Dedicatory Inscription Research Articles

Alle origini della plebs Sanctae Agathae. Iscrizioni perdute e ritrovate per la storia di Santhià nell’alto Medioevo

Two fragments of white marble are embedded in the apsis’ wall outside the parish church of St. Agatha in Santhia (near Vercelli, in Piedmont): the first one is engraved with the final part of a dedicatory inscription to a martyr by a clergyman named Vvalpertus (or Alpertus); the second one is a part of a small pillar or a lintel coming from a presbytery enclosure, and is decorated with a motif of intertwined gallons. The inscription stayed in the middle of a pluteus bordered by a carved frame, of which only a part of the lower band survives: the letters and the style of the decorations allow a chronology within the 8th century, while the fragment of pillar is to be traced back to a period between the 8th and the first half of the 9th. Of special interest are the Lombard onomastic of the dedicator and, in the final surviving text, the “signature” of a sculptor, which is present in a second inscription of Lombard age found in Piedmont, adorned with carved decorations as well. The analysis of these artefacts - hitherto unpublished - offered the opportunity to restudy two other inscriptions once existing in the church of St. Agatha, long lost and of uncertain authenticity: all these data allow various deductions about the history of Santhia over the centuries of the early Middle ages, the presence of a clergy in the countryside of the diocese of Vercelli, and the work of sculptors and engravers active between the 8th and 9th century in an area between Lombardy, Piedmont, Liguria and Provence, labelled in the past under the unifying name of “bottega delle Alpi Marittime”.

ALCAEUS OF MESSENE, PHILIP V AND THE COLOSSUS OF RHODES: A RE-EXAMINATION OFANTH. PAL.6.171

Among the poems of the Greek Anthology is one (Anth. Pal.6.171) which purports to be the dedicatory inscription of the Colossus of Rhodes built to celebrate the Rhodians' successful resistance to the siege of their island by Demetrius Poliorcetes in the years 305–304b.c. It has long been assumed by scholars that this epigram represents the authentic dedicatory inscription carved on the base of the Colossus, which was completed in the 280s and stood for some sixty years before being destroyed by an earthquake that rocked the island of Rhodes in the 220s. There are, however, strong reasons to doubt the epigram's authenticity, some of which come from considerations of the poem itself and others which come from a comparison with a closely related epigram (Anth. Pal.9.518) composed by Alcaeus of Messene to celebrate Philip V's military successes during his Aegean campaign of 203–200. Verbal and thematic parallels between the two epigrams make a connection certain. It is the aim of the present study to re-examine the Rhodian epigram and its relation toAnth. Pal.9.518 in order to propose a new date for the former in the context of Rhodes' defeat of Philip V and the advent of Rome in the affairs of the states ringing the Aegean.

Changing Forms: Mantegna's Poietics in the Camera Picta

Hidden in the vegetal ornament of one of the pilasters of the Camera Picta, Mantegna placed his self-portrait in the form of a leafy mask. In so doing, he introduced the sign of his authorship at the heart of a germinative process. This essay reconsiders the insertion of the self-portrait as an image of the generative power of the artist. Together with the room's dedicatory inscription (in particular the term absoluvit), the date 1465 inscribed in the marble, as well as several pictorical inventions signalling the porosity between art and nature, the secret, changing and subtle poietical programme in the Camera Picta can be revealed.

The Dedicatory Letter for the Ordinary People like ‘You’ ― Looking at the Love in a fallen city from the Viewpoint of ‘female’ and ‘others’

The Dedicatory Letter for the Ordinary People like ‘You’ ― Looking at the Love in a fallen city from the Viewpoint of ‘female’ and ‘others’

Od hagiografskog obrasca do političkog elaborata - škrinja Sv. Šimuna, zadarska arca d’oro

