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What early medieval saint did Pope Benedict XVI defend in a recent speech?
Please send trivia responses in email with the subject line "trivia" directly to gabriel gryffyn (ggryffyn.cms@gmail.com). Previous weeks' trivia results will be announced en masse NEXT WEEK.
Edited by UMN faculty Calvin Kendall, Oliver Nicholson, William Phillips, and Marguerite Ragnow, this volume brings a comparative approach to what, in recent years, has been a hotly debated topic within and across a number of academic disciplines: conversion to Christianity. These debates register the challenges inherent in attempting to understand a transformation that was at once personal and collective--a matter of inner conviction and outward conformity. The essays in this volume range from the late antique Middle East to medieval Western and Eastern Europe; from early modern Asia to the Americas and islands in the central Pacific.
Collectively, the ten authors encourage consideration of the conversion phenomenon comparatively across time and space. Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Prince of Austurias Professor of History at Tufts University, frames the essays in a broader global perspective in light of the two other major world religions, Islam and Buddhism, in his Prologue, while John M. Headley, Distinguished University Professor, University of North Carolina, considers the various conversion processes and their broader impact within the cultural transformation of the societies involved, foreshadowing "the uncertain extension of the universal jurisdiction of humanity . . . to the peoples of the globe" that is one of the transformative processes of the 21st century.
ISBN: 9780979755903 (hardcover) 2009, 449 pages.
Price: US $95.00
"The Use of Documents of European Archives for the History of the Maghreb during the Colonial Period": A workshop with Dominique Valérian (Paris, History)
"Merchant Identities in the Medieval Mediterranean World": A talk by Dominique Valerian
Dominique Valérian is maître de conférences at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. He is the author of Les sources italiennes de l'histoire du Maghreb médiéval (2006) and Bougie, port maghrébin, 1067-1510 (2006), and a co-editor of Chemins d'outre-mer (2005) and Espaces et réseaux en Méditerranée médiévale (2007).
The paper for the workshop can be downloaded ValerianTexts.doc.
Additionally cosponsored by the Identity in the Mediterranean World Collaborative.
What is the given name of the titular figure in an Anglo-Saxon poem about a sea creature that can pretend to be an island in order to lure sailors to their doom?
Please send trivia responses in email with the subject line "trivia" directly to gabriel gryffyn (ggryffyn.cms@gmail.com). Previous weeks' trivia results will be announced en masse once a new prize has been decided on.
What book, surviving from the early 10th century, consists of just a palimpsest of a few wooden tablets and wax pages, but suggests the early origins of an Eastern European heresy as the author records prayers in which the place of God is taken by that of an Armenian prophet named Alexander?
Please send trivia responses in email with the subject line "trivia" directly to gabriel gryffyn (ggryffyn.cms@gmail.com).
Name the eighth century settlement on the Volkhov River that served as an important trading post and later as a capital city for a dynasty that then moved to Kiev and went on to survive in one form or another until shortly after the death of Ivan the Terrible.
Answers to gabriel gryffyn (ggryffyn.cms@gmail.com) with the subject line "trivia" by noon on Wednesday, 30 September.
Stephen Martin of the University of Minnesota, Duluth will be speaking on Vetting the Variorum for French-Language Studies.
Where: Nolte Center 140
When: Tuesday, October 6 at 4:00 p.m.