23 X 2025: Yitzhak Hen (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem), Purifying Texts in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages

Throughout Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages, a vast corpus of potentially dangerous texts was dismissed as unorthodox and unauthorised by Christian scholars and policy makers. These texts exposed ...

16 X Zachary Herz (University of Colorado Boulder): A Fetid Jungle of Laws. The Organization of Imperial Rescripts, 160–534 C.E.

Modern readers experience imperial constitutions through vast multiauthor compilations like the Codices Justinianus et Theodosianus. These compilations organize the writings of many different people by subject matter, and thus present ...

MOVED TO A LATER DATE 9 X 2025: Simcha Gross (University of Pennsylvania), Good Fences Make Bad Neighbors: Communities and Empire on the Roman-Sasanian Frontier

The competition between the Roman and Sasanian empires for control of the frontier has been told many times, but typically from an imperial perspective. This lecture shifts the focus to ...

2 X 2025: Jakub Urbanik (UW) D. I 3.37 / P. Oxy. LXXXV 5495 – Consuetudo Strikes Back

The quaestio prima of the juristic papyrology has been since its beginning the problem of law application in Egypt under the Roman rule. In the last half of the century two ...

5 VI 2025: Thomas Laver (Cambridge) New Insights into the Organisation of Monastic Estates in Egypt, 5th-9th c.

The growth of the monastic movement in Late Antique Egypt brought with it highly practical concerns for those ascetics that chose to live in communities, with the necessities of survival ...

29 V: Przemysław Nehring (UMK) & Aldona Glińska-Neweś (UMK): Augustine’s Sermons 355-356 – Communication Strategy in an Institution’s Reputational Crisis – Rhetorical Analysis vs Modern Crisis Management Theory

This paper examines Bishop Augustine's crisis communication strategy during the "Januarius affair" of 425-426 CE, when the aging bishop delivered two sermons to defend both his monastic institution and personal ...