The casket of St Simeon the God-Receiver is the most representative work in the applied arts of the Croatian Trecento and, at the same time, one which displays great iconographic complexity. Although it was the subject of two monographs and a large number of individual articles, a whole set of questions remains open and awaits plausible interpretations. Particularly great problems are connected to the interpretation of a number of scenes which were understood differently by different scholars. At the same time, it can be noted that the discussion about the casket’s complex iconographic programme lacks a study which would address it as a unique a coherent whole in which every single scene is viewed as its irreplaceable constituent part. This article aims to demonstrate that the casket’s iconographic programme, especially that of the eight panels on its main body, was selected and arranged according to a carefully developed programme the creators of which were five noblemen of Zadar to whom Queen Elizabeth, the wife of the powerful King Louis I the Great of Hungary (1342-1382), entrusted not only the silver for the making of the casket but other important details connected to the commission such as the choice of the artist and, even more importantly, the selection of the scenes through which the casket communicated with its spectators. There is no doubt that the queen had her own demands with regard to what was depicted as can be seen in the opulent dedicatory inscription which records that she was the patron of the casket but also in the donation scene where she appears together with her daughters. It can also be said with certainty that she gave instructions for the somewhat unusual panel which depicts her standing by the catafalque of her father, Ban Stephen of Bosnia (+1354) who is being sent off to the next world by St Simeon the Righteous. It should mentioned that Ban Stephen was considered a heretic – a Bogomil – which means that being a Catholic queen, his daughter attempted to rectify the past with this panel. All these scenes are at the back of the casket. The queen undoubtedly also had a say in the selection of scenes which were depicted on the front. Those relate to the life of St Simeon which, considering that we know of only one event in his life, was done in a very skilful way: the central panel shows the saint receiving the Christ Child in the scene of the Presentation in the Temple while the panels to its left and right depict the translation of the saint’s relics which have not been identified as such in the scholarly literature. The translation consists of three scenes which are always present in the cases of translation: the finding of the body (inventio corporis), the transport of the body to a new place (translatio corporis) and, finally, the placing of the body to a new site where it would remain in the future (colocatio corporis). These three scenes were interpreted by the noblemen of Zadar in an idiosyncratic way in order to affirm the medieval Zadar and its nobility on the casket itself. The scene of the inventio corporis depicts the rectors of Zadar intervening at the last moment before a group of monks from the outskirts of town get hold of the body and place it in their monastery. In the scene of the colocatio corporis, the body of St Simeon is being carried into the Church of St Mary Major in the presence of King Louis and the grateful citizens who are led by the Bishop Nicholas Matafar. This scene depicts the return of the saint’s body from Venice where, according to the author of this article, it had been taken during the local uprising against the Venetian rule (1346-1358). At the same time, the visual message of the two scenes which flank the central one was to show that the exclusive ownership of the relics belonged to the citizens of Zadar. The conflict with the monks which erupted on a local level is being resolved by the local authorities, that is, the rectors of Zadar. When the problem becomes ‘bilateral’, that is, when it involves Venice, the dispute is settled (to the benefit of the citizens of Zadar) by their sovereign, the king of Hungary and Croatia.The visual interpretation of the translation depicted on the casket relies greatly on the scenes from the cycle of the translation of the body of St Mark from the façade of St Mark’s basilica at Venice (the discovery and exhumation of the body, the transport of the body on a ship, the placing of the body in a new shrine). The author of the article, therefore, frequently compares the scenes on the Zadar casket to those from Venice.

A New Reading of the Belvedere Altar

Controversy over the identification of the figures on the Belvedere altar has long hindered consensus about the meaning of this important Augustan monument. Attention has focused on the chariot-riding figure previously identified as Julius Caesar, Augustus, Romulus-Quirinus, Aeneas, or even Agrippa. I argue that references in Ovid's Fasti and the Consolatio ad Liviam, as well as the dedicatory inscription of the altar, suggest this figure depicts Nero Claudius Drusus at his funeral in 9 B.C.E., which was observed by Livia and Gaius and Lucius Caesar. The Belvedere altar advertises Augustus' dynastic ambitions during the early years of his pontificate, revealing the importance of the Claudii Nerones in Augustus' plans to secure his family's place as the preeminent military guardians of Rome. By implicitly associating Drusus' triumphant career with the promise of empire evoked by the appearance of Vesta and the ancient Trojan "pledges of empire" within the domus Augusta, the Belvedere altar represents an early articulation of the divine claims of Augustus' household to monopolize Rome's military responsibilities. The assimilation of divine and human households on the Belvedere altar also parallels the increasing identification of young Augustan princes as living pledges of empire and as new Dioscuri.

