ChronARG, the result of international collaboration, is a critical presentation of recent scholarship pertinent to the study of ancient Greek material religion, published annually in Kernos.

Lena C. Steinjahns verfasste einen theologisch-religionswissenschaftlichen Beitrag zu „Mächtige Männer – ohnmächtige Frauen? Machtkonzeption und Geschlecht in den spätantiken Texten zur Diakonin Olympias von Konstantinopel“. Der Aufsatz bietet eine geschlechtersensible Lesart von spätantiken Texten über die byzantinische Diakonin, Ordensstifterin und Äbtissin Olympias, ihre Vita und Legende. Ausgehend vom Machtkonzept Foucaults, werden einerseits die Zusammenhänge zwischen Machtverhältnissen, Machtvoraussetzungen und unkonventionellen weiblichen Handlungs- und Gestaltungspotenzialen von Olympias als historischer Person analysiert. Andererseits wird die jeweilige auktoriale Deutungsmacht der Texte in den Blick genommen. Auf diese Weise werden die textuellen Konstruktionen, Erzähl- und Deutungsschemata transparent, mit denen die einzelnen Verfasser ihr meist hagiographisches Olympias-Bild legendial modellieren und strategisch zur Sicherung tradierter patriarchaler Geschlechterrollen und -stereotype verwenden.

The myth of the Amazons began in Ancient Greece. Renditions of the myth were found in art and literature of the Greeks and Romans in the ancient world. The image of the Amazons changed with the culture and ideology that discussed them. The Amazon myth reflected Greek and Roman views of women. Through looking closely at the three stages of the myth of the Amazons one can determine the myth strengthens the image of women that was held by men of the ancient world. The Amazons were connected with the heroes Heracles, Theseus, and Alexander the Great. Individual Amazons such as Antiope, Penthesilea, and Camilla were also dominant in the mythology of the Amazons. By completing a literary analysis of the myths of the Amazons beginning in the eighth century B.C. and through the fourth century A.D. one is able to see what was expected and deemed acceptable of women.

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En année 408 après J.-C., l’Espagne, malgré sa position péninsulaire à la fin de l’Europe, était intégrée à une culture pan-Méditerranéenne qui s’étendait du Portugal jusqu’à la Syrie. Trois décennies n’étaient pas encore passées depuis l’instauration du Christianisme comme religion de l’état romain et l’Eglise Catholique était en pleine croissance. L’année suivante, l’Espagne entra sur une voie de transformation irrémédiable alors que les païens, avec leurs langues barbares Germaniques franchirent les Pyrénées portant la guerre et la misère aux Hispano-Romains et fondant leurs royaumes là où auparavant gouvernait l’état romain. Dans le désarroi du Ve siècle, les évêques Catholiques luttèrent pour imposer leur dominance dans les communautés et dans les coeurs des pieux. À la lumière des progrès dans l’archéologie et la qualité des éditions critiques de nos sources littéraires est venu le moment d’identifier les évêques ibériques avec une attention aux conditions régionales. Ce mémoire caractérise les évêques de l’Espagne et du Portugal et démontre les épreuves auxquelles ils firent face comme intermédiaires entre indigènes et envahisseurs, comme évangélistes parmi les païens, persécuteurs des apostates et gardiens de la romanitas à la fin du monde Antique. / In Anno Domini 408, Spain, despite its peninsular location at the ends of Europe, was part of a pan-Mediterranean culture which spread from Portugal to Syria. Christianity had been adopted a mere 28 years prior and the Catholic Church was growing across the Roman world. The following year, Spain entered on a course of irreversible transformation as pagan Germanic speaking 'barbarians' crossed the Pyrenees bringing war and strife to the Hispano-Romans and establishing new kingdoms where the Roman state had once governed. In the turmoil of the fifth century, Catholic bishops laboured to assert their dominance over their communities and over the hearts of their flock. In light of advances in archaeology and quality critical editions of the literary sources, the time has come to identify the traits of the Iberian bishops with attention to regional variation. This thesis characterises the bishops of Spain and Portugal and demonstrates the challenges they faced as intermediaries between natives and newcomers, as proselytizers of pagans, persecutors of heretics and retainers of romanitas at the end of the Antique world.

This study aims to explore the mosaics in the Sala delle Palestrite at Villa Romana del Casale in Piazza Armerina, Sicily. These mosaics depict women wearing garments that resemble modern bikinis. However, upon closer examination of the roles of these ten women, it becomes evident that their attire is a form of Roman underwear, worn in an athletic context. Rather than being bikini-dressed figures, the women in the mosaic are athletes engaged in various sports activities from both ancient Greek and Roman cultures. The concept of aretḗ, which celebrates the ideal combination of strength, beauty, and harmony, often explains why Greek athletes are depicted nude. In contrast, the clothed female athletes in the mosaic suggest a different interpretation of female aretḗ, highlighting a paradox between the ideal representations of male and female athletic bodies. This depiction may however also signal an increase in women's autonomy during the 4th century AD, possibly resulting from broader cultural and social changes that reduced restrictions on women during this period. Furthermore, this study argues that these female athletes embody not only progressive but also aristocratic values. The mosaic reflects the upper class's interest in using artistic expressions to convey social status and intellectuality within their homes. With the increased social freedoms of the period, including women's rights to own land, the mosaic could represent the villa's domina attempt to portray a new image of women, diverging from traditional roles. Although the mosaic indicates greater social freedom for aristocratic women, it also reveals the persistence of traditional values in its stylistic expression. Given the historical association between women, fertility, and physical activity, the athletes' bodies might serve to communicate female aretḗ, often linked with fertility and reproduction. Alternatively, this could also highlight a recurring issue in art history; the limited representation of the female body, especially in contexts like athleticism, which did not conform to traditional portrayals of women. In conclusion, the mosaics offer a complex portrayal of female athletes that reflect both progressive and traditional values, illustrating broader social changes and the evolving roles of women in ancient society. It is thus unique evidence of the early female liberation.

