Colloquia Ceranea III, University of Łódź, April 15–17, 2021

We cordially invite you to participate in the international scholarly conference Colloquia Ceranea III, organised by The Waldemar Ceran Research Centre for the History and Culture of the Mediterranean Area and South-East Europe “Ceraneum”, University of Łódź, Poland, 15–17 April 2021.

Colloquia Ceranea III is targeted at scholars who study the history and culture of the Mediterranean (the Greco-Roman world, the Byzantine Empire, the Slavic world, the Balkans), the Middle East, and the Caucasus over the period from Antiquity to the Early Modern Times.

As usual, we wish to focus particularly on topics connected with:

• food and medicine from Antiquity to the Early Modern Period,
• the history of the Church and religious movements,
• material culture and everyday life,
• historical and political geography,
• peace and war studies,
• society, mores and social norms,
• education,
• language,
• art and visual culture,
• cultural unity and diversity, continuity and innovations,
• political culture and ideology,
• historiography and perception of the past from Antiquity to the present day,
• the state and its organization.

We encourage you to submit proposals of a thematic group (or thematic groups) organised around one specific topic (i.e. thematic panels). We expect each panel to consist of a minimum of 3 speakers. Individual submissions are also welcome.

You may organise your own thematic panel or join one of the following:

Food and medicine in Byzantium: We would like to invite scholars conducting their research into food history and history of medicine to submit papers covering the following questions:

• Byzantine ars coquinaria;
• Food as an indicator of social status;
• Interactions between Mediterranean diet and medicine;
• Reception of ancient medicine in Byzantium;
• Medicaments or beauty products? Cosmetics in medical treatises.

Since the session aims to investigate various aspects of culinary and medicinal traditions in the Mediterranean World from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages, papers devoted to other than the suggested above thematic areas are also welcome.

Infidels, heresies and heresiology in the Byzantine World: We invite you to raise in your paper one of the following questions:

• Bogomil unity and diversity – relations with Cathars, Paulicians and other eastern religions,
• social position of the heretics and people of other faiths (tolerance, isolation and persecution),
• polemical strategies of orthodox (catholic) writers (including Christian-Muslim, Christian-Jewish, Orthodox-Latin, Orthodox-Armenian relations),
• credibility and historiographical value of the sources (either catholic, orthodox or heretical).

The main focus of our thematic session is going to be put on the Bogomilism and its picture in the polemical sources. However, any topic related to the broad context of inter- and intrareligious coexistence and conflict will be welcomed.