CMRS Center for Early Global Studies

This lecture, “The Acts of the Christian Martyrs and Court Protocols,” is by Professor Éric Rebillard (Cornell), part of the CMRS-CEGS Research Seminar graduate course for Spring 2023, Persecution and Defiance: Religious Minorities in the Roman World 200-700 CE (History201B). It has long been assumed that acts of martyrs derived from court protocols of their trials. Not only no such official document has ever been discovered but a good case can be made that the adoption of the protocol format by acts of martyrs is a development that is posterior to the Great Persecution. Instead of assessing the authenticity of the acts upon their...

In most of the older studies of the Renaissance, Eastern Central Europe was a “dark area” about which very little was said. We have since come a long way in understanding 15th-century culture in Hungary, Slavonia and Croatia. A thriving Renaissance movement was spreading, and its focal point was Bishop John Vitez, a generous patron of the arts and a scholar himself. This native of Slavonia and son of Croatian-speaking petty nobles brought together an international circle of artists and scholars, who would meet at his court in Oradea in today’s Romania and, later, in Esztergom in today’s Hungary. His...