With each generation arrives at a new understanding and specifically creates a new representation of the ancient pharaoh Tutankhamun. My study analyzes the role of Tutankhamun in American media and popular culture, especially the changing depictions of the Pharaoh over time. My thesis discusses the historical Tutankhamμn and the how this differs from the "Golden Boy" Tut popularized in modem times since the discovering of the tomb by Howard Carter. His discovery launched an Egyptomania craze periodically resurged over the course of the century~ particularly in the years immediately following the find, 1978t and in 2005-2007. My analysis further explores why American society fashioned particular representations of Tutankbamun, and Egypt as a whole from his tomb that contained insufficient connections with the historical King Tutanlqiamun. The study concentrates on three time periods distinct by heightened fascination - the opening of the tomb and the first and second museum touring of the Tut exhibits in the United States. The created images are exploited for monetary gain by the media while driven by Western society as a measure of our own cultural self--definition. Each modification of the Pharaoh reflects the changing culture of American society.

The subject of the present work is the provision of higher literate education in late Roman Syria (c. 350 - c. 450). The difference that Christianity made to literate education has always been in danger of being explained with the introduction and the development of a new kind of instruction provided in monasteries. A rigid dichotomy between secular schools and Christian monasteries, however, finds limited validation in our sources for literate education. While early Christian literature often presented monasteries as providers of education, documentary evidence offers a more blurred picture. On the one hand, studentsʼ papyri show the penetration of Christianity into schools, and, on the other, secular instructional texts have been found in the excavations of early monasteries in Egypt. This thesis presents a neglected corpus of Christian instructional texts that call into question an oppositional understanding of scholastic and monastic education in the Syrian region during late Antiquity. The corpus consists of the Syriac translations of six literary pieces by (or attributed to) Plutarch, Lucian, and Themistius that bring together features of rhetorical education with an interest in Christian asceticism (ch. 2). While the contents and the transmission of the Syriac translations reveal the link to Christianity and Christian ascetic practice (ch. 3), the textual form and the choice of the texts unearths the underlying connection to traditional literate education (ch. 4). These documents, which will be put in relation to instructional literature composed in Greek, Latin, and Syriac in the same period, challenge the existence of a neat line dividing scholastic and monastic education in the Syrian region during late Antiquity. A fresh analysis that is not constrained by a preconceived model of monastic instruction better accounts for the involvement of early Christian leaders in higher education and prompts a new investigation of their conduct on the social scene. Their agency now appears much closer to that of their non-Christian counterparts, sophists in primis, and raises the broader question of the extent to which they owed their considerable success to the implementation of strategies ultimately derived from the world of professional paideia.

The subject of my thesis is a little-studied hagiographical work that gives important insights into rewriting processes and their significance in medieval textual culture. The anonymous Life of Christina of Hane, a thirteenth-century Premonstratensian nun from the Palatinate, is an example of bridal mysticism which combines the medieval tradition of the reception of the Song of Songs with hagiographic elements. A codicological and palaeographical analysis of the only manuscript shows it to be a sixteenth-century copy, but the type of mysticism and the theological questions that it discusses suggest that the text was initially composed in the thirteenth century, when Christina is thought to have lived. The theological and spiritual ideas in the text belong to the wider context of communicating the transcendental within the world. My thesis uses performative language analysis to address the problems of textuality and authorization in the Life of Christina of Hane. It yields new insights into the ways in which this mystical text makes use of hagiographic strategies, how gender and vernacular theology are linked, how liturgical elements support the text’s pragmatic nature, and how somatic spirituality is reflected on an allegorical level in the embodiment of God’s bride. An assessment of three communicative aspects – medial, narrative, and allegorical – highlights the textualization of the mystical experience. The appellative structure of Christina’s text invites the reader to engage with the text. This study provides the first comprehensive interpretation of the text on Christina of Hane. It compares it to other mystical texts, to a German–Latin prayerbook, and to a fragmentary legend about Mary Magdalene. It challenges existing judgments about Christina’s biography and offers alternative solutions founded in the latest scholarship on female mystical literature.

In this thesis, I hope to demonstrate that what I call the magic contest tradition, that is the episodes of competitive wonder-working that appear in a wide variety of apocryphal and non-canonical Christian texts, made an important contribution to the development of Christian thought during the second to the fifth centuries CE. This contribution was to articulate ‘the way’ to be a Christian in a world which was not isolated from the secular, and not insulated from the reality of the Roman empire. First, I demonstrate that a tradition of texts which feature magic contests exists within the broader scope of non-canonical Christian literature (looking at this literature across communities, regions and time periods). Second, I identify what the major features of the traditions are, e.g. what form the narratives take, what the form for a magic contest is, and what the principles used to build the magic contests are, and how these principles feature in the texts. The principles I identify are power, authority, ritual, and conversion, as well as their use as historical exempla. Third, I discuss what the texts did in the context of the time period, and for the communities that produced and read them: in other words, how did the this tradition work? I show that they served multiple purposes: as tests of faith, religious truth and ways to proclaim such; as constructors and markers of group identity (and the perilous task of identifying the insiders and those who should be outsiders); as calls to unity within the overarching diversity of the times and places, and a unified front for the ‘battle’ against evil. I suggest that the texts present a model for how one could decide what the ‘true faith’ was and how one could practice it in the turbulent environment that early Christians faced both before and after Constantine.