authors. Moreover, Sunday was by no means a central theme in the history of late antique Christianity, so that the scattered references must be interpreted.

This edited collection, based on a conference in Vienna in 2019, investigates the relevance of Sunday and the weekly rhythm in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages in the everyday life of people, in monasticism, in synods, in further imperial and ecclesiastical laws, and in disciplinary and liturgical developments. It also covers controversies with the Jewish Sabbath as well as reflections on the aspect of rest, freedom, and of charity. While exploring different views and regional differences, the contributions show the growing importance of the Lord’s Day, especially since the sixth century, as part of the Christianization of society and the sacralization of the calendar.

Across three thematically-linked sections, this volume charts the development of competing geographical, national, and imperial identities and communities in early medieval England. Literary works in Old English and Latin are considered alongside theological and historical texts from a range of disciplinary perspectives. Accounts of travel, foreign contacts, conversion, migration, landscape, nation, empire, and conquest are set within the continual flow of people and ideas from East to West, from continent to island and back, across the period. The fifteen contributors investigate how the early medieval English positioned themselves spatially and temporally in relation to their insular neighbours and other peoples and cultures. Several chapters explore the impact of Greek and Latin learning on Old English literature, while others extend the discussion beyond the parameters of Europe to consider connections with Asia and the Far East. Together these essays reflect ideas of inclusivity and exclusivity, connectivity and apartness, multiculturalism and insularity that shaped pre-Conquest England.

The three-volume project Cohesion in Multi-Ethnic Societies in Europe from c.1000 to the Present explores and seeks to find solutions to a crucial problem facing contemporary Europe: in what circumstances can different ethnic groups co-operate for the common good? They apparently did so in the past, combining to form political societies, medieval and early modern duchies, kingdoms, and empires. But did they maintain their ethnic traditions in this process? Did they pass on elements of their cultural memory when they were not in a dominant position in a given polity?

The first volume of the project explored written sources about the past to show how communities shaped their collective memories in order to ensure the smooth functioning of multi-ethnic political communities. This second volume looks beyond texts and focuses on activities and events that were designed to build a sense of community within a political community made up of different ethnic groups. The coexistence of different ethnic groups is considered not through the prism of theoretical analyses by intellectual elites, but by following community members’ responses to current events as recorded in the sources.

This volume fills an important gap in the study of medieval English sanctity. Focused on the period 1150-1550, it examines later manifestations of pre-conquest northern English cults (John of Beverley, Oswald, Hilda, Ætheldreda etc.), and the establishment and development of many more during the twelfth to fifteenth centuries (Godric of Finchale, Robert of Knaresborough, Oswine of Tynemouth, Æbbe of Coldingham, Bega of Copeland, William of York, etc.). It showcases the diversity of new northern cults that emerged after 1150, and pays particular attention to cultures of episcopal and eremitic devotion and hagiographic production in Yorkshire, Cumbria and Lincolnshire.

Divided into five subsections, the volume opens by exploring the relation of sanctity to constructions of northern identity through targeted examinations of northern textual and material cultures. It then turns to a series of case studies of northern saints’ cults, grouped with reference to the eremitic life, female networks and locations, and the contextualisation of northern sanctity within national, transnational and post-medieval currents of veneration. Underlying all these essays is a concern with the conflicted idea of ‘northernness’. This collection argues for a northern sanctity that is imagined in varying ways by different communities (monastic, diocesan, national etc.), allied to a series of conceptual ‘norths’ that differ significantly in accordance with the bodies of evidence under survey.

À l’époque médiévale, en Orient et en Occident, se conjuguent sur la figure mythique du roi Salomon des aspects variés et parfois contradictoires touchant aussi bien au secret qu’à une diffusion d’idées et de représentations visant à un consensus social et politique. Les contributions ici réunies s’inscrivent dans une optique comparative dans la mesure où la place qu’occupe Salomon dans les trois religions du Livre (judaïsme, christianisme, islam) n’a fait que croître et embellir durant la période médiévale, dans le cadre d’une symbolique du pouvoir en partie commune et de ce que l’on pourrait qualifier une « culture de l’équivoque » (Bruno Roy). Paradigme du roi sage et juste d’après le texte biblique, Salomon est en effet également un souverain dépravé, pourvu de 700 épouses et de 300 concubines, femmes qui, au temps de sa vieillesse, détournèrent son cœur pour l’inciter à suivre d’autres dieux et à sombrer dans l’idolâtrie. Son sort dans l’au-delà a ainsi fait l’objet de nombreuses spéculations. En outre, plusieurs traités pseudépigraphiques grecs des premiers siècles de notre ère, ainsi que la tradition juive rapportée par Flavius Josèphe et abondamment exploitée dans l’Occident médiéval (notamment à partir du XIIe siècle), en font un roi exorciste et magicien, capable de contraindre les démons à lui obéir. Salomon joue également un rôle fondamental dans la littérature magique byzantine, copte et arabo-musulmane, dont certains spécimens ont été traduits ou adaptés en latin. À l’instar d’Hermès et d’Aristote, il est donc l’un des grands héros emblématiques du vaste mouvement de transfert culturel entre l’Orient et l’Occident qu’a connu la seconde moitié du Moyen Âge.

