The Late Bronze Age was a period of heightened international diplomacy throughout the eastern Mediterranean littoral and the Near East. A direct result of this supra-regional interconnectivity is argued to have been the formation of an independent hybrid visual style, the ‘International Style’, an iconographic idiom which occurs sparingly on art…[Read more]

Die Vita der heiligen Adelheid von Vilich, geschrieben um 1056/57, wird vor dem Hintergrund ihres Entstehungskontextes interpretiert.

Lotharingia and East Francia: Marriage as a Political Instrument? – Kings and nobles arranged marriages for their daughters in order to form or strengthen po- litical alliances. Historical writers of the tenth century interpreted the relations of the Ottonian kings Henry I and Otto I with the Lotharingian dukes Giselbert and Conrad the Red in t…[Read more]

The present article examines the Corpus Leidense, the group of eight Ciceronian treatises among which the De natura deorum was also transmitted, focusing on its archetype. The second and longer section contains the first complete list of the 174 identified manuscripts of De natura deorum, with 57 new items added to the 117 already listed by Pease…[Read more]

Recent scholarship has done much to challenge the long-held antipathy towards Pausanias, even if some of the best studies appear “enamored not so much of Pausanias himself as they are of the idea of Pausanias”. As one of the leading new Pausaniacs, Greta Hawes has been at the vanguard of efforts to get the measure of this storied landscape. Her…[Read more]

The subject of this chapter is a single contested word in Herodotus’ Histories. In it I explore its semantic range and use it to think about broader questions of Herodotus’ interplay with Homer. Where many of the Homeric touches in Herodotus can be put down to, and more productively used, as examples of traditional referentiality or, at least, n…[Read more]

The seventh-century Regula cuiusdam ad uirgines (Someone’s Rule for Virgins), which was most likely written by Jonas of Bobbio, the hagiographer of the Irish monk Columbanus, forms an ideal point of departure for writing a new history of the emergence of Western monasticism understood as a history of the individual and collective attempt to p…[Read more]

This chapter is published within Early Medieval English Life Courses: Cultural-Historical Perspectives, ed. Porck and Soper. Please email me if you would like to cite it and I will send you a PDF with page numbers.

Announcement for the opening of the exhibition “Eden and Everything After” at the University of Stavanger Archaelogical Museum and publication of attendant catalogue.

This chapter traces cross-communal interactions in the fields of medicine, mathematics and what the historical actors called the natural sciences. It discusses various modern interpretations of those interactions and engages with a number of historical problems researchers face when studying the extant sources. After a substantive survey of the…[Read more]

This course offers a survey of the archaeology of settled landscapes in the ancient Mediterranean world,
including both the ancient Near East and the Mediterranean basin. In particular, the course will focus on
city-country dichotomies in order to study the patterns of development, demography, and land use in
selected case study areas. While…[Read more]

This course provides an introduction to the visual culture and art forms of the Italo-Roman world from the
Early Iron Age to the beginning of Late Antiquity. The course examines the developmental arcs of art
forms in various spheres (public, private, sacred, funereal) and considers key media (sculpture, painting,
mosaic, decorative arts).…[Read more]

This course provides an introduction to the visual culture and art forms of the Italo-Roman world from the
Early Iron Age to the beginning of Late Antiquity. The course examines the developmental arcs of art
forms in various spheres (public, private, sacred, funereal) and considers key media (sculpture, painting,
mosaic, decorative arts).…[Read more]

This paper uses the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the publication of the original report on the Corbridge Hoard, together with the redisplay of the finds in the site museum at Corbridge, to review the findings of the original report. The ‘lorica segmentata’ armour is considered in the light of more recent finds from Carlisle (UK), Stillfried…[Read more]

At the Fourth Roman Military Equipment Conference in Newcastle in 1987, I first explored the reconstruction of Roman cavalry harness, attempting to harmonise the evidence from sculptural representations and archaeological excavation. Much has been learned since then, and this paper attempts to review how some of the principles expounded back then…[Read more]

A select group of 1st-century AD ‘Totenmahl’ tombstones shows Roman auxiliary cavalry horses being long-reined. These same stones also provide the main sculptural evidence for the use of saddle plates. This paper begins by examining one set of privately owned horse harness and then broadens its focus to consider the wider implications of…[Read more]

Viking invasions and settlements left substantial legacies in late Anglo-Saxon England, attested in legal texts as a division between areas under Dena lage and those under Ængla lage. But how legal practice in Scandinavian-settled England functioned and differed from Anglo-Saxon law remains unclear. III Æthelred, the ‘Wantage Code’, provides criti…[Read more]

A work-in-progress, this is an extended bibliography on Messene covering the period from 1831 and up to today. It includes the excavation reports and archaeological/historical publications of ancient and byzantine Messene in Messenia, SW Peloponnese. Please send via mail or message any corrections, suggestions and additions.

The text signs on this comb are Minoan Linear A and not the Proto-Canaanite of Serabit el-Khadim as claimed in its 2022 archaeology report. Like most pre-classical linear texts found by archaeology, the language of this text is Akkadian which was the language of the Neolithic farming culture which spread into Europe from the Near-East starting…[Read more]

The ninth-century Annales Fontanellenses are a concise set of monastic annals composed by the community of St Wandrille, situated along the lower reaches of the river Seine. Covering the 840s and 850s, their contents are concerned with a relatively brief but highly tumultuous period in the history of the Frankish realm, representing an eclectic…[Read more]