Laetae segetes VIII

The aim of this paper is to reveal the specifics of the perception of calendar time among the Greeks of the 8th century BC. Through an analysis of the iconographic sources and the original texts, we have made an attempt to determine the peculiarities in their perception of the flow of time, the change of seasons, and the annual circulation of time. By studying the imagery as it is shown in the pottery decoration of the Proto-geometric and Geometric periods, we have come to the conclusion that the symbols depicted in it were reflected in the representations about calendar time as connected to the natural environment and alteration in the surrounding space in accordance with the annual changes in nature.

Iuliana Lebedeva is a fourth-year doctoral student at Masaryk University. The field of her interest is the history of Ancient Greece and Classical languages. Her dissertation is devoted to consideration of the specifics of the mentality of the Greeks of the 8th century BC in terms of their perception of space and time. She spent several months in Greece examining the iconographic sources to reveal the interconnection of the symbols of Geometric art with the ideas about calendar time.

Con questo contributo si intende esaminare il ruolo dei poristai, una magistratura natura finanziaria, attestata ad Atene tra il V e il IV sec. a.C., a cui la critica ha dedicato un’attenzione limitata. La rilevanza della riflessione ateniese sui poroi (entrate) contraddistinse la politica, tanto interna quanto estera, già dal V secolo; la gestione dell’economia ateniese subì una serie di cambiamenti sostanziali a partire dalla fine della Guerra del Peloponneso e un ruolo di rilievo sembra sia stato riservato alle cariche finanziarie, giacché l’amministrazione dello Stato richiedeva competenze sempre più specifiche anche nella gestione delle finanze. Il contesto economico emergenziale all’indomani della disfatta siciliana del 413 aveva reso necessaria la creazione di una carica peculiare: un collegio di magistrati, i poristai, assunsero un incarico straordinario, che con buona probabilità riguardava la gestione dei fondi pubblici e delle entrate dello Stato. Attraverso i riferimenti al collegio nelle fonti antiche e all’uso, spesso “tecnico”, del verbo porizo, si proverà a far luce sulle funzioni e sull’ identità di alcuni di questi magistrati, nonché sulla possibilità che tale carica, inizialmente di natura straordinaria, abbia raggiunto una certa e graduale stabilità all’interno della macchina finanziaria ateniese nel corso del IV secolo.

Flavia Usai is a second-year Ph.D. candidate in Greek History at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, with a joint degree with KU Leuven. Her research project aims at reconstructing the political biography of Agyrrhius of Collytus, an Athenian politician between the end of the 5th and the 4th century BC. Her MA thesis concerned the use of memory and topicality in Aristophanes' last works, with particular attention to the emblematic case of the Ecclesiazusae and the criticism of the demagogues. Especially during her last six months in Leuven, her thesis work led her to focus on economic issues, such as particular financial positions during the 4th century BC.

Herodotus promised to deliver the so-called Assyrian logos in his Histories, but ultimately failed to do so. Twice we can find a remark on his future project that (possibly) never materialized in the end. Even though we do not have a long, detailed description of Assyria, there are still several mentions of Assyrian kings, history, and customs, although quite often very brief. Even if he wrote a logos on Assyria, it did not become too influential. On the other hand, we have many fragments dealing with Assyrian history by the later authors, notably Ctesias or Berossus, who expanded the stories of this kingdom to the Greek audience. Could they refer to Herodotus at some points? In this presentation, I will focus on the short remarks of Herodotus on Assyria and the potential existence of the promised logos. In the main part, I will compare his account with the tales from the later sources, what are the most significant changes in the narrative, and who became the authority on the history of Assyria in his place.

Libor Pruša is a student of Ancient history at the local university and focuses on the life and the work of Ctesias of Cnidus. His goal is to make the first translation of his fragments into the Czech language with an introduction and commentary. Most notably, he is dealing with Ctesias’ reception among later authors and how he influenced the Greek traditional view on Eastern history. Next to Ctesias, his main fields of interest are ancient geography and ethnography.

The paper intends to give a brief overview and comparison of the role of sacral and divine rulership in ancient China during the Western Han dynasty and in the ancient Seleucid Empire. It will present an overview of the evolution of ideas about the sacral and divine rulership in both of these ancient states (while at least briefly touching on the period-specific perception of godhood itself), of the process and ideology of deifying a ruler, and of the formal characteristics of the ruler cults. The main intention of the paper is to explain what role (if any) did ruler’s godhood have as their tool of political power, to investigate the importance of sacrality for the legitimacy of the ruler, and to highlight the differences and similarities of both ancient states with respect to the above mentioned and make a comparison of them.

