Category: Third-party

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CALL FOR PAPERS Rituals of Mothering in the Middle Ages Leeds IMC 2026

Rituals of Mothering in the Middle Ages Leeds IMC 2026

The Cyprus-based interdisciplinary project ‘Breastfeeding and Mothering in Antiquity and Byzantium’ (https://www.ucy.ac.cy/motherbreast/) – co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund and the Republic of Cyprus through the Research and Innovation Foundation (EXCELLENCE/0524/0012) and the University of Cyprus – warmly invites proposals for a series of sessions at the International Medieval Congress 2026 (University of Leeds, 6-9 July 2026).

The project approaches mother as a premodern identity that can only be fully understood through the use of the modern concepts of “gender”, “body”, and “performance”. These are useful concepts for describing a biological act that is nevertheless culturally constructed in the way in which it reflects the values and structures of the societies in which it exists. As such, mothering is associated with certain gestures, behaviours, rituals, prejudices, and ideologies. For the purposes of this event’s thematic, we approach the rituals of mothering alongside their medical, familial, social, ideological, religious, literary, and visual uses.

Prospective speakers are invited to address the following questions:

• What rituals marked the transition into mothering, and how did these reflect broader ideologies about femininity and purity?

• Which general typology can be derived from approaching a broad spectrum of carefully chosen medieval rituals of mothering?

• What are the predominant values of mothering rituals in medieval cultures?

• How do rituals of mothering intersect with power, authority, and lineage in medieval political or aristocratic families?

• What role do rituals of mothering have in medieval art and literature?

• How do the literary enunciations of mothering rituals relate to their visual representations?

We welcome paper proposals which explore and theorise mothering rituals, their place and various meanings and uses in medieval cultures in any of the above and/or other interrelated ways. We are open to various approaches, especially the ones which explore the interconnections between different methods and disciplines, such as Late Antique and Medieval Studies, Philology, Art History, Archaeology, History of Medicine, Gender and Performance Studies, Ritual Studies, Sociology, Anthropology, and Theology. Selected papers will be published in the diamond open access peer-reviewed journal Eventum: A Journal of Medieval Arts and Rituals (https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/eventum).

Please send your abstract (200 words maximum) and a short CV including your email and affiliation no later than the 5th of September 2025 to cemar@ucy.ac.cy.

Please note that the organizers (Stavroula Constantinou, Eirini Panou and Savvas Mavromatidis) cannot cover conference registration fee and travel or accommodation expenses.

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John H. Pryor

It is with great sadness that we pass on the news that John H. Pryor, Emeritus Professor of Medieval History at Sydney University, passed away early on Tuesday March 24th. Professor Pryor’s son Sean has indicated that although his father’s death was somewhat sudden, he had been unwell for a long time. Nonetheless, John Pryor had been down at the family’s holiday house south of Sydney until the morning before he died and had walked out along his favourite beach a few days earlier. Characteristically, he had asked not to have a funeral or memorial service.

 

Professor Pryor will be very well known to many scholarly audiences for his pathbreaking scholarship which brought together the study of the western Middle Ages, the Islamic world, the Crusades and Byzantium. The focus of his research was on maritime history, particularly in the Mediterranean. Author of multiple publications which combined analyses of the practicalities of sea-faring, trade and naval warfare, his most notable book was Geography, Technology, and War : Studies in the Maritime History of the Mediterranean, 649-1571 (Cambridge, 1988), a widely reviewed volume which was regarded  as soon as it appeared as a landmark publication. Integral to JP’s analysis was his identification of the fundamental significance of the counterclockwise current in the Mediterranean for shipping, trade and conflict across the medieval centuries. Professor Pryor was notable for his focus on Byzantium as a central component of a complex Mediterranean world, with his collaboration with the late Professor Elizabeth Jeffreys leading to another landmark publication The Age of the Dromon: The Byzantine Navy ca. 500-1204 (Leiden: Brill, 2006). He was a regular participant in Byzantine conferences including the Spring Symposium. And he was still publishing important articles and book chapters into the 2020s. An index of the significance of JP’s scholarship was the 2016 Festschrift, Shipping, Trade and Crusade in the Medieval Mediterranean, published by Routledge, which ran to more than 400 pages and included contributions from twenty of the most significant scholars in the many fields on which he had made such a profound impact. His students will remember him as an extraordinarily generous, stimulating and intellectually rigorous teacher, whose enjoyably sardonic humour came with great warmth.

