Abstract: In Late Antiquity and the medieval period, gilded objects and lavish manuscripts attest to the widespread diffusion and use of mercury, a material that circulated over large distances in western Europe. Relevant instructions in recipe books show that mercury was essential to specialized crafts. However, given the paucity of the written sources between the fifth and the eighth centuries, mercury has remained elusive. In particular, we do not know much about its circuits of trade and distribution. The present article combines an analysis of the textual sources having to do with mercury, including the fundamental evidence offered by craft treatises and the archaeological remains for production. This interdisciplinary approach opens new perspectives on the system of long-distance maritime routes which, through the Atlantic Ocean, connected Spain with France, Ireland, and Britain during Late Antiquity; particular attention is devoted to Britain and its position at the periphery of this network. Moreover, tracing this neglected but important metal permits us to ask questions about the demand for specialized crafts in different social strata in the post-Roman period.

Abstract: This paper examines the relationship of banditry with slavery and constructions of sanctity in the early medieval West. Eric Hobsbawm suggested that, across preindustrial societies, bandits were admired and supported as dispensers of justice. Yet this role seems more obviously fulfilled in Late Antiquity by saints. Where we do have bandits who appear to have been championed by the poor, they sometimes appear as failed holy men amid contests over religious authority. Indeed, the conceptual overlap between modern interpretations of the bandit and the holy man echoes their shared association with the wilderness in contemporary hagiography. But this shared association leads to bandits usually appearing as the antithesis of saints rather than their allies in justice. In this light, the holy man emerges as the “anti-bandit”: a crucial aspect of the significance of saints at a time when brigandage threatened the activities of pilgrims and churchmen. Furthermore, that both slavers and fugitive slaves were characterized as brig-ands raises interesting questions about the supposed marginality of bandits. Overall, the early medieval evidence shows that banditry was a more heterogeneous phenomenon than Hobsbawm theorized.

Reviewed by: Time and Difference in Rabbinic Judaism by Sarit Kattan-Gribetz Marie-Ange Rakotoniaina Time and Difference in Rabbinic Judaism Sarit Kattan-Gribetz Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2022. Pp. 408. ISBN: 9780691242095. Upon sitting with Sarit Kattan Gribetz's Time and Difference in Rabbinic Judaism, the reader journeys through the multifaceted temporal worlds that the rabbis' imagination fashioned in Late Antiquity, from Roman Palestine to the Sasanian Empire, from Second Temple times to the Talmud. To reveal how these universes of time in turn intersect with the creation of forms of difference within and beyond the rabbinic community—such is the promise of the book. It does so with exquisite erudition and delightful readability, while distilling the conceptualization of "rabbinic timescapes" (1, 5, and 22)—as the author put it, "the many dimensions of time that operate within any given society—similar to the use of 'landscape' to describe the variety of natural and human dimensions of space in any given location" (258 n. 16). The approach taken does not merely spatialize time. It actualizes and classifies its multiplicity as contained in rabbinic texts: time reveals itself as at once mythic and quotidian, historical and lived, ritual and biological. The book aims at demonstrating how these dimensions of time function as vectors of cohesion and separation. The Introduction sets the scene upon the remains of a lost epoch: the disappearance of the temple leaving behind it a "temporal trauma" (9). Henceforth a "conceptual temple" commands the rabbinic effort to re-imagine and negotiate the shifting boundaries of timekeeping and community. The following chapters associate a particular configuration of time—from the units of the year and the week to that of the day and the hour—to the formation of a series of respective dualities: between rabbis and Romans, Jews and Christians, men and women, human and divine. Each chapter's textual analyses embody the playfulness of rabbinic engagement with time, their refusal to dwell in the past or linger in an uncatchable future. They would rather drink the promise of the present. Emulating this promise, the book offers itself as much as the linear unfolding of temporal scales as the sketching of a mosaic of identities generated by quotidian rhythms. In other words, imagine a rabbinic replay of Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day or Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu. Time has captivated countless studies. In the context of the most recent [End Page 276] tide of this fascination (which Gribetz has elsewhere labelled as "the temporal turn"), the book bears affinities with investigations in ancient Judaism and beyond uncovering rabbinic calendars, time-markers, chronologies, ideas of history and memory—from Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi's Zakhor to Eve-Marie Becker's The Birth of Christian History and Lynn Kaye's Negating Time. The book favors a sociological approach (in the footsteps of Eviatar Zerubavel) focusing on discourses and practices. Yet its intellectual lineage reaches wider and deeper. Drawing from anthropology and phenomenology to neuroscience, from historical studies to the technicities of timekeeping in the ancient world, the investigation invokes as its theoretical foundation a mesmerizing array of interdisciplinary analyses of time. It stands out by the conviction and exactitude with which it navigates between "the conceptual and the practical, the symbolic and the quotidian, weaving together the history of daily life, social history, cultural studies, religious studies, and rabbinics" (4). As a result, a series of close readings unfold the "constellation of times and differences" (230) that the rabbis' literary mastery, legal virtuosities, and ritual innovations designed. Chapter 1 gives a captivating glimpse into the cultivation of a Roman-rabbinic identity through the differentiation and synchronization of Roman and Jewish annual rhythms. The reader may delight in the minute weaving of material and textual sources. Numismatic depictions, frescoes, and floor mosaics give sharper relief to the "temporal modes of imperial resistance" (39) of the Midrashic project. Yet these "hidden transcripts" (57) are not without similarities to Livy or Ovid. The rabbis' practices of storytelling emulate Roman etiologies. The Palestinian and Babylonian Talmuds project a "hybrid historical time onto the Roman calendar" (38), which points to the (paradoxical) Romanness both...

