8 V 2025 Stephen Shoemaker (University of Oregon): Religious Literacy in the Late Ancient Near East: Liturgical Catechesis and Not-So-Simple Believers of Roman Arabia

Recent scholarship on late antique Near Eastern religious culture has rightly brought renewed attention to questions of literacy. It is well established that most Christians—and others—in the region were functionally ...

24 IV: Perrine Pilette (CNRS – UMR8167 Orient & Méditerranée) Patriarchs, Month After Month : Rewritings of the History of the Patriarchs of Alexandria in the Copto-Arabic Synaxarion

The Coptic-Arabic Synaxarion, compiled at the turn of the Mamluk period, organizes the commemorations of saints and martyrs according to the Coptic calendar. Among these holy figures, the patriarchs hold a prominent ...

10 IV: Zachary Chitwood (München), Eastern Roman Law, Islam and the First Millennium: Prolegomena to a ius commune orientale

The scholarship on Roman law in the Middle Ages has focused to a large degree on the ius commune, the shared wellspring of the Roman legal tradition that served as ...

3 IV: Paweł Filipczak (Uniwersytet Łódzki) Commentary on John Malalas (XI, 3-4) on Emperor Trajan’s Expedition to the East

The purpose of the paper is to analyse a short passage from the Chronicle of John Malalas (1st half of the 6th century AD), describing the initial phase of Emperor ...

27 III: Daria Elagina (Hamburg Universität) & Dorota Dzierzbicka (UW), An Ethiopian pilgrim at Old Dongola, Sudan. New insights from a Vatican manuscript

In 1596, Takla ʾAlfā found himself stranded in Old Dongola, Sudan, during his pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Our paper discusses the Ethiopian monk’s first-hand account concerning his stay in the city, ...

20 III: Noel Lenski (Yale), Feeding a Young Capital: The Food Supply of Constantinople in the Fourth Century

When he dedicated his new eastern capital in 330, Constantine gave clear signs that he intended it to be a ‘Second Rome.’ As such, he endowed Constantinople with distinct privileges ...