 

Catherine Holmes, Amanda Power

 

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New editor for Byzantine Modern Greek Studies

The Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies is pleased to announce that Dr Baukje van den Berg will assume the position of editor of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies at the start of 2025.

Dr van den Berg is Associate Professor in the Department of Historical Studies at the Central European University and director of its Center for Eastern Mediterranean Studies. She is a leading expert in Byzantine literary thought and the reception of ancient literature in Byzantine culture. Her publications include her monograph Homer the Rhetorician: Eustathios of Thessalonike on the Composition of the Iliad (OUP, 2022) and a recent co-edited volume (with Nikos Zagklas) Poetry in Byzantine Literature and Society (1081–1204) (CUP, 2024).

The Centre would also like to express our most heartfelt thanks to Professor Ingela Nilsson (University of Uppsala), who steps down from the role. Professor Nilsson has been instrumental in ensuring the continued success of the journal in the past few years and its importance to Byzantine and Modern Greek scholarship within Birmingham, and across the globe.

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Call for Papers: Radicalism and its Uses in Late Roman/Byzantine History (Session for the Leeds International Medieval Congress, 7–10 July 2025)

Radicalism, as a form of sociopolitical thought or action that aims at fully upturning the roots (radices) of a problem, must necessarily pose some threat to the status quo. The late Roman and/or Byzantine status quo is generally regarded to have been particularly impervious to such threats. One dominant narrative of Christianisation is that the ‘oppositional radicalism of the early church’, especially the radical potential of its social ethics, was defused in the rapprochement with mainstream Roman society and gave way to a non-radical ‘establishment outlook’ (Harper 2016, 141). This was, for some, unavoidable: ‘as Christianity was progressively identified with the Empire’, Christian ideas ‘gradually lost their radical character’ (Merianos & Gotsis 2017, 205). For others, it was a conscious counter-radical project, as ‘upper-class Christian leaders’ learned ‘to accommodate the Bible’s most radical social critiques… into something less threatening’ (Maxwell 2021, 158). Either way, the consequence is a model of Christian Roman society that affords little space for radicalism, even at the margins, over a thousand-year period.
This model is under challenge. The editors of the 2018 Cambridge Intellectual History of Byzantium criticise the field’s ‘persistent tendency… to subordinate individuals to normative ideas’ and to assume that late Romans ‘could not conceive a particular radical, heterodox, or supposedly modern idea because they could not think outside the box of their imperial-Orthodox framework’ (Kaldellis & Siniossoglou 2017, 18). “Radicalism” is one lens through which historians might meet this call for more generous study of the non-conformist elements of late Roman/Byzantine intellectual and political culture. Yet while our overarching scholarly narratives of late Roman history are just beginning to admit the possibility of “radicalism”, the terms “radical” and “radicals” have always appealed to any historian who wishes to emphasise moments of difference or divergence. We hear, for example, of the ‘radical Christian ascetics’ (Cullhed 2016, 352) who made a ‘radical rejection of normal life’ (Hezser 2018, 20), though their movements perhaps safely diverted the more threatening anti-wealth instincts of some Christians. We hear of ‘religious radicals’ (de Wet 2018, 74) and ‘guerilla… radical[s]’ (Drake 2002, 229) who made use of violence to advance their cause. We even hear of radical emperors pursuing ‘radical administrative reform’ (Bell, 2013, 165). And the late Roman past, whatever radical ideas it gave rise to itself, is productive ground for public-facing historians who think through inequality and capitalism, perhaps with a radical instinct of their own (e.g. Paolo Tedesco in Jacobin). For a society traditionally thought to have been un- or counter-radical to its core, its modern historians are eager to make claims for the radicalism of their chosen subjects.
In light of the above, the session organiser invites proposals for ambitious papers that critically interrogate the concept(s) and historiographical uses of “radicalism”, and seek to furnish the term with a sharper analytical utility. Papers may treat any aspect of late Roman or Byzantine history, conceived very broadly in time and space. They might explore any or more of the following:
  • The definition(s) of radicalism in different late Roman/Byzantine contexts: what was “radical” in the late Roman or Byzantine world?
  • Case studies of specific late Roman/Byzantine ideas and behaviour that are usefully described as, or were perceived at the time as, radical (or counter-radical);
  • Late Roman/Byzantine attitudes to radicalism (philosophical, social, political, religious, etc.);
  • Radical or counter-radical traditions of thought and/or action in the late Roman/Byzantine world;
  • The conceptual utility of the terms “radical” and/or “counter-radical” for understanding aspects of the late Roman/Byzantine world;
  • Previous scholarly uses of (or choices not to use) the term “radical” in a late Roman/Byzantine context that might be productively rethought;
  • Radical approaches to the study of late Roman/Byzantine history.
Scholars of any career stage are welcome to propose a paper. To do so, please send a title and brief description of the paper, around 100 words in length, to matthew.hassall@liverpool.ac.uk by the end of Friday 20 September 2024. Questions are welcome at the same address. The organiser expects to be able to defray some of the costs of participating in the Congress for any speakers who do not have their own recourse to sufficient institutional funds.
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Roman Constantinople in Byzantine Perspective