Cultic Relationships Between Buddhism and Brahmanism in the ‘Last Stronghold’ of Indian Buddhism

Cultic Relationships Between Buddhism and Brahmanism in the ‘Last Stronghold’ of Indian Buddhism: An Analysis with Particular Reference to Votive Inscriptions on the Brahmanical Sculptures Donated to Buddhist Religious Centres in Early Medieval Magadha In this article, an attempt has been made to understand the patterns of cultic relationships between Buddhism and Brahmanism through the prism of dedicatory inscriptions on the Brahmanical sculptures donated to Buddhist religious centres in early medieval Magadha. I have looked into the social background of the donors and the expressed motives for donation of such images. I have argued that the Buddhist Sa?gha accepted the donation of Brahmanical sculptures to effect a ma??alic appropriation of Brahmanical cults to Buddhism, though this does not seem to have been how the donors saw it. In the process, it exposed its own flank to a counter-appropriation by Brahmanism.

The Miraculous Versatility of Apophthegms

Apophthegms circulated not only in collections, but also as parts of all sorts of texts. This article explores the relation between apophthegm and context in passages from Erasmus’ correspondence, Declarationes (1532), and Ecclesiastes (1535). From the point of view of the reader, the apophthegm is a surprising illustration of the argument. For the author, however, it may have been the starting-point of a passage, as appears from Erasmus’ De conscribendis epistolis. In his dedicatory letter to his own collection of apophthegms (1531), Erasmus stresses that these anecdotes offer more philosophy than one may suspect at first sight. This is corroborated by the passages discussed.

Architecture and élite identity in late antique Rome: appropriating the past at Sant'Andrea Catabarbara

The conversion of a fourth-century secular basilica into the church of Sant'Andrea Catabarbara in Rome during the 470s invites a discussion of how architectural adaptation contributed to the identity of its restorer, Valila. More than a century after the praetorian prefect of Italy, Junius Bassus, founded the basilica in 331, a Goth named Valila, belonging to the senatorial aristocracy, bequeathed the structure to Pope Simplicius (468–83). References to Valila's last will in the church's dedicatory inscription were inserted directly above Junius Bassus's original donation inscription, inviting reflections upon the transmission of élite status from one individual to another. The particularities of Valila's legacy as a testator, as indicated in the references to his will in the Sant'Andrea Catabarbara inscription and confirmed by a charter he wrote to support a church near Tivoli, suggest that he sought to control his lasting memory through patronage. Valila's concern for a posthumous status provides a context for interpreting the interior of the Roman church. Juxtaposed to the church's fifth-century apse mosaic wereopus sectilepanels depicting Junius Bassus, together with scenes of an Apollonian tripod and an illustration of the exposed body of Hylas raped by two nymphs originating from the earliest phase of the basilica. The article proposes that Valila nuanced his élite identity by preserving the fourth-century images and thereby hinted that preservation fostered both the accretion of physical layers and the accrual of multiple identities by a Gothic aristocrat in Rome.

Qazion

ABSTRACT First discovered in 1860, the monumental structure at Qazion and its late second-century CE Greek dedicatory inscription by Galilean Jews have been a focal point of scholarly debate. Did this building serve as a synagogue for the local community or was it a Roman temple constructed by Jews to honor Septimius Severus and his family? This article presents the results of the Hachlili and Killebrew archaeological survey of the Qazion cultic complex and a new interpretation of this site located on the border of Jewish and pagan Galilee.

