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This article focuses on the western cult of two saints, Cyrus and John, which was founded in Egypt – where Sophronios of Jerusalem composed the anargyroi 's hagiographic dossier in the seventh century – and quickly spread to Italy. The analysis of the manuscripts containing the Latin translations of Sophronios's texts allows us to trace the diffusion of this hagiographic corpus in Rome, and to link its transfer and first reception in Italy to a broad Mediterranean migration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The name Bian Que, like that of the Yellow Emperor (Huangdi), has reverberated through the development of Chinese medicine since the time of the Warring States. The discovery of a human figurine showing channels and strategic points, together with a number of medical texts, during the excavation of the Laoguanshan Han tomb in Chengdu, Sichuan, in 2012–13 has reignited controversies about whether it is correct to speak of a specific Bian Que school, or whether, as this paper argues, these texts were written by the Han physicians who used Bian Que as a mouthpiece to record their own medical expositions. The paper begins by examining the main characteristics of the Laoguanshan human figurine and discusses what this excavated artifact reveals about the early history of Chinese medicine. It questions the existence of the so-called Bian Que school and, obliquely, the suggested relationships between the school and the figurine and between the school and medical texts found in the same tomb. The paper shows how diverse the disjointed knowledge of medicine was and that the idea of a "school" does not accurately reflect what was happening in the transmission of medical knowledge during the Warring States, Qin, and Han periods (475 BCE–220 CE). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The origin of Attic reduplication (AR) in Greek, the phenomenon whereby roots beginning with VC- sequences copy the entire sequence in reduplication, is poorly understood. Contrary to the usual approach, which starts from the perfects of roots beginning with *HC- clusters (e.g., ἐλυθ - 'go out' < *h 1 lud h - ; perf. ἐλήλ (ο) υθα < *h 1 leh 1 l(ó)ud h - ?), it is argued here that AR began in the reduplicated aorist, where intensive reduplication was a shared innovation with Armenian (Gk. inf. ἀραρεῖν 'fit together' = Arm. 3 sg. arar 'made' < *h 2 er-h 2 r-e / o-). From here AR spread first to the weak forms of the perfect, leaving relic forms like the feminine participle ἀρᾰρυῖα , and then to the perfect paradigm more generally. The historical origin of AR was thus quite different from what might have been supposed from its descriptive profile in a synchronic grammar—a point to which a final discussion is devoted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Despite the historians' growing interest in material culture, collections of sacred objects have largely been overlooked by scholars of religious history and art history alike. While the former tend to reduce church artifacts to their religious function, the latter focus mostly on individual items of singular artistic import. This essay examines a collection of displaced relics from the perspective of their shifting meanings and multiple uses as ritual objects, offerings, gifts, and commodities. Charting the parallel displacements of objects and people during the Polish-Ottoman wars of 1672–1699, I argue that the mutability of the relics shaped the refugees' attempts to deal with the conflicting social obligations and economic pressures of exile. Drawing on the church inventories and trial records of the Armenian communities in Poland-Lithuania, this essay offers a wider analytical framework with which to approach the problems of migration, displacement, and collective possessions in the early modern world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historical studies have indicated that African religions, in the pre-colonial period, were dynamic and multilayered with long histories of contradictions, contestations, and synthesis. Using the Pokot of north-western Kenya as a case in point, this contribution attempts to demonstrate the fluidity that was inherent in African religions. The Pokot originally were an agro-pastoral group inhabiting the Cherang'any and the Sekerr ranges. During the first half of the nineteenth century, a section of them descended the hills to pursue pastoralism. In their pastoral excursions, they came into contact with Plain Nilotes, especially the Karimojong. What followed was cross-cultural bartering of religious artefacts, both ideological and material, in which process the Pokot adopted selected religious aspects from the Karimojong and fused them with their previous beliefs to formulate syncretism. This contribution not only highlights the religious concepts that were fused but, also, attempts to explain the process of fusion itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From a diachronic perspective, and considering both textual and visual evidence, this article traces the relic cult of SS Gregory Nazianzen and John Chrysostom. It focuses on two historical contexts, hitherto not compared with each other, in which both the relics and the architectural frame in which they were placed acquired significant additional meaning and value: tenth-century Constantinople and sixteenth- century Rome. I will show how Emperor Constantine VII, in the Holy Apostles, and Pope Gregory XIII, in St. Peter's, used the same relics as an instrument in a process of meaning-making, thereby asserting their own authority and prestige. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines a ḥadīth text that illustrates the complicated interactions between Christian and Islamic sacred spaces in the early period of Islamic rule in the Near East. In this narrative, the Prophet Muḥammad gives a group of Arabs instructions for how to convert a church into a mosque, telling them to use his ablution water for cleansing and repurposing the Christian space for Muslim worship. Contextualizing this narrative in terms of early Muslim-Christian relations, as well as late antique Christian religious texts and practices, my analysis compares this story with Christian traditions regarding the collection and usage of contact relics from holy persons and places. I argue that this story offers an example of early Islamic texts' engagement with, and adaptation of, Christian literary themes and ritual practices in order to validate early Islamic religious claims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]