Seminario MEDhis (CCHS, Madrid, 8 de octubre 2015): Paul Stephenson, The Serpent Column: A Cultural Biography

Seminario del MEDhis, organizado por Therese Martin y Ana Rodríguez
12.00 del 8 de octubre de 2015
Sala 2D Juan Cabré
Centro de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales del CSIC.
C/ Albasanz, 26-28 (Metro Suanzes)
 
 The Serpent Column, a bronze sculpture that has stood in Delphi and
Constantinople, today Istanbul, is a Greek representation of the Near
Eastern primordial combat myth: it is Typhon, a dragon defeated by Zeus, and
also Python slain by Apollo. The column was created after the Battle of
Plataia (479 BC), where the sky was dominated by serpentine constellations
and by the spiralling tails of the Milky Way. It was erected as a votive for
Apollo and as a monument to the victory of the united Greek poleis over the
Persians. It is as a victory monument that the column was transplanted to
Constantinople and erected in the hippodrome. The column remained a monument
to cosmic victory through centuries, but also took on other meanings.
Through the Byzantine centuries these interpretation were fundamentally
Christian, drawing upon serpentine imagery in Scripture, patristic and
homiletic writings. When Byzantines saw the monument they reflected upon
this multivalent serpentine symbolism, but also the fact that it was a
bronze column. For these observers, it evoked the Temple’s brazen pillars,
Moses’ brazen serpent, the serpentine tempter of Genesis (Satan), and the
beast of Revelation. The column was inserted into Christian sacred history,
symbolizing creation and the end times. The most enduring interpretation of
the column, which is unrelated to religion, and therefore survived the
Ottoman capture of the city, is as a talisman against snakes and
snake-bites. It is this tale that was told by travellers to Constantinople
throughout the Middle Ages, and it is this story that is told to tourists
today who visit Istanbul.

Paul Stephenson is Head of the School of History and Heritage, University of
Lincoln. In the past two decades Stephenson has been Professor of Medieval
History at Radboud University, Nijmegen, in the Netherlands; Professor of
Medieval History at Durham University; Rowe Professor of Byzantine History
at the University of Wisconsin and Dumbarton Oaks (Trustees for Harvard
University) in the USA. He has also taught for short periods at King’s
College, London, University College, Cork, and the University of California,
San Diego. Stephenson’s published work has focused on the political and
cultural history of the Roman Empire in late antiquity and the Middle Ages,
generally called Byzantium. He is author and editor of several books,
including Byzantium’s Balkan Frontier (2000), The Legend of Basil the
Bulgar-slayer (2003), and Fountains and Water Culture in Byzantium (edited
with Brooke Shilling, 2016), all with Cambridge University Press, and The
Byzantine World (Routledge, 2010). His Constantine: Unconquered Emperor,
Christian Victor (London, 2009; New York, 2010), has been translated into
several languages and appeared in a US History Book Club edition. His next
book, published by Oxford University Press, is The Serpent Column: a
cultural biography.

Reading pleasure: Medieval approaches to reading (Summer School, May 2016, Istanbul)

La Universidad de Uppsala en colaboración con otros centros organiza en la semana del 23 al 28 de Mayo de 2016 un curso sobre el placer de la lectura (o la lectura placentera!). 
Los organizadores ofrecen cinco becas para asistir al curso, que tendrá lugar en el Instituto Sueco de Estambul. El plazo está abierto hasta el 1 de diciembre de 2015.

Tutores: Christian Høgel (University of Southern Denmark), Lars Boje Mortensen (University of Southern Denmark), Ingela Nilsson (Uppsala University), and Elizabeth Tyler (University of York).
Profesores: Virginia Langum (Uppsala University), Pernilla Myrne (University of Gothenburg), Stratis Papaioannou (Brown University), and Bo Utas (Uppsala University).

Email de contacto: hogel@sdu.dk
Más información aquí.

Especial para filólogos: The Postclassical Greek: the Intersections of Philology and Linguistics, 15-16-17/02/2016, Mainz (Germany)

Información en Fasti Congressuum

Información en el blog de la Oxford University Byzantine Society

Deadline for the submission of the abstracts: October 1, 2015.