Diplomacy, Patronage, and the Preface to De Revolutionibus

IntroductionThe Preface to De revolutionibus is an extraordinary document, of which several possible varieties of interpretation have already been explored, without exhausting its potential reasonable interpretations. Some historians have picked out particular passages in the Preface, interpreting them as representing the actual trajectory of discovery or the state of consensus in the scientific community or as exemplifying some modern logic of justification.1 Burtt proposed that a crucial aspect was disagreement among the ancients while the Preface showed the continuity of his thought with the Florentine Neoplatonic-Pythagorean tradition; Duhem used to exemplify methodological points.2 Kuhn did look at the whole Preface, with characteristic emphasis on its presentation of the contemporary internal state of astronomy as monstrous, diffuse and inaccurate.3The principal content of Westman's 1990 paper was a ground-breaking discussion of the Preface's rhetorical methods. Westman noted that these were similar to those used for Reformist tracts and for requests for patronage. Westman's prime comparative example of the latter was the patronage of Gaurico by Pope Paul HI and the methods by which was achieved. However, Westman4 rightly noted both that the Preface followed the idiom of patronage and that there were several ways in which Copernicus and his Preface did not follow the conventional patronage-seeking model. Firstly, he noted that it is revealing of Copernicus ' strategy that he chose not to make predictions about the pope's health, longevity, or political future, nor did he advise him when to make journeys, that is, he did not use some usual methods available to an astronomer for obtaining patronage; and secondly, there was no evidence that Copernicus wrote De revolutionibus with the aim of achieving preferment in the Church hierarchy. Westman retained the word 'patronage', but not used in the strict sense involving an acceptable non-monetary gift by the client being rewarded by the patron with a monetary gift or a court appointment, rather being used in the sense that a patron would afford protection; he suggested that this request was a failure, but that suggestion was relative to the assumed aim of papal suppression of all criticism of the book. The discussion of the Preface in Westman's 201 1 magnum opus5 states clearly that although the Preface was cast in the image of church patronage and reform, is not the language of office-seeking, and proposes that Copernicus was hoping to gain support for his view of the heavens, and, by implication, what the Church ought to teach about it.The paper by Granada and Tessicini6 included some fundamental insights, derived from their highly plausible detailed comparison of Copernicus's Preface with that of Fracastoro's Homocentrica,1 together with the interesting context of politics within the papal Curia. While they continued Westman's theme of the use in the Preface of standard rhetorical devices typical of dedicatory letters of the time, they also continued Westman's theme by noting several more differences between Copernicus's Preface and standard patronage-seeking models. Firstly, the publication of Cardinal Schonberg's 1536 letter prior to the Preface was an act of simulation,8 giving the illusion of a patron-client relation where there was in fact none. Schonberg had not met Copernicus and had died in 1537, well before the composition of the Preface, and no reply by Copernicus had survived.9 Secondly, Copernicus's tone differs markedly from that of a standard dedicatory letter in that he characterises the Pope rather in his function as a servant. Thirdly, whereas was accepted practice for a preliminary approach to be made to the prospective dedicatee's secretariat to check if the dedication would be acceptable, no such approach took place,10 and such an approach would in this case have been highly likely to fail - not least because the reviewing staff would have included clerics concerned with the literal interpretation of Scripture, towards which the Roman Catholic hierarchy had been moving in response to the Protestant challenge. …

Violence, Revenge, and the Stakes of Writing during the French Civil Wars: Simon Belyard’s Le Guysien