Abstract: Hans-Dieter Spengler sodali et iuris consulto Jerome's oeuvre is huge; it comprises translations and commentaries of many books of the Christian Bible, a universal history, a history of Christian literature, biographies of monks, many treatises, and more than 130 letters addressed to people from the educated upper classes of the late Roman West. This article investigates what role Roman law played in Jerome's writings, what he knew about it, and how he evaluated it. It also looks at his views on late Roman jurisdiction and collects the evidence he provides for petitions to the emperor and for imperial rescripts. The main section analyzes Jerome's ideas about imperial legislation, his knowledge of individual laws, and the way he presented them. On this basis, it is argued that Jerome's writings bear impressive witness to the importance of Roman law for both the social practice and the mindset of the provincial and local elites in the late Roman empire.

Abstract: Paul the Deacon's Historia Langobardorum has long underpinned histories of the First Pandemic in Italy, with the text's narrative account of a plague outbreak in Liguria, Venetia, and greater Italy typically dated to 565. The following pages examine the modern and premodern treatment of the Ligurian Plague, highlighting the problems with and debates about its date, reconsidering its murky origins in Paul's writing, and reframing it as an editorially complex account of disease. A thematic and structural analysis of Paul's text alongside those of other key western Mediterranean plague narrators—namely, Gregory of Tours and Gregory the Great—suggests this Historia Langobardorum plague passage was neither wholly original nor based on detailed accounts from northern Italy. Instead, it was a product of the geography of Paul's narrative and his wider attempt to rehabilitate the history of the Lombard conquest, resulting in an apocalyptically-tinged report of mid-sixth-century plague that is both geographically and chronologically unreliable. In calling into question popular claims about the Ligurian Plague's geography and chronology, this microstudy offers a novel method of interrogating late antique plague texts and further elucidates Paul's process as a narrator of Lombard and Italian history.

Reviewed by: Hagiography, Historiography, and Identity in Sixth-Century Gaul: Rethinking Gregory of Tours by Tamar Rotman Richard Shaw Hagiography, Historiography, and Identity in Sixth-Century Gaul: Rethinking Gregory of Tours Tamar Rotman Social Worlds of Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022. Pp. 195. ISBN: 978-9463727730. This book by Tamar Rotman, based on her doctoral dissertation, puts forward three hypotheses: Gregory of Tours' Glory of the Martyrs (GM) as well as his [End Page 565] Glory of the Confessors (GC) covered "eastern" saints for whom there were no contemporary cults in Gaul (Chapter 2); the GM, GC, and the Life of the Fathers (VP) were planned as an "ecclesiastical history" to serve as a counterpart to the "secular history" offered in the Ten Books of Histories (LH) (Chapter 3); and this "ecclesiastical history" was intended to establish a sense of "Gallo-Christian identity" (Chapter 4). It is easier to pose stimulating questions about Gregory and his works than it is to provide persuasive answers. Gregory is an enigma, and his corpus is sufficiently large and varied as to defy simplistic explanation. Rotman raises—and incidentally inspires—many interesting questions about Gregory of Tours's approach—and about how he should be approached—but the arguments made—and the ways the arguments are made—in this slim volume are unlikely to convince many. The argument proper begins in Chapter 2, following what amounts to two introductions: the "Introduction," which introduces Gregory and begins setting out the aims of the study via intense criticism (running throughout the book) of the perceived limitations of the work of all previous scholars in the field; and Chapter 1, which (re)introduces Gregory, providing an effective tour of elements of his life, as well as a synopsis of some, but not all, of his hagiographical writings. Chapter 2 ("'When the Saints Go Marching In': Eastern Saints in Merovingian Gaul") attempts to show that Gregory included accounts of saints, especially from the east and especially in the GM, that were not venerated in Gaul. The method followed is to test an assumption that is said to be the consensus among scholars: that Gregory only wrote about and to promote saints for whom there was a local cult (47). There is no such academic consensus, as far as the present reviewer is aware. Disposing of this straw man, therefore, restricts one to conclusions that are already generally accepted: "Therefore, one must break free from traditional definitions of hagiography and accept the idea that hagiographical texts such as Gregory's collections may have been written for other reasons than merely commemorating the saints and promoting their cults." (104). Does any scholar doubt this? Despite the uncontroversial nature of the chapter's principal finding—that Gregory wrote stories about saints for whom there was no local cult in Gaul—the argument employed is unpersuasive. Rotman's process is to discuss each account of "eastern" saints (although she does also consider "Italian" but not "Spanish" or other non-Gallic saints) in the GM and the GC, and to examine whether there are signs of veneration of that saint in Gaul. There is useful content here, and Rotman helpfully tracks some earlier accounts of these individuals. As a method of argument, however, this approach relies on treating absence of evidence as evidence of absence. In reality—and this should not really need saying, especially to those studying this period—the lack of evidence for veneration of a saint is not evidence that the saint was not venerated, just as it would be fallacious to assert that evidence for veneration proved that the existence of these cults was the reason for Gregory's inclusion of stories about the saints in question. The premise for the analysis in Chapter 2 is the assumption that "Gregory's choice [to include foreign saints, especially in the GM] … strikes one as peculiar, meriting further discussion" (47). [End Page 566] She decries prior historians for having "overlooked" (47) this issue. One simple explanation for this putative oversight is that much of the answer is surely obvious: East and West remained well connected, even integrated, in the sixth century. People...