Description

Greek is one of the few languages in the world with an uninterrupted literary tradition. Nearly all the periods of Greek are well-documented by large amounts of texts. While the pre-classical and classical periods have been receiving much scholarly attention for centuries (for a synoptic overview see Giannakis, ed. and 2014; Bakker, ed., 2010), the study of post-classical Greek, from New Testament Greek until the Byzantine period, is a much recent phenomenon, albeit with a large body of research (cf., inter alia, Browning 1983; Horrocks 2010; Bentein 2014; Gianollo 2010; and Janse 1993).

This interdisciplinary workshop aims at bringing together scholars working on different aspects of post-classical Greek up to the Byzantine period. We strongly believe that only integration of the linguistic and philological knowledge can create a coherent model of the processes that underlay the language change of that period and provide answers as to why Greek of the Byzantine period is the way it is.

We aim at highlighting language changes /sensu latissimo/ of that period from different perspectives. The topics we would like to address are among the following (but are not restricted to them):

- Language standardization phenomena, penetration of the colloquial elements of the period into written texts; the effects of the tradition, as, for example, scribes’ mistakes; what can be gained or lost from studying the manuscripts directly?

- Parameters and metrics for distinguishing between normalized texts and texts with a stronger penetration of colloquial elements of contemporary Greek; influence of Classical and Biblical Greek;

- Principles that underlie the written tradition; text copying (such as, e.g., amendments/corrections by copyists);

- The role of Byzantium in the preservation of Classical texts: How much intervention on the part of the Byzantine scribes/excerptors/compilers is there to expect? How do the changes to the Classical texts made in the Byzantine period can be traced and how do they influence our understanding of the Classical period? (cf. Kaldellis 2012)

- The social, historical and cultural environment that potentially may have constrained the language of that period; influence of other languages and the way the interaction with other languages was organized;

- The sociolinguistic situation: different registers/lects, diatopic and diastratic variation; multilingualism;

- Effects of the historical-critical editing (as, for example, normalization or emendations): To what extent do they mirror the linguistic “reality”? Are these effects rather insignificant or do they have a potential to influence our understanding of the language?

- Is the chronological division of the language tradition into Classical, Byzantine and Modern, which influenced the study of Greek since the Renaissance times, justified?

- Methods and metrics for dating texts on the basis of linguistic phenomena;

- Purely linguistic approaches to language change such as grammaticalization, language contact, structural and functional explanations, etc.; emergence of new grammatical categories; disappearance of grammatical categories;

- How Digital Humanities may contribute to the questions addressed in the workshop? Which corpora do we have? What kind of data, tools and methods are available?

- Corpus-based approaches to the study of Greek.

Invited speakers (titles are preliminary)

Marina Benedetti (University of Siena), "The middle and perfect in the Greek grammatical tradition, from Apollonius Dyscolus to Byzantine scholars"

Klaas Bentein (University of Ghent), "Finite versus non-finite complementation in documentary papyri from the Roman and Byzantine period (I - VIII AD)"

Robert Crellin (University of Cambridge), "The socio-linguistic status of Biblical Greek: comparing the language of the Septuagint and Josephus"

Chiara Gianollo (University of Cologne), "Syntactic factors of the Greek genitive-dative syncretism"

Brian Joseph (Ohio University), "Grammaticalization of the periphrastic future"

Daniel Kölligan (University of Cologne), "Anmerkungen zur Syntax des Johannes Malalas"

Nikolaos Lavidas (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki) & Dag Trygve Truslew Haug (University of Oslo), "Participles in time: change from above in biblical Greek"

Jose Luis García Ramón (University of Cologne), "Grammatical und lexical structures on change in Post-Classical Greek: local dialects and supradialectal tendencies"

Charlotte Schubert (University of Leipzig), title to be announced

Staffan Wahlgren (University of Trondheim), title to be announced

Abstract Submission

Abstracts are invited for the workshop session. Each presentation has 20 minutes followed by 10 minutes of discussion. Only one paper per participant is admitted.

Abstracts should be anonymous, maximally of one page in length, excluding references and examples (in .doc, .pdf or .docx).

Abstracts should be submitted to both organizers via e-mail: dariya.rafiyenko@uni-leipzig.de, ilja.serzants@uni-mainz.de

The deadline for the submission of the abstract is: October 1, 2015.

Applicants will be notified of abstract acceptance by: October 15, 2015.

All contributors will be invited to submit a version of their paper to the conference follow-up volume to be published with DeGruyter. Further details will be made available in due time.