Publications

Conference Publications

The Center publishes proceedings from a number of its conferences.

The Center is currently working on publishing the proceedings from the Papal Avignon Conference (Spring 2002) and the Lactantius conference (Spring 2000). Papers from the conference on conversion co-sponsored in 2001 by the Center for Early Modern History and CMS will be published in September 2008 in Conversion to Christianity from Late Antiquity to the Modern Age: Considering the Process in Europe, Asia, and the Americas, eds. Calvin B. Kendall, Oliver Nicholson, William D. Phillips, Jr., and Marguerite Ragnow, the first volume in the new series, Minnesota Studies in Early Modern History, published by the Center for Early Modern History. The volume brings a comparative approach to what, in recent years, has been a hotly debated topic within and across a number of academic disciplines: conversion to Christianity. These debates register the challenges inherent in attempting to understand a transformation that was at once personal and collective—a matter of inner conviction and outward conformity. The essays in this volume range from the late antique Middle East to medieval Western and Eastern Europe; from early modern Asia to the Americas and islands in the central Pacific. Collectively, the ten authors encourage consideration of the conversion phenomenon comparatively across time and space.

The Oxford Dictionary of Late Antiquity

The Oxford Dictionary of Late Antiquity will be a single-volume reference book of 1,000,000 words, written by multiple experts and covering all aspects of the years c. 250-750 AD in Europe, the Mediterranean World and the Near East (including Persia and Ethiopia). Oliver Nicholson, Associate Professor of Classical and Near Eastern Studies and a former director of the Center, is the General Editor. This will be the first ever single-volume reference book covering the half-millennium from mid-3rd to the mid-8th century A.D.