Ondřej Kvapil is currently going through his doctoral degree programme at the Faculty of Arts of Masaryk University with Ancient history as his field of study and the research topic for his doctoral thesis is the comparison of government mainstays in China and Hellenistic kingdoms. His research interests include the history of the Seleucid empire and of the history of ancient China from Bronze Age to Han Dynasty; he is also interested in the histories of Mycenaean Greece, Roman Republic, and ancient Greece, more specifically in their societies and political systems (among others).

In my presentation, I examine the interconnectedness of the concepts of misanthropy and illiberality in a politico-legal context in the rhetorical literature of Classical Athens, focusing on the works of Isocrates and Demosthenes. My approach offers new insight into Athenian societal values, especially regarding the concept of freedom. The topic of this presentation is related to my doctoral thesis on the phenomenon of misanthropy in antiquity. Classical misanthropy or misanthrōpia is usually understood as the universal hatred of humanity, and it is in this sense that the concept is typically used in the ancient Graeco-Roman literature. I claim however that the rhetorical literature of Classical Athens represents a unique context in which misanthrōpia is given as the quality of a person who is contemptuous of common people and who has failed to properly fulfill his obligations for society and exercise his freedom as a citizen. In this context, misanthrōpia is closely associated with illiberality or aneleutheria. I argue that this specific rhetorical use of misanthrōpia was unique to the historical context of Classical Athens and its democratic political system and social values and that this explains its disappearance from ancient Greek literature at the end of the Classical period.

Misha Hyttinen graduated as BA in 2013 and MA in 2017 at the Department of History at Oulu University, Finland. In his Bachelor's and Master's theses he studied the representations of prostitution in the legal rhetoric of Classical Athens and the epigrammatic works of Martial respectively. He started working as a doctoral researcher at the Department of History of Sciences and Ideas at Oulu University in 2020. His doctoral research deals with the phenomenon of misanthropy in ancient Greek and Roman cultures. His thesis is the first comprehensive study of misanthropy in antiquity. By approaching the subject from historical, sociocultural, and psychological perspectives, his aim is to bring to light the historical significance of the phenomenon in the ancient world.

Unlike Libanius and Themistius, Himerius never received close attention among modern scholars, even though he was the primary source of knowledge about the teaching of rhetoric at Athens in the 4th century AD. Among his imaginary orations, the Polemarchic Oration (or. 6 Colonna) is the only one preserved in full, and the only rhetorical exercise that survived from antiquity imitating the Athenian funeral speeches. Most of the traditional themes of praise are to be also found in the Polemarchic Oration. However, it lacks the features too tied to classical Athens, such as the exhortation to the living, the consolation of the parents, and the praise of the Athenian democracy. This speech must be regarded, indeed, as 1) a full-blown development of two preliminary exercises (προγυμνάσματα) typical of Greek education in the Imperial age, namely narration (διήγημα) and praise (ἐγκώμιον), and 2) a display of Himerius’ devotion to Athenian heritage. The passages from the Polemarchic Oration analyzed in this paper shows how and why the Athenian funeral eloquence became, many centuries later, a subject suited for the needs of a rhetoric teacher.

Tito Storti's Ph.D. project deals with a critical edition of three speeches written by the 4th century AD rhetor Himerius (or. 6, 7, 8 Colonna). The commentary focuses on textual problems and provides further information about the tradition of funeral speeches in Athens, and the development of the genre in the Imperial age. The project is aimed at updating and improving the knowledge of the author, his manuscript tradition, and teaching methods. His fields of study are Greek Rhetoric, Greek Funeral Eloquence, Late Antique Schools, Rhetorical Handbooks of the Imperial Age. His research interests are Textual Criticism, Palaeography, Codicology, Greek Literature; Thucydides, Plato, Himerius.