La parrhésia antique idéalisée, cette parole franche qu’autorise et exige la démocratie, devrait disparaître avec l’installation des pouvoirs souverains du Moyen Âge. De fait, la répression légale des paroles sacrilèges signale la naissance de la théocratie pontificale et de l’État moderne au tournant des XIIIe et XIVe siècles. L’absolutisme va de pair avec une réduction de la liberté de parole à un simulacre politique.

Entre le XIIIe et le XIIIe siècle cependant, en Occident latin, en Islam et dans l’empire byzantin, des pouvoirs souverains qui disent tenir de Dieu leur autorité voient leurs élites religieuses continuer à revendiquer et à pratiquer une forme de liberté de parole. Ces élites exercent une critique justifiée par leur maîtrise de la tradition écrite et par leur expérience du gouvernement. Elles envisagent la liberté de parole comme un devoir religieux vis-à-vis du prince, en appellent à sa conscience et l’exhortent à être à la hauteur du pouvoir reçu de Dieu. Leurs paroles critiques prennent aussi un public à témoin, dans le cadre d’un rituel politique qui n’est jamais parfaitement contrôlé ni instrumentalisé. Elles contribuent ainsi à associer une large communauté, fondée religieusement, à l’exercice du pouvoir.

En comparant la liberté de parole assumée par ces élites médiévales, c’est donc le fonctionnement des empires du Moyen Âge central qu’on analyse – des empires dont l’assise théocratique reste compatible avec la critique et implique la participation sous contrôle d’une partie des populations. Au début de la période, celui qui critique le prince lui donne un gage de fidélité ; il déclare que le pouvoir exercé peut être amélioré. À la fin de la période, le critique fait d’abord valoir son amitié pour le souverain – indice de la réduction de l’assise collective de ces régimes.

From the rule of Justinian (AD 527-AD 565) up to the Islamic conquests in the Byzantine Empire, the lands of the Mediterranean basin underwent significant change from the sixth to the ninth centuries AD. Urban and rural areas were transformed, landscapes altered, and material cultures saw a fundamental shift. But such changes were by no means uniform across the region. From Jordan, Greece, and the Danube, to the Italian peninsula, Sicily, Spain, and the Horn of Africa, the contributions gathered together in this volume explore new advances and perspectives from the field of ‘Byzantine’ archaeology over the longue durée in order to shed new light on this period.

What was the impact of the reconquest of Justinian? What was the impact of Byzantium in archaeological record? What are the archaeological indicators of urban and rural transformations from the sixth to the ninth centuries? Did architecture represent a marker of socio-economic and cultural change within the Byzantine world? By engaging with such key questions, and by drawing on new data from surveys, excavations, material culture, and historical sources, this volume offers new insights into archaeological perspectives on the broader Byzantine world.

Le présent ouvrage participe aux recherches sur la poésie latine tardo-antique qui s’efforcent de situer et de décrire l’émergence, puis le développement de cette poésie dans le cadre de la christianisation de l’Empire. Tout en situant les auteurs et les œuvres par rapport aux grands changements et aux convulsions idéologiques qui ont traversé la société romaine du iii e au vi e siècle, les dix contributions de ce volume, réunies par Giampiero Scafoglio et Fabrice Wendling, tentent d’appréhender par le biais de la littérature un phénomène désormais bien étudié par les historiens, celui de la transformation du christianisme dans le contexte constantinien et théodosien d’une religion devenue romaine. Si l’on observe dans la sacralisation des bâtiments et des lieux un processus qui opère une rupture avec la religion spirituelle des premiers siècles, ne peut-on trouver trace d’une telle mutation dans la poésie des iv e et v e siècles ? Une expression désignant le Christ comme Saluator generis Romulei (Prudence), l’effacement des thématiques chrétiennes dans certains poèmes d’Ausone, l’apparition dans les hymnes de Prudence d’une topographie sacrée, l’éloge hyperbolique de l’art oratoire chez un Ennode de Pavie ou, encore, la stigmatisation de la virginité dans tel Épithalame du même Ennode ne témoignent-ils pas d’une forme de « romanisation » ou - plus exactement peut-être - d’interpretatio romana de la foi chrétienne, d’origine hébraïque ? Autrement dit, symétriquement à la « conversion » de la culture classique dont témoigne la littérature chrétienne, ne peut-on mettre au jour dans les textes poétiques un processus sans doute déconcertant, mais réel, de transformation de la foi, de transmutation de ses contenus originels, sous l’effet d’une poésie chrétienne qui garde des attaches profondes, non seulement avec la poésie classique, mais encore avec tout le « passé » de la civilisation romaine antique, jusque dans ses aspects religieux ?