When Henri III had the Guise brothers killed, mutilated, and cremated and then disposed of their ashes in the River Loire, the factional violence of the French Civil Wars reached new heights. After the brothers' deaths, one duke and the other cardinal, the ultra-Catholic League was particularly vocal, calling for the king's excommunication and even assassination. (1) This hostile and frantic environment not only fueled violence and revenge between all echelons of society, but also inspired polemicists to use the pen and graphic images as weapons to fight against one another. One representative example is Le Guy sien by the vallegeois Leaguer and schoolteacher Simon Belyard (dates unknown). (2) This play stages the duke's assassination in an extremely explicit manner, placing the bloodshed on stage for all the spectators to see in very graphic way. (3) The physicality of the murder scene is especially important since, although no trace of performance has (yet) been found, Belyard claims that certain Monsieur Pajot a fait representer [la tragedie], pour encourager le peuple bien affectionne de toujours persister de bien en mieux maintenir l'Eglise, et la patrie contre 1'heretique (Dedicatory Letter, A ii ro). The actors were probably students from Belyard's college, (4) and, though it is unknown when M. Pajot had the play performed, the play was likely put on before Henri Ill's death, and the staging of the duke's death would have inspired the audience to take revenge against their heretical king. (5) In this article, then, the first step is to consider the performance aspect of the assassination as cultural artifact of this turbulent time and to place this violent scene in the iconographical context after the duke's death. In this way, the play serves as prism to interpret the proper dynamics of the live spectacle and measure what theater can do, as well as its (intended) impact on spectators and readers. From there, the article reads the final act of the play between the king and the duke's mother alongside and against the various political discourses about regicide that circulated in the late 1580s. The final section interprets the stakes of writing polemical theater. All three sections suggest how this play would have encouraged sixteenth-century (Leaguer) spectator or reader to avenge her or his leader. I argue that the three parts are intricately linked, for the performance of the assassination and calls to avenge the duke's death mirror the self-performative aspect of writing this polemical tragedy. The act of taking up the pen, for Belyard, is militant act, analogous to the act of taking up the sword, which his readers and spectators would (ideally) have done to avenge their leader's unjust death. Staging the Assassination It will be helpful to briefly summarize the plot up to the assassination scene in act four. The play opens with the fury of Alecto's eight-page monologue in which she graphically recounts the horrors of civil wars and sets up the action that will ensue; Madame de Nemours, the duke's mother, foresees her son's demise in act two; the king and his counselors devise plan to assassinate the duke in act three. In this act, Henri is radically demonized, along with his right-hand man the due d'Epernon, and they devise the plan to kill the duke. Guise, perfect foil for the king, arrives on stage in act four with his mother. This scene is capital, for it is the first time the duke appears. His ethos is one of innocence and loyalty in stark contrast to the king's tyrannical nature, character dynamic that Belyard's polemical text necessitates. The duke and his mother speak in stichomythic dialogue, exchanging moral commonplaces and debating whether the duke should follow the king's orders and meet him in his chambers. The use of stichomythia between worried mother and her naive son also gives Guise more human character than Henri III, for the latter has only spoken in relentless tirades. …

“Vox Populi”: Machiavelli, <em>Opinione</em>, and the <em>Popolo</em>, from the <em>Principe</em> to the <em>Istorie Fiorentine</em>

Author(s): Ascoli, Albert Russell | Abstract: In a famous passage from the dedicatory letter to the Principe, Machiavelli paradoxically authorizes himself as an expert concerning the high and the mighty by claiming to speak with “the voice of the people”. On the face of it the Principe contains one lesson after another in how a “virtuous” leader can manipulate and control the populace to his own ends. On the other hand, from shortly after the composition of the treatise, readers have asserted that Machiavelli is secretly, ironically, allegorically, expressing opinions that place him on the side of the “popolo” against the repressive regimes of such as Cesare Borgia and Julius II. Rather than taking sides in this still unresolved, and perhaps unresolvable, debate, I argue that the Principe, in the letter to Lorenzo and throughout, delineates the problematic nature of Machiavelli’s relationship to the “people”—and with it the unstable contours of his “subject position” as opinionated commentator on politics and history—posing questions which will continue to haunt his writings from the near contemporary Discorsi, particularly in the remarkable chapter 59 of book 1, up through his final masterpiece, the Istorie fiorentine. Indeed I will claim that Machiavelli’s treatment of the categories of the “popolo” and “opinione” in relation to his own discursive stance may be said to anticipate, mutatis mutandis, features later associated with what Habermass has called “the public sphere” in which private citizens express opinions about public matters.