Conversational environments reveal the shifting nature of power relations between speaking characters. Especially in the epic tradition, which includes a high proportion of speech and hence speech exchanges, the variable characteristics of a character’s speeches across similar scenes allow for a different evaluation of the speeches’ powerful or less powerful effect on the interlocutor. This paper focuses on the presentation of Athena’s (and consequently her interlocutors') role in divine councils in epic (Iliad, Odyssey, and Argonautica) by examining her speeches both in terms of the speech mode used and their particular style as well as the various types of power incorporated within her speeches. Her repeated presence in councils shows her acquirement of discriminate speech elements in her various speeches through which she either foregrounds or challenges the type of power she possesses in her power relations with others. These speech and power-related elements affect her characterization and reveal her dynamic textual role across epics. Intertextual and intratextual links within epic tradition disclose more clearly the variability of relational speech and power patterns across the same character’s speeches and their consequences on the shaping of the speaking character’s role in a given scene and across similar scenes within the epic genre.

Despoina Christou recently graduated from the University of Manchester, where she obtained her Ph.D. degree. Previously she completed her BA and MA degrees at the University of Ioannina. Her field of study is Classical Literature with an emphasis on Latin Literature and particularly ancient Greek and Latin epic, Augustan poetry, and Ovidian poetry. Her research interests focus primarily on gender studies. She has recently presented a paper at the Classical Association Annual Conference in Swansea as well as she has given papers at the University of Ioannina and the University of Patras. She has also given shorter presentations of her Ph.D. research at the University of Manchester.

In this study, focusing on several cadastral records surviving from the early fifteenth century, I will investigate how the Muslim conquerors sought to establish their rule in tandem with the pre-existing Byzantine administrative and socio-cultural structures. These documents show that a good portion of the indigenous landlords in the area managed to retain their hereditary rights in their ancestral lands. Without being exposed to any kind of religious oppression, they did not feel the necessity to convert to Islam in order to keep the custodianship of their cultivated areas or charitable endowments. These landlords also feed the ranks of the Ottoman provincial army with Christian militias under their service, something that indicates the multi-ethnic and multi-religious nature of the early Ottoman military structure. Moreover, in addition to pursuing accommodationist policies regarding the incorporation of the landed estates into its nascent administration, the regional Ottoman administration also aimed to pacify local militias and armed groups called “armatoloi” in Thessaly, granting them economic and administrative privileges such as tax exemptions. In this regard, scrutinizing fifteenth-century Ottoman cadastral records, this study will argue that an important portion of the local Byzantine military, administrative and economic structures had been placatingly and successfully incorporated into the newly established frontier administration of the Turahan Gazi in Thessaly.

Husamettin Simsir focuses on the late Byzantine and early Ottoman political histories. His research field includes Political histories of the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires, 1000-1500, History of the Medieval Balkans, Frontier and cross-cultural relationship in the Medieval Eastern Mediterranean, The development of the Ghazi ideology, Mechanisms of Greek-Turkish coexistence in the late Middle Ages, Representation of Muslims and Christians in Ottoman and Byzantine works of literature, History of military conflicts and the development of the art of war in the late Middle Ages.

Circus factions were a special product of Byzantine culture. In different periods of its existence, they played a more or less significant role in the fate of the entire state. The political situation of the Eastern Roman Empire from the 5th to the beginning of the 7th century was marked by a huge influence on the ideological and social life of circus factions. One of the most turbulent periods in the history of circus performances against the center of power in Constantinople falls during the period of Justinian I the Great reign. It was then that the Nika riots, which were triggered by a series of neglect generating social and economic issues in the stratum bourgeois discontent in Constantinople. The main subject of my paper will be an attempt to make a revision comparing dialogs between emperor Justinian I and representatives of circus factions in the time of Nika Uprising. I'll try to bring closer the profiles of protesters and the frequency of the occurrence of dialogue in individual sources. Also, I'll pay attention to the gaze of chroniclers and the question of their presence in public life. One of the most essential parts of mine of the presentation will be an analysis of the cause-and-effect relationship of individual events of rebellion against the emperor Justinian I in Constantinople and its influence on the exacerbation of the reaction of the population.

Franciszek Jóźwicki is a Ph.D. candidate in history at the Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University in Warsaw. Research interests: Circus factions, Early Byzantine Empire, Macedonian dynasty period in Byzantium, writings of Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus, history of polish student movements and organizations between 1918-1939. Author of six publications published on site Magyazyn about Polish-Hungarian topics financed by the Wacław Felczak Polish-Hungarian Cooperation Institute and Polish Ministry of Culture. Two-time scholar in Wacław Felczak Polish-Hungarian Cooperation Institute 2019/2021. Lecturer in panels of Summer University of Wacław Felczak Polish-Hungarian Cooperation Institute from 2018 to 2021.

