Volume 3, issue 2 (winter 1995-1996)
News from Groningen
by Peter Hatlie
There have been a few events worthy of note and others to look forward to.
Prof. Henry Maguire of the University of Illinois and Dumbarton gave a lecture in Groningen on 21 Sept. 1995. It was entitled Magic and Money in the Early Middle Ages. The local research group COMERS (The Centre for Oriental, Medieval, and Renaissance Studies) and the Department of Modern Greek and Byzantine Studies sponsored it.
A workshop involving Byzantium took place in Groningen on 22-23 September. The participants were Prof. Judith Herrin of King's College London, Profs. Eunice Dautermann Maguire and Henry Maguire of the University of Illinois and Dumbarton Oaks, and Dr. Alice-Mary Talbot of Dumbarton Oaks. The topic of the workshop was Women and Religion in the Middle Ages, East and West. Herrin addressed the period from late antiquity to Iconoclasm. Dautermann Maguire and Maguire discussed the material culture of religious women for the entire Byzantine age. Talbot focused on Byzantine women from Iconoclasm to 1453. There were also several prominent Western Medievalists on the program, which prompted much lively discussion about the similarities and differences in religious devotion by women in the two different cultures. Another meeting of the workshop is being organized for 1996, and there are tentative plans for a publication for 1997. For more information, contact Peter Hatlie in Groningen.
COMERS will sponsor an International Congress on Pre- Modern Encyclopedic Texts on 1-4 July 1996. Five main sessions are planned, each of which is meant to include all the disciplines represented by COMERS, including Byzantine. The deadline for submitting abstracts is 15 January 1996. Byzantine scholars are strongly encouraged to submit an abstract. For more information (or to submit your abstract), contact Dr. Peter Binkley, Int'l Encyclopedia Congress, Oude Boteringestraat 23, 9712 GC Groningen, The Netherlands. Tel. (050) 262 72 63. Information is also available on the World Wide Web (WWW) at:
Dr. Spartharakis (Leiden), Van Gemert (Amsterdam) and Hatlie (Groningen) have arranged for a visit to the Netherlands by Dr. Massimo Bernabo, an art historian from the University of Florence, Italy. Among his several publications is The Byzantine Octateuchs (forthcoming), which he co-authored with the late Prof. Kurt Weitzmann. Dr. Bernabo will visit and lecture in each of the above universities in late February/early March 1996. For more information, contact one of the sponsors above.
Drs. Thanasis Dialektopoulos took his diploma in Byzantinologie on 5 October 1995. The title of his scriptie, written in Greek, was Observations on the issue of education according to the church fathers of the fourth century. Warm congratulations to Thanasis for completing his course of study.