The Memorial and Aesthetic Rediscovery of Constantine’s Beautiful City, from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance

Author:

Paul Magdalino
This book studies the research perspective in which the literary inhabitants of Late Antique and medieval Constantinople remembered its past and conceptualised its existence as a Greek city that was the political capital of a Christian Roman state. Initial reactions to Constantine’s foundation noted its novel Christian orientation, but the memorial mode of writing about the city that developed from the sixth century recollected the traditional civic cultural heritage that Constantinople claimed both as the New Rome, and as the continuation of ancient Byzantion. This research culture increasingly became the preserve of the imperial bureaucracy, and focused on the city’s sculptured monuments as bearers of eschatological meaning. Yet from the tenth century, writers progressively preferred to define the wonder and spectacle of Constantinople in the aesthetic mode of urban praise inherited from late antiquity, developing the notion of the city as a cosmic theatre of excellence.
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Online Lecture: Recycled Cities: Sardis and the Fortifications of Early Byzantine Anatolia

The Mary Jaharis Center for Byzantine Art and Culture is pleased to announce the final lecture in our 2023–2024 lecture series.

Thursday, March 28, 2024 | 12:00 PM EDT | Zoom
Recycled Cities: Sardis and the Fortifications of Early Byzantine Anatolia
Jordan Pickett, University of Georgia

The largest standing architecture at the ruined city of Sardis is not its famous Temple of Artemis, the fourth largest Ionic temple of antiquity, but is instead the massive but little-published fortification that sits on its Acropolis. This paper delivers preliminary results from new study of the Byzantine fortifications on the Acropolis at Sardis, part of the larger Harvard-Cornell Exploration of Sardis ongoing since 1958. Composed entirely of thousands of architectural blocks and sculpture recycled from older Iron Age and Roman monuments of Sardis, our understanding of the Acropolis fortifications hinges on three questions considered here. How has the Acropolis, composed of extraordinarily friable loose conglomerate subject to erosion and earthquake, changed since Antiquity? When were the Acropolis fortifications constructed? Possibilities range from c. 550 during the reign of Justinian to as late as c. 850. And, how and by whom were the Acropolis fortifications constructed? Set at a remarkably steep elevation, the labor for transport and construction with reused materials was extraordinary. No minor monument of the “Dark Ages”, the fortifications on the Acropolis at Sardis stand as a remarkably well-preserved complex of defensive architecture that sheds light on the priorities and capacities of communities in Byzantine Anatolia.

Jordan Pickett is Assistant Professor in the Department of Classics at the University of Georgia and co-PI, with Benjamin Anderson (Cornell University), for Acropolis investigation for the Archaeological Exploration of Sardis, Turkey, under the direction of Nick Cahill (University of Wisconsin).