In the third book of the Fasti, some potential explanations of the origin of the goddess Anna Perenna are given, among which there is the miserable fleeing of Dido’s sister from Carthage, then a short story about a helpful older woman, and another on the fruitless love affair of Mars. The purpose of the presentation is to examine, on the one hand, the poetic complexity of these lines and, on the other hand, the generic border crossings due to the effect and influence of the stage and the theatre. Firstly, a brief and twisted version of the Aeneid grabs our attention since Ovid reframes and rewrites the first part of the epos, putting a female protagonist in the middle of the masculine epical narrative. In the last episode, Ovid plays another genre, namely the mime, into play: Mars, as a ridiculous lover, is cheated by Anna, who plays the classical role of a bawd (lena), making the god of war a complete fool. The presentation will give a comparative analysis of this complex web of stories and genres, focusing on the particular effect of using mime as a poetic pattern at the end of the Anna Perenna narrative.

Barna Dobos is a doctoral student in the Ancient Studies Doctoral Programme at the Doctoral School of Linguistics of Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. His doctoral supervisor is József Krupp, Ph.D. He is interested in Roman literature, to be more specific, in Ovid's poetry. The Fasti's poetics and the potential Horatian influences, particularly the Satires, are examined during the doctoral period based on recent outcomes of literary theory.

Nichts prägt uns so sehr wie unser Beruf. Ständig liegt die Aufmerksamkeit auf Fragen der richtigen Berufswahl, der Absicherung durch die Erwerbstätigkeit, der Zukunftsplanung und des Erhalt des Arbeitsplatzes. Dieser Zustand trifft nicht nur auf die heutige Gesellschaft zu, sondern kann gleichermaßen auch auf antike Kulturen umgelegt werden. Der Alltag des Großteils der Bevölkerung im Imperium Romanum wurde durch die Lohnarbeit bestimmt. Die Hinweise zu ihrem harten und oftmals unsicheren Leben sind umfangreich. Gerade in den Bereichen der Landwirtschaft und der Textilarbeit als zentrale Stützen des antiken Wirtschaftssystems lassen sich Spuren zur Lebens- und Arbeitswelt von Lohnarbeiter:innen finden. Durch Untersuchungen der schriftlichen Quellen, die sich aus Inschriften, Papyri, Graffiti und literarischen Zeugnissen zusammensetzen, lassen sich Rückschlüsse auf den Alltag der Betroffenen und deren wirtschaftliche Lage ziehen. Durch Textanalyse verbunden mit der Interpretation der archäologischen Quellen kann erschlossen werden, welche soziale Stellung die Lohnarbeiter:innen innerhalb der Gesellschaft hatten und wie ihre Aufstiegschancen aussahen. Das Leben der Lohnarbeiter:innen verlief dabei teils sehr unterschiedlich, wofür verschiedene Faktoren ausschlaggebend waren. Wobei vor allem das Geschlecht sowie das Alter eine entscheidende Rolle spielten. So lassen sich die noch heute topaktuellen Themen wie Kinderarbeit und Geschlechterrollen am Arbeitsplatz durch die erhaltenen schriftlichen und archäologischen Quellen rekonstruieren.

Tanja Bruckmüller beende nach einem Bachelor- u. Masterabschluss in „Klassischer Archäologie“ gerade ihr Masterstudium „Alte Geschichte und Altertumswissenschaften“ an der Universität Wien mit einer Arbeit zur Lohnarbeit im Imperium Romanum. Im Zug dieses Masterstudiums hatte sie die Möglichkeit ein Erasmusjahr an der Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in München zu absolvieren und weitere Methoden und Forschungsansätze kennenzulernen. Sie bevorzuge eine interdisziplinäre Vorgehensweise, bei der alle zur Verfügung stehenden Quellen, vorrangig materielle Hinterlassenschaften und schriftliche Zeugnisse, kombiniert und mit geeigneten Methoden untersucht werden. Ihr Forschungsschwerpunkt liegt dabei auf sozial- und wirtschaftsgeschichtlichen Fragestellungen zur griechisch-römischen Antike. Ein besonderes Interesse besteht dabei hinsichtlich der Geschlechtergeschichte und antiker Agrargeschichte.

