December 2015
On Friday and Saturday 4th and 5th December 2015, UCL hosted a joint workshop organized by Benet Salway of the History Department's Volterra project and by Dario Mantovani of the REDHIS Project (REDiscovering the Hidden Structure), Pavia. About twenty scholars mostly from Italy and the UK, including Benet Salway, Simon Corcoran and Michael Crawford, gathered to discuss late antique juristic thought in the light of fresh work on Roman legal texts surviving on parchment and papyrus from Egypt and elsewhere. Entirely new texts were showcased, as were radically new reconstructions of others long known, all part of a long-term ERC funded project to produce a corpus of the juristic texts from late antiquity and to analyse their significance. This will include the Fragmenta Londiniensia Anteiustiniana, the set of fifth-century parchment scraps, which were originally identified at UCL some 5 years ago by Salway and Corcoran as coming from the otherwise lost Gregorian Code, an important collection of imperial laws that the laid down the pattern for the later Codes of Theodosius II and Justinian.
Everyone's hard work puzzling out the complex Sudoku of fragmentary Greek and Latin material was rewarded with a fine repast in the Provost's Dining Room.
November 2015
Simon Corcoran gives a presentation entitled "Harbours and shipping in imperial rescripts and letters" as part of the Oxford Portuslimen seminar day "Rome and the Sea: Juridical Approaches", held at All Souls College, Oxford.
October 2015
Consuelo Carrasco García (Charles III University, Madrid) joins the History Department as a Visiting Professor for the year 2015/2016 under the aegis of the Projet Volterra to research the use of pignus in Latin literary sources.
September 2015
The project holds a workshop in the Dept. of History at UCL to discuss the fragments of Diocletian's Currency Decrees from Aphrodisias in the light of the new piece of the inscription discovered in 2014 and published in 2015 (Journal of Roman Studies 105: doi 10.1017/S0075435815000933). The workshop was led by Prof. Michael Crawford and was attended by a small group of international scholars, who are making up a team to help in the preparation of the edition of the decrees for a forthcoming Aphrodisias volume.
Simon Corcoran's chapter entitled "From unholy madness to right-mindedness: or how to legislate for religious conformity from Decius to Justinian" is published in the volume Conversion in Late Antiquity: Christianity, Islam, and Beyond, edited by Arietta Papaconstantinou (Ashgate). This is based on a paper originally given at Corpus Christi College, Oxford in January 2010.
July 2015
Simon Corcoran gives a paper entitled "Roman law and the two languages in Justinian's empire", as part of the conference held at All Souls College, Oxford, to celebrate Professor Sir Fergus Millar's 80th birthday.
The Volterra team (Corcoran, Crawford, Salway) participates in the Leeds International Medieval Congress, where the project sponsors two sessions on the theme "The Roman legal heritage between continuity and reformation in the tenth and eleventh centuries". https://www.ucl.ac.uk/volterra/colloquia/v2c6
Simon Corcoran's chapter on "Hincmar and his Roman legal sources", based upon a presentation give at the Leeds IMC in July 2012, is published in the volume Hincmar of Rheims. Life and Work, edited by Rachel Stone and Charles West (Manchester University Press).
June 2015
Simon Corcoran gives a presentation entitled "When the slave becomes the master: Or how the commentary becomes the law in early medieval legal texts", as part of the Marginal Scholarship project conference "Early Medieval Practices of Reading and Writing", held at the Huygens Institute in the Royal Dutch Academy in The Hague.
Benet Salway gives a paper at Charles III University in Madrid on the textual transmission of the Theodosian Code.
April 2015
Simon Corcoran represents the project at the conference "Texte regenerieren, Kontexte rekonstruieren" held at the University of Münster by the project working on a palingenesis of Roman senatorial decrees. He gives a presentation entitled "The Projet Volterra and the palingenesis of imperial constitutions: principles and problems".
Simon Corcoran and Benet Salway participate in the Journée d'études "Figures impériales tardives" held at Université Lille 3.
February 2015
Simon Corcoran gives a reprise of his Codex Gregorianus paper in the series Conférences de l'Institut de Droit Romain at l'Université Paris 2 (Panthéon-Assas), and also a reprise of his Sirmondian 19 paper at the Oxford Late Antique seminar, held in Trinity College, Oxford.