Advance registration required at https://maryjahariscenter.org/events/recycled_cities

Contact Brandie Ratliff (mjcbac@hchc.edu), Director, Mary Jaharis Center for Byzantine Art and Culture with any questions.

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Opportunity for Graduate Students & ECRs: Inscriptions in a Digital Environment: An Introduction to EpiDoc for Byzantinists

The Mary Jaharis Center for Byzantine Art and Culture and the Byzantine Studies Association of North America are pleased to offer a three-part EpiDoc workshop for graduate students and early career researchers in collaboration with Martina Filosa of the University of Cologne.

Inscriptions in a Digital Environment: An Introduction to EpiDoc for Byzantinists, workshop by Martina Filosa (University of Cologne), Zoom, April 5, 12, and 26, 2024, 11:00 AM–3:00 PM EDT with a break from 12:30–1:00 PM

In this online workshop, participants will explore the use of EpiDoc, the established standard for digitally encoding ancient inscriptions, papyri, and other primary and documentary texts in TEI XML for online publication and interchange. The workshop will also introduce the participants to the EFES (EpiDoc Front-End Services) platform for viewing and publishing EpiDoc editions. The workshop will include asynchronous tutorials, real-time sessions, and guided hands-on exercises. Participants will have the opportunity to work with their own epigraphic material, broadly understood.

Registration closes Friday, March 22.

Who is eligible?

  • Graduate students and early career researchers (PhD received after April 2016) in the field of Byzantine studies.
  • All participants must be BSANA members. BSANA membership is free for graduate students and early-career contingent scholars who have earned their PhD within the last eight years and who do not hold a permanent or tenure-track appointment. If you are not already a BSANA member, please complete the BSANA Membership Form before registering for the workshop. Your membership status will be confirmed before your space in the workshop is confirmed.

For a full description of the workshop and to register your interest, please visit https://maryjahariscenter.org/events/inscriptions-in-a-digital-environment.

Contact Brandie Ratliff, Director, Mary Jaharis Center for Byzantine Art and Culture, with any questions.

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Call for Sessions: Mary Jaharis Center Sponsored Panel, 50th Annual Byzantine Studies Conference

As part of its ongoing commitment to Byzantine studies, the Mary Jaharis Center for Byzantine Art and Culture seeks proposals for Mary Jaharis Center sponsored sessions at the 50th Annual Byzantine Studies Conference to be held in New York City, October 24–27, 2024. We invite session proposals on any topic relevant to Byzantine studies.

Session proposals must be submitted through the Mary Jaharis Center website. The deadline for submission is April 3, 2024.

If the proposed session is accepted, the Mary Jaharis Center will reimburse a maximum of 5 session participants (presenters and chair) up to $800 maximum for scholars based in North America and up to $1400 maximum for those coming from outside North America. Funding is through reimbursement only; advance funding cannot be provided.

For further details and submission instructions, please visit https://maryjahariscenter.org/sponsored-sessions/50th-bsc

Contact Brandie Ratliff, Director, Mary Jaharis Center for Byzantine Art and Culture, with any questions.

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PhD position – The Slavonic Metaphrasis of Byzantine Orthodoxy – KU Leuven

You will work as a PhD student in an interdisciplinary team, contributing to the FWO WEAVE project “The Slavonic Metaphrasis of Byzantine Orthodoxy. A Digital Inventory of South Slavonic Translation Literature applied to Research on Translated Authority and Linked Texts”. At KU Leuven you will be part of the Research Group of Greek Studies (Faculty of Arts: Literary and Cultural Studies Research Unit). The project involves collaboration with the Institut für Slawistik of the University of Innsbruck.
Project
Medieval Slavonic literature consists mostly of translations of Byzantine Greek works. It is a normative literature deeply imbued with a sense of tradition and religious and textual orthodoxy, but at the same time it is the product of the inherently transformative process of translation (metaphrasis). In this project you address these normative and transformative tendencies that have shaped the textual culture of the Slavonic Middle Ages. You study textual authority and the role of the Byzantine ‘florilegic habit’ in Greek-Slavonic translation literature and develop digital tools, drawing on the life’s work of one of the most renowned modern scholars of Slavonic literature. From 1975 until his death, Francis Thomson (1935-2021) prepared a catalogue of Greek-Slavonic translation literature: his work resulted in an unpublished Cartotheca of more than 100,000 handwritten index cards, which constitutes an invaluable source of information for the project. The digitization of this Cartotheca is part of the project. This PhD position will focus on the investigation of text collections, the authority of tradition and conceptions of orthodoxy, with a case study that involves florilegia and question-and-answer literature. As a topic for that case study the principal investigators (PIs) propose the tradition, Greek context and transmission of the Slavonic ‘Sotêrios’, but well-argued alternatives that fit within the frame of the project can be considered. In your research and in the development of the digital card index, you collaborate intensively with the Leuven PIs and occasionally with Prof. Jürgen Fuchsbauer (Innsbruck).

