Cult of Saints in Late Antiquity, Warsaw, September 27–28, 2018

The Cult of Saints in Late Antiquity  project is mapping the cult of saints as a system of beliefs and practices in its earliest and most fluid form, from its origins until around AD 700. Central to the project is a searchable database, in which all the literary, epigraphic, papyrological and documentary evidence for the cult of saints is being collected, whether in Armenian, Coptic, Georgian, Greek, Latin or Syriac.

On 27-29 September 2018 we are organising a final conference in Warsaw, before the project closes at the end of the year. The topic of the conference is as broad as the project – the cult of saints in Late Antiquity. What we hope to achieve is a broad picture of this phenomenon, and so, although we will welcome papers studying the cult of a specific saint, cultic activity or region, we will give priority to those that set cults and cult practices against the wide background of cultic behaviour and belief, now readily accessible through our database (already operational and filling up fast).

Among the confirmed key-note speakers are Luigi Canetti, Vincent Déroche, Stephanos Efthymiadis, Cynthia Hahn, Anne-Marie Helvétius, Xavier Lequeux, Maria Lidova, Julia Smith, Raymond Van Dam, and Ian Wood.