Gregor Kalas writes on the cultural significance of Sidonius’ portrait bust among others in ‘Portraits of Poets and the Lecture Halls in the Forum of Trajan: Masking Cultural Tensions in Late Antique Rome’, in: Gregor Kalas and Ann van Dijk (eds), Urban Developments in Late Antique and Medieval Rome: Revising the Narrative of Renewal, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021, 75-108.
See catalogue
We are delighted to announce the conference ‘The Jeweled Style Revisited’, which aims at developing, extending, celebrating and refining (aspects of) the concept first described by Michael Roberts in his seminal study The Jeweled Style (1989). The conference is going to take place online (Zoom) on Friday 25 June and Saturday 26 June 2021.
For the programme, see below or here. To register, please email helen.kaufmann@fau.de by 24 June. All are welcome!
Best wishes,
Joshua Hartman and Helen Kaufmann
The Jeweled Style Revisited
Friday 25 June 2021
14.45h Welcome: Joshua Hartman (Bowdoin) and Helen Kaufmann (Erlangen)
14.50h Introduction: Joshua Hartman (Bowdoin)
15.00h-16.30h: First session: Vergil, Homer, and Classicism in the Jeweled Style
Scott McGill (Rice), Virgil’s children: Christian centos and Virgil’s fourth Eclogue
Frances Foster (Cambridge), Learning the Jeweled Style
Fotini Hadjittofi (Lisbon), The Greek Jeweled Style
16.30h-16.45h: Break
16.45h-18.15h: Second session: Homiletics, Exegesis, and the Jeweled Style
David Ungvary (Bard), The cento and scripture: An early Christian debate over the poetics of exegesis
Francesco Lubian (Padua), Sparkles and textures: Jeweled sea storm descriptions in Zeno of Verona and Ambrose’s Exameron
Elena Castelnuovo (Milan), Biblical clusters in Dracontius’ De Laudibus Dei: A Christian Jeweled Style?
18.15h-18.30h: Break
18.30h-20.00h: Third session: Testing the Boundaries of the Jeweled Style
Markus Kersten and Ann-Kathrin Stähle (Basel), Jewels or rhinestones? Diminishing paratexts in Ausonius and Sidonius Apollinaris
Jesús Hernández Lobato (Salamanca), An ‘unjeweled’ Christian style? A look at Augustine’s Confessions
Bret Mulligan (Haverford), The Jeweled Style in epigram
Saturday 26 June 2021
15.00h-16.30h: Fourth session: The Language of the Jeweled Style
Michael Roberts (Wesleyan), The Jeweled Style in context
Cillian O’Hogan (Toronto), The Jeweled Style in early medieval Latin poetry
Christoph Schubert (Erlangen), Metaphor squared
16.30h-16.45h: Break
16.45h-18.15h: Fifth session: Histories of The Jeweled Style
Ian Fielding (Michigan), Run the jewels: The decadent prehistory of the Jeweled Style
Ruth Parkes (UWTSD), Reclaiming the wood from the trees: The Jeweled Style and Silver Latin scholarship
Carole Newlands (Colorado), Architectural ekphrasis in Venantius Fortunatus: Beyond the Jeweled Style
18.15h-18.30h: Break
18.30h-20.00h: Sixth session: Unity, Genre, and the Jeweled Style
Andreas Abele (Tübingen), The Jeweled Style and Neoplatonism
Catherine Ware (Cork), The Jeweled Style in prose panegyric
Helen Kaufmann (Erlangen), Digression, variety and unity in (late) Latin poetry
20.00h-20.30h: Break
20.30h: Final discussion
All times are Central European Time.
Further information: https://www.klassische-philologie.phil.fau.de/2021/06/12/internationale-tagung-the-jeweled-style-revisited/
Sylvie Crogiez-Pétrequin devotes pages 453-54 of her article ‘Les bénéficiaires du cursus publicus: des privilégiés?’, Revue historique 698 (2021) 447-62 to Sidonius’ voyage to Rome in 467.
See also her 2010 article ‘Sidoine Apollinaire et le col du Petit Saint Bernard’ (biblio, tab 2010).
Hendrik Hess (Bonn) comes up with a review of the Companion in Historische Zeitschrift 312 (2021) 760-61. He values it as ‘ein unverzichtbarer Begleiter für Studien zur gallischen Geschichte des 5. Jahrhunderts im Allgemeinen und zu Sidonius’ Texten im Speziellen’, in which gender aspects remain somewhat underexposed.
In ‘La Psychomachia de Prudencio: un artefacto inspirado’, Circe 25 (2021) 141-59, Juan Manuel Danza (Bahía Blanca, Universidad Nacional del Sur) compares Sidonius’ Ad Catullinum poem for the negative metapoetics of Late Antiquity.
The three volumes of Max Manitius’ Geschichte der lateinischen Literatur des Mittelalters are a Fundgrube of the most minute references. Joop van Waarden has made a three-page document which is an elaboration, for the lemma Sidonius Apollinaris, of the indexes of these volumes by means of the text passages they refer to. Its aim is to simplify access to the wealth of detail they contain, and make them even more accessible for the study of Sidonius’ reception.
This document initiates a new page ‘Appendices’ in the Companion Continued section. Here goes.
Fabio Gasti (Pavia) has written a report of the Sidonius Companion for Athenaeum 109/1, 2021, appreciating ‘la rilevanza dell’iniziativa editoriale, che configura senz’altro un momento critico di alto livello interpretativo e di ampio respiro storico-letterario’.
Website of this journal here.
Franz Dolveck adds three manuscripts to his census:
60 bis*. Vatican City, Bibl. Vat., Pal. lat. 1587
83 bis*. Florence, BML, plut. 45. 11
85 bis*. Cologny, Fondation Martin Bodmer, 46
See his explanations on this website, page Companion Continued: Three More Manuscripts
Bruno Luiselli, professor emeritus of Latin literature at La Sapienza University, died on 2 June at the age of 87 years. A versatile academic, he was a leading authority in the field of romano-barbarian studies. He founded the Romanobarbarica review as well as the series Biblioteca di Cultura Romanobarbarica. His own output includes, among much else, Romanobarbarica. Scritti scelti, Florence 2017, and Storia culturale dei rapporti tra mondo romano e mondo germanico, Rome 1992.
Read the obituary in La Repubblica here.
SISMEL/Edizioni del Galuzzo publishes the Nuova Biblioteca di Cultura Romanobarbarica in his honour. Its editors are Proff. Antonella Bruzzone, Alessandro Fo, and Luigi Piacente. Information here.
Now announced by Liverpool University Press for publication on 1 November 2021:
Roger P.H. Green, Sidonius Apollinaris. Complete Poems, Translated Texts for Historians 76.
Sidonius Apollinaris was an inhabitant of southern Roman Gaul in the mid fifth century AD, when it was threatened by invasions from beyond the boundaries of the Roman Empire and by competing warlords. His many poetic works include three panegyrics to emperors at the beginnings of their reigns; these are carefully translated and annotated, and provided with comment and synopses. His multiple shorter poems, in a variety of metres, are translated into appropriate English and given separate introductions and notes of various kinds, historical and literary. There is an extensive and informative introduction to the whole work.
This book by Roger Green, a lifelong expert in Late Antiquity, gives a firsthand account of the political strife and manoeuvring of the times but also a vivid picture of the lives of his like-minded friends in an almost post-Roman episode of Rome’s existence. Sidonius was read widely in the Middle Ages, with a golden age in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and also in the fifteenth century revival of Late Antique literature. Today his poetry will awaken new study and interest, without the archaism of many older translations and with a fresh and updated approach to many issues.