Society at the time of the Roman Empire was highly hierarchical, which was also applied to the strata of the urban population. Therefore, members of the urban lower classes joined professional associations with the vision of getting a better social status. These associations – collegia represented „miniature cities“ in which people sought satisfaction of their needs and desires. It not only provided them with life security but also helped develop the social identity of its members. Some selected guilds were involved in keeping cities safe; as such, they were used for the purpose of extinguishing fires, which were quite common in ancient times. Among these collegia were included centonarii, dendrophorii, fabric, and fabri tignuarii. The presented paper analysis the preserved inscriptions of the mentioned associations and tries to answer the questions regarding, what was the frequency of occurrence of individual associations and whether the presence of some associations prevailed over others. Did the collegia occur together? What types of cities were they located in? Was the situation in the western and eastern parts of the empire comparable, or was it substantially different, as the reply of Trainus to Pliny the Younger suggests?

Jakub Knobloch graduated with a master’s degree in ancient history at the Masaryk University of Brno. He now continues his Ph.D. program in ancient history at the Department of Classical Studies of Masaryk University. His research focuses on the internal security forces of the Roman Empire, which includes police and fire brigades, customs, the prison and intelligence services, relations between individual forces, as well as their cooperation in the performance of their tasks.

In this paper, the author examines the most important interpretative lines based on sources from the medieval, humanist, and baroque periods. The study also seeks to provide a comprehensive summary of the most significant interpretations of the events of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages in Slovak historiography. The thesis analyses the interpretations of historians and academics from the so-called pre-Renaissance stage. The article also briefly characterizes the currents of thought of each period, for a better understanding of the background against which contemporary thought developed. Based on the analysis of the sources, the study concludes that the historians' aim was to find historical arguments that would support the autochthony of the Slavs within Hungary. These interpretations often succumbed to bias as well as to a looser handling of the facts of literary sources. In the medieval period, the Bible was considered an important source on the basis of which medieval chroniclers developed theories about the origin and the triple arrival of the Hungarians in the Carpathian Basin. In the humanistic period, two new theories developed in addition to the criticism of the sources: the Illyrian and the Sarmatian. In the Baroque period, several views came close to the contemporary historical reality. The foundations of the hospitality theory were formulated. Also, Slavic tribes were identified with the tribes of the Quadi, the Marcomanni, the Vandals, and the Ostrogoths. Several academics understood the context of the arrival of the Huns, Avars, and Magyars as a continuous historical event that built on each other, even though it was three different landmarks. Other historians, on the other hand, dated the arrival of the Slavs in the central Danube region before or shortly after the birth of Christ.

Samuel Červeňanský, Catholic university in Ružomberok, Faculty of Arts and Letters, Department of History

Nell’esegesi dei frammenti del Carmen Saliare, trova ampio spazio la discussione sul frammento tradito da Festo riguardante il sintagma Pilumnoe Poploe. Il problema oltre che dal punto di vista interpretativo risulta essere ancora ampiamente aperto anche dal punto di vista linguistico e conseguentemente storico. Il sacerdozio saliare è infatti parte integrante non solo della religio romana sin da epoca arcaica, ma anche della vita dello stato in senso militare. Questo intervento si propone di far entrare in contatto la ricerca linguistica, storica e religiosa con lo sviluppo della realtà armata di Roma, evento, almeno nel caso dell’Urbe, necessario per la formazione dell’identità cittadina. Una nuova lettura del passo con l’aiuto di fonti letterarie, epigrafiche ed iconografiche finora non utilizzate potrebbe riuscire ad apportare una nuova interpretazione al frammento ma soprattutto alla natura e alle caratteristiche di questo importante collegio che non segue l’evoluzione della tipologia dell’esercito di Roma.

Matteo Gallo studied at the University of Rome - Tor Vergata, first obtaining a bachelor's degree and then a master's degree. He is a Ph.D. student at the same university since the academic year 2020/2021 with a research project that focuses on the study of the main institutions of archaic Rome, focusing research on their origin and their developments. Among the topics there is a thorough research on the priesthood of the Salii starting from the attestation of the term poploe in their carmen.

In the 9th century, Otfrid, a monk at the abbey of Weissenburg, wrote a gospel harmony called Evangelienbuch, today known as the first German epic written in rhyme. This work, however, is not just a mere versification of the Gospel original. Composed by a man fully acquainted with contemporary theology, it has a theological value of its own. Therefore, the purpose of our presentation will be to identify author’s non-biblical sources, observe their interaction with the Gospel original and ascertain what is the result of their transformation into the language of poetry.

Viktor Wintner is a Ph.D. student of Historical languages of Medieval Bohemia focusing on the study and translation of biblical epics written in Latin and Old German.

