CALL FOR PAPERS
Colloquium on ‘Roman Provincial Calendars and the Hemerologia’
University College London
Monday 4 – Wednesday 6 July 2016
The ERC Advanced Grant Project ‘Calendars in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages’ is delighted to issue a call for papers for a colloquium to be held on 4-6 July 2016 at University College London on the theme of ‘Roman Provincial calendars and the Hemerologia’.
Calendars were an important manifestation of cultural diversity in the Roman Empire, especially in the provinces of the Roman East, where the Julian calendar was generally not in use. The calendars of cities and provinces were very diverse, some remaining lunar or lunisolar, but most becoming adapted in a variety of forms to the solar, Julian calendar of the imperial rulers.
This diversity is evident in epigraphic sources, but most explicitly in texts known as Hemerologia, which are attested in a few early medieval manuscripts. The Hemerologia consist of calendar tables with the days of the Julian calendar in the first column, and in the rest of the table, the equivalent days in a range of calendars from the Roman Eastern provinces and cities. These texts are a powerful testimony of calendar diversity in the Roman East, but at the same time, of the standardization of these calendars and their assimilation with the 365-day year of the Julian calendar. The historical reality behind the Hemerologia was probably more complex and flexible than they convey. But by describing or indeed prescribing a changeless, fixed relationship between the Julian and provincial calendars, the Hemerologia may have played a critical role in the standardization of time reckoning in late Antiquity. Continue reading