‘Giving’ and ‘Making’ in Early Runic Epigraphy

A survey of the early Germanic etymological semantics of 'giving' and 'making' is presented in light of the recent reaffirmation that early Nordic *taujan is etymologically related to Old Norse tœja 'grant, bestow, help, assist'. Contextualising the early runic fabricatory and dedicatory inscriptions in terms of sociological, textual and anthropological theory, a new interpretation of early runic pragmatics is developed. The new approach to early runic performance proferred seeks to explain the broader function (and context) of epigraphic production, not merely the most logical reading of individual texts. The early runic pragmatics of 'giving' and 'making' are employed as an analytical frame in which to analyse the socio-cultural as well as linguistic meaning of a series of both functionally and textually related, often significantly stylised Iron Age epigraphs found on a range of early Scandinavian media: runestones, moor finds and migration-era amulets.

The Artist, the Scholar and the Next School

This summer the Documenta exhibition opened in Kassel with a strange and powerful dedicatory inscription: we were told that a dance had been “frenetic, lively, rattling, clanging, rolling, contorted, and [had] lasted for a long time,” that “the riddle of art is that we do not know what it is, until it is no longer that which it was,” that “it is defined even by what it fails to achieve.”Further, dOCUMENTA (13) proclaimed its dedication to “artistic research and forms of imagination that explo...

The Saddest Tory

The Saddest Tory John Attridge Some Do Not...: A Novel. Ford Madox Ford. Max Saunders, ed. Manchester: Carcanet, 2010. Pp. xciii + 426. $29.95 (paper). No More Parades: A Novel. Ford Madox Ford. Joseph Wiesenfarth, ed. Manchester: Carcanet, 2011. Pp. lix + 286. $24.81 (paper). A Man Could Stand Up—: A Novel. Ford Madox Ford. Sara Haslam, ed. Manchester: Carcanet, 2011. Pp. lxxxi + 251. $22.76 (paper). Last Post: A Novel. Ford Madox Ford. Paul Skinner, ed. Manchester: Carcanet, 2011. Pp. lxv + 253. $29.95 (paper). Ford Madox Ford has always been a shifting, elusive figure in the modernist group photo, difficult to take in at a glance. His centrality to Anglo-American modernism as novelist, critic, poet, and editor is not in doubt, but the multiplicity of his roles, the generic heterogeneity of his oeuvre, and the very longevity of his involvement with the modern movement have made him harder to categorize and evaluate than other figures of comparable eminence. In recent years, and especially since the publication of Max Saunders’s definitive biography in 1996, the terrain vague of Ford’s eclectic literary persona has been redeveloped as a happy hunting ground for the new modernist studies, with his activities as, for example, impressionist sociologist and wartime propagandist coming to join his editorship of the English Review and the transatlantic review as key quadrants in the enlarged map of modernism.1 Ford’s tetralogy about the First World War and its epiphenomena, described by William Carlos Williams as “the English prose masterpiece of their time,” is by no means uncharted territory in the same sense, either for scholars or for readers.2 But it has never existed before in a corrected [End Page 799] and annotated text, and Carcanet’s excellent four-volume edition paves the way for a new wave of reconsiderations of Ford’s postwar masterpiece. This edition gives the reader of Parade’s End numerous advantages she has not previously enjoyed. At once the most obvious and the most easily overlooked of these is the division of the series into four separate volumes. This is of course how the novels were originally published between 1924 and 1928, but they have not been in print separately since 1948, so most contemporary readers will have ploughed through a single-volume omnibus edition as I did. Convenient in some ways, these editions omit Ford’s interesting dedicatory letters to each book and tend to obscure the formal autonomy of the individual novels, which were always designed to work as stand-alone units (unlike, for example, the volumes that make up In Search of Lost Time). The Carcanet edition also gives new options to undergraduate course designers wishing to represent the Tietjens novels on a syllabus without assigning the whole tetralogy. The new edition was set in motion when one of the four editors, Joseph Wiesenfarth, was alerted by a colleague that the Hemingway papers at the John Fitzgerald Kennedy Library in Boston appeared to contain a Ford manuscript. This document turned out to be a previously unknown typescript of No More Parades (1925), completing the set of one surviving manuscript per volume (in the author’s hand in the case of Some Do Not. . ., typed with autograph revisions for the other three volumes). In the absence of witnesses other than these manuscripts, the editors have taken the UK first edition as the copy text, intervening in the case of unambiguous errors and where the manuscript can be taken with reasonable certainty to be a better reflection of Ford’s intention. The selective textual notes signal alterations to the copy text as well as commenting on significant revisions and deletions made in the manuscript, shedding light on Ford’s habits of composition. For the less assiduous reader, useful summaries of these habits and of the artistic significance of certain revisions are provided in the introductions, drawing attention to, for example, instances where Ford went back and amplified the novel’s thematic matrix with handwritten additions.3 This textual apparatus is complemented by admirably comprehensive informational notes, elucidating Ford’s prolific biblical, classical, historical, literary, and topical allusions, decoding Edwardian slang and regional dialects, glossing recondite vocabulary, and pointing out...

