A faculty-graduate student working group started by the Comparative Antiquities network, a past Humanities Council Global Initiative. Current working groups are sponsored by the Center for Collaborative History with support from the Program in Medieval Studies. Meetings are convened by Thomas Conlan (East Asian Studies, History) and Marina Rustow (Near Eastern Studies; History). To receive announcements about the workshop and brief precirculated readings, email graduate coordinator Athina Pfeiffer (Near Eastern Studies).
What is Comparative Diplomatics?
It is an exploratory workshop on documents in late antiquity and the middle ages with occasional forays into the modern era, as distinct from narrative and normative long-form texts. Its goal is twofold: to stimulate the production of new translations of late antique and medieval documentary sources that can be used in the classroom, and/or harvest some of the translations already being made; and to bring languages, subfields and approaches into contact in order to clarify methodological questions.
We hope to consider documents as objects in time and space — to understand them not just as a dematerialized set of words, but as scribal products, as representatives of a diplomatic tradition, as legal, administrative or financial instruments, as objects of institutional preservation or discard, and as the focus of scholarly examination. In short, we are interested in each document’s lifecycle, from the moment of its production to the present. Each presenter will translate an unpublished document or retranslate a previously published document that needs fresh examination, and roughly one week ahead of time, provide the group with an edition, a translation and an image of the original.
Upcoming Meetings
More details about upcoming meetings will be available shortly. Check the Medieval Studies events page for the latest information.
Past Meetings
Spring 2026
February 4, 2026
Amel Bensalim (History): “Medieval Arabic Legal Documents”
March 25, 2026
Samet Budak (Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies): “Ottoman firmans”
Spring 2025
February 20, 2025
Paul Bertrand (University of Louvain): “Murder in Bavaria: about a peculiar letter in the codex Falkensteinensis (xii-xiiie s.)”
March 27, 2025
Shaun Marmon (Religion): “Race, Slavery and Complaining Freedmen: Marginal Documents in the Waqf of a Fourteenth Century Mamlūk Eunuch”
April 17, 2025
Anne E. Lester (Johns Hopkins University): “The Testament of Ada de Nesle, “one time lord of Boves” and the Convent of Le Paraclet (Somme): Widow, Patron, Crusader?”
Fall 2024
October 3, 2024
David Rivera (Spanish and Portuguese): “Mapping Japan in the Iberian Archive: 16th Century Accounts from the Christian Mission”
October 24, 2024
Michael Laffan (History): “Settling an Atoll? Unpicking the Cocos Keeling Census of 1876”
November 21, 2024
Sofía Torallas Tovar (Religion): “When the Format Matters: a fourth century papyrus witness to the works of Athanasius of Alexandria”
Spring 2024
March 26, 2024
Regaldo José (University of Santo Tomás): “The growth of the mestizo sangley in early 17th century Manila as seen in two 1630s documents”
April 11, 2024
Christina Lee (Spanish and Portuguese): “Accounts on how the “King of Firando” pledged his fealty to the King of Spain”
Fall 2023
September 19, 2023
Trenton Wilson (East Asian Studies):“Han Dynasty Edicts and Ordinances on Official Promotion”
October 10, 2023
Yusuf Umrethwala (Near Eastern Studies): “Scribes of Power: Analyzing the role and influence of scribes in Fatimid Cairo through a draft petition from the Cairo Geniza”
November 14, 2023
Thomas Conlan (East Asian Studies): “How can Jesuits be mistaken for Buddhist monks? Ōuchi Yoshinaga’s 1552 commendation and its Portuguese and Latin Afterlives”
Spring 2023
May 16, 2023
Lucia Waldschuetz (History): “Guarantee, Control, Profit: Surety Contracts of Byzantine Egypt”
Spring 2020
February 6, 2020
Umberto Bongianino (Oxford University): “The caliph and the monks’ cattle: an Almohad decree in favor of a Catalan monastery (1217 CE)”
February 27, 2020
Debjani Bhattacharyya (Drexel University): “Inscribing Land Titles: Geographical Imaginations in Legal Texts”
March 3, 2020
Helmut Reimitz (History): “From Medieval Charters to Roman Law and Back Again. Some Examples from the Late Antique West”
March 24, 2020
Megan Gilbert (East Asian Studies): “Curated Scrap Paper: Documents on the Reverse Sides of Medieval Japanese Diaries”
April 14, 2020
Miriam Frenkel (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem): “Rich Bride Poor Bride – Two Trousseau Lists from the Cairo Geniza”
April 30, 2020
Horikawa Yasufumi (East Asian Studies):“Samurai’s Oath in Medieval Japan: From Princeton University Collection”
Fall 2019
October 2, 2019
Marina Rustow (NES, History): “Multi-handed Arabic documents and the Fatimid State”
October 23, 2019
Hiroshi Takayama (IAS, The University of Tokyo)
November 6, 2019
Khodadad Rezakhani (Research Scholar, Mossavar-Rahmani Center): “Making a Case: Pahlavi Documents from early Islamic Iran”
December 11, 2019
Rachel Mairs (University of Reading): “What can(‘t) Greek documents from Egypt tell us about Greek documents from Bactria?”