Profiel

The successful candidate:
– combines an MA in Classics (Greek) or Byzantine Studies with proficiency in Old Slavonic and/or an MA in Slavistics combined with proficiency in (Byzantine) Greek;
– has an interest in expanding their expertise to include digital approaches;
– has an excellent oral and written command of English or German;
– is willing and able to work both independently and as part of a broader research team;
– is expected to spend on average 80% of their time on their PhD research, and 20% on database development and academic and administrative services to the project and the research group;
– is expected to work in Leuven and is willing to work abroad in Innsbruck for 6 months.

Aanbod

The full-time position is normally for 4 years, contingent upon positive evaluation after the first year (= initial 1-year contract, extended by 3 years after positive evaluation). The starting date is September 2, 2024, or as soon as possible.
The successful candidate will:
– receive a generous scholarship;
– enjoy academic guidance by the PIs;
– be integrated into an attractive and diverse research environment, with people from various backgrounds, in different career stages and with different kinds of expertise;
– become part of an institute with a longstanding tradition of textual scholarship and research on the literature of the Christian East;
– benefit from project partnership with the Slavistics Department of the University of Innsbruck;
– have funding available for costs related to the research, e.g. to travel to conferences.

Interesse

Please upload in the application tool:
(1) your CV, including student track record;
(2) a motivation letter;
(3) the names and contact details of two academic references;
(4) if already available, a specimen of academic writing (max. 15 pages).
For more information please contact Prof. Dr. Reinhart Ceulemans (reinhart.ceulemans@kuleuven.be) or Dr. Lara Sels (lara.sels@kuleuven.be).
For more Please click here.
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Mary Jaharis Center for Byzantine Art and Culture: Online Lecture: Byzantium as Europe’s Black Mirror

Online Lecture: Byzantium as Europe’s Black Mirror

The Mary Jaharis Center for Byzantine Art and Culture is pleased to announce the 2023–2024 edition of its annual lecture with the Harvard University Standing Committee on Medieval Studies.

Friday, February 16, 2024 | 12:00 PM EST | Zoom
Byzantium as Europe’s Black Mirror
Anthony Kaldellis, University of Chicago

In the course of its long self-fashioning, “the West” (later “Europe”) set itself off as a superior alternative to a number of imagined Others, including the infidel world of Islam, the primitive nature of the New World, and even its own regressive past, the Middle Ages. This lecture will explore the unique role that Byzantium played in this process. While it too was identified as the antithesis of an idealized Europe, this was done in a specific way with lasting consequences down to the present. Byzantium was constructed not to be fully an Other, but rather to function as an inversion of the Christian, Roman, and Hellenic ideals that Europe itself aspired to embody even as it appropriated those patrimonies from the eastern empire. It became Europe’s twin evil brother, its internal “Black Mirror.” Once we understand this dynamic, we can chart a new path forward for both scholarly and popular perceptions of the eastern empire that are no longer beholden to western anxieties.

Anthony Kaldellis is a Professor of Classics at the University of Chicago.

Advance registration required at https://maryjahariscenter.org/events/byzantium-as-europes-black-mirror

This lecture is co-sponsored by the Harvard University Standing Committee on Medieval Studies.

Contact Brandie Ratliff (mjcbac@hchc.edu), Director, Mary Jaharis Center for Byzantine Art and Culture with any questions.