XPS characterization of (copper-based) coloured stains formed on limestone surfaces of outdoor Roman monuments

Limestone basements holding bronzes or other copper alloys artefacts such as sculptures, decorations and dedicatory inscriptions are frequently met both in modern and ancient monuments. In outdoor conditions, such a combination implies the corrosion products of the copper based alloy, directly exposed to rainwater, will be drained off and migrate through the porous surfaces, forming stains of different colours and intensities, finally causing the limestone structures to deteriorate.In this work we have analysed samples from two modern limestone monuments in Rome, the Botticino surfaces of the ‘Vittoriano’ (by G.Sacconi, 1885-1911- Piazza Venezia) and the travertine basement of the ‘Statua dello Studente’ (by A.Cataldi, 1920- University city, La Sapienza), and focussed our investigation on the chemical composition of the copper-stained zones using XPS (X-ray Photoelectron Spectroscopy) as a surface-specific technique.Based on observations reporting on the structure and bonding at the calcite surfaces we have identified copper complexes and mixed calcium/copper carbonates associated with the stains, as well as the chemical state of other elements therein included, and related the compositional changes with differences in chromatic characteristics and sampling locations.

Inscribing Authority: Female Title Bearers in Jewish Inscriptions

This paper investigates representations of gender in the material culture of the ancient synagogue. The pertinent data are numerous dedicatory and funerary inscriptions linking individual Jews, men and women, with titles seemingly associated with leadership in Late Antique synagogues (ca. 200–600 CE). Bernadette Brooten’s influential 1982 monograph argued against the prevailing tendency to characterize these titles as indications of power, authority, and responsibility when associated with men but as meaningless flattery when applied to women. She suggests that synagogue titles denote power, authority and responsibility on all title bearers equally, both men and women. I question the continued utility of proffering female title-holders as enumerable examples of powerful women rescued from their forgotten place in history. Using theoretical insights developed by historians Elizabeth Clark and Gabrielle Spiegel, this paper will engage a comparative analysis with the work of Riet van Bremen and Saba Mahmood to develop new methods of conceptualizing women’s authority in early Jewish communities. I propose that viewing women’s synagogue titles as culturally constructed representations allows for a fruitful inquiry into how women’s titles were used by male-dominated synagogue communities in their self-articulation and public presentation of Judaism.

Philip Sidney in the Cloister: The Reading Habits of English Nuns in Seventeenth-Century Antwerp

This essay's title pays playful tribute to Sasha Roberts's ground-breaking 1998 work on Shakespeare (who creepes into the womens closets about bedtime) in which she investigates the spaces where women read Venus and Adonis.1 Here, though, I focus on the reading conditions of English nuns living in enclosed convents in or near Antwerp during the period from 1619 until 1794 when they returned to England, considering what they read and where as well as the effects of those conditions on their reception of particular texts.From the nuns' accounts, I find no evidence of activity like that alleged in 1623 by Thomas Robinson in his supposed expose of the English Brigittine community in Lisbon into which he claimed the confessor introduced obscene literature: there are few idle Pamphlets printed in England which he hath not in the house.2 This reading precisely located in the 'dark' privacy of the bedchamber late in the evening, after supper, behind closed doors (Roberts 39). In Antwerp, it mostly takes place within the community and follows prescribed book lists. If that sounds less potentially enticing, bedroom reading of a kind is mentioned. One asthmatic nun is said to have read saints' lives at night since she was unable to lie down without being ready to stifle with violen[t] oppression. Her lungs making a noise exactly lik[e] a pare of Bag Pipes (A2, 297).One particular book in the convent is especially intriguing in the context of Robinson's aspersions. The preface to a 1670 edition of Julian of Norwich's Revelations of Divine Love asks the reader to afford Her a place in your Closet (Cressy, Dedicatory Letter). I wish to examine the implications of that request for our understanding of reading in a same-sex community, and by doing so I am able to draw some wider inferences about female religious closets in the early modern period, situating this understanding within the debate about Catholicism and nationhood.3 I also consider the reception of Philip Sidney's Arcadia by one nun who, having enjoyed the book as a young woman, later rejected it: I explore the consequences of sequential reading, the after-life of books as well as readers, to investigate why one book might be received into the convent while another was refused.First, we need to consider the kind of spaces available in the convent and the meaning of in such a setting. Cultural historians have long associated ideas of personal space, including that of the body itself, with subjectivity. Nascent interiority of the early modern period has often been linked with changes to domestic privacy, with the closet seen as a space of potential solitude and personal re-creation. Mary Thomas Crane has shown that, in fact, privacy was more often to be found outside the house, where an ecological selfhood was shaped within a larger physical environment. Such studies complicate assumptions about the gendering of separate spheres. An examination of the living conditions of English nuns also adds to the intricacy of interpretation. These were women who lived outside the home, in enclosures of a different kind, semi-autonomous, in exile from their homeland during periods of persecution, pursuing a communal, contemplative resolve. The way nuns are spatially envisaged is due in part to antagonistic polemic, Robinson's included, in which convents were represented as prisons where reluctantly encloistered women were in thrall to devious priests. Our understanding of privacy in such contexts needs to be extrapolated from this prevailing propaganda and from the nuns' own idealized accounts in which their convents are often represented as expatriate havens.Notwithstanding the complexity of interpreting competing views surrounding religious women, the nuns' records show their own clear experience of spaces, discernible beyond the more rhetorical tropisms. They also reveal evidence about the conception of their own bodies as both spaces in themselves and as experienced within their surroundings. …

A New Form of Evidence to Date the Madaba Map Mosaic

One lingering problem facing researchers of the Madaba Map mosaic is its precise date of manufacture. The historical geography evident in the mosaic and stylistic considerations are generally viewed as the essential dating indicators. Michele Piccirillo suggested that the Map and mosaics from the nearby church of Sts. Lot and Procopius were paved by the same workshop, primarily on the strength of style. An analysis of the technique employed by the artisans to illustrate certain detailing elements common to these mosaics leads to the compelling belief that they were indeed manufactured by the same workshop. The pavement from Sts. Lot and Procopius can be reliably dated by its dedicatory inscription to a specific year that also accords with the period ascertained by the Map’s historical evidence. Consequently, this should stand as the probable date for the creation of the Map mosaic.