Diomedes’ Ars grammatica belongs to the so-called eastern Artes, a group of late antique manuals aimed at teaching Latin to Greek-speaking students and composed by Greek-speaking teachers. Written in this social and cultural context, probably around 370-380 A.D., Diomedes’ grammar knows an important level of diffusion a few centuries later, in a very different context, when it is used in some important western early medieval courts and schools for the education of the new not Latin-speaking ruling classes. In the first part of the research work proposed, we will try to outline some specific aspects of Diomedes’Ars – especially with regard to the first book, dedicated to the partes orationis – that can be connected to some typical characteristics of eastern Artes, such as the inclusion of wide vocabulary lists or the attention devoted to some irregular forms used by the auctores. In the second part of the work, we will try to reconstruct some moments that seem to be particularly significant in the history of Diomedes’s work reception. In particular, we will examine the extracts contained in some important miscellaneous manuscripts dated to IX-X centuries and a series of early medieval remakes of some sections of Diomedes’ work devoted to morphology.

Fatima El Matouni is a Ph.D. student in Latin Philology at the University of Verona and Sorbonne Université-Paris. Her research interests mainly concern the philology of Latin grammatical texts. She has published contributions about a chapter of Charisius’ Ars grammatica devoted to the schemata dianoeas. Her doctoral thesis is aimed at a new study of the manuscript tradition of Diomedes’ work and the preparation of an edition essay, followed by an Italian translation and commentary. In Verona, she collaborates in the preparation of a database for the cataloging and description of grammatical manuscripts copied up to the XI century.

In this paper, I will focus on the herbarium Galganum as part of the medical compendium Melleus Liquor, written probably by Alexander Hispanus. Herbarium Galganum became the best-seller of its genre In Central Europe in the 15th century. I will briefly introduce the medical file Melleus Liquor and the herbarium itself and focus on their preservation in European libraries.

Miluše Moučková is a Ph.D. student at Masaryk University in Brno. Her field of study is Auxiliary Historical Sciences, and in her thesis, she is working on the critical edition of the treatise Antihus by Prior Stephen of Dolany.

Book prefaces generally provide valuable information about the author and his work. This is no different for fight books, at least those for which prefaces have survived. This paper will therefore focus specifically on the contents of the prefaces of several Latin fight books, using them to attempt to explain the reason for the emergence of this literary genre and its functions. Specifically, it will focus on the work Florius de arte luctandi by the Italian fencing master Fiore de'i Liberi (ca. 1350–1409), the book Exercitiorum Atque Artis Militaris Collectanea by the Spanish soldier and scholar Pietro del Monte (1457–1509), as well as a comprehensive, two-volume manual of fencing with the characteristic title Opus amplissimum de arte athletica by the Augsburg official and collector of old weapons and military literature Paulus Hector Mair (1517–1579), and, finally, the book Sciomachia et hoplomachia sive De veris principiis artis dimicatorie by the young Saxon nobleman Heinrich von Gunterrodt (1557–1618).

Karel Dobiáš is a Ph.D. student in the cotutelle program, focusing primarily on late medieval and early modern fight books written in Latin. A developing interest includes the topic of medical astrology at the University of Prague at the turn of the 14th and 15th centuries. He came to this topic in the framework of the project "Philosophy at the University of Prague around 1409: Matej Knin's Quodlibet as a Crossroads of European Medieval Knowledge" at the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences.

The town of Wilsnack has become a major pilgrimage site when three supposedly intact hosts were discovered after a fire in the local church, each with a drop of blood in the middle. Word soon spread that the blood is the blood of Christ and the hosts have healing powers. Pilgrims began arriving in the town. The hosts were subsequently consecrated by the local bishop to avoid idolatry, and pilgrimages were approved by the Pope. On-site, many pilgrims, bought so-called pilgrim badges. Such badges were common in medieval society. They had ecclesiastical as well as secular origins and had a significant informative value towards the surroundings of their wearer. Wilsnack badges have been found in various places within Germany and outside its borders. They are also depicted in many paintings and statues of saints in Germany. The purpose of this paper would be to look more closely at the role of Wilsnack badges in medieval society, the non-verbal message they carried, and, if possible, to compare written records from similar pilgrimage sites where such badges were found.

Alexandra Ballová's research interests lay in the intellectual, religious, and social history of Europe in the medieval and early modern era. As a Ph.D. student, she focuses primarily on the Tractatus De sanguine Christi, written by Jan Hus, and the history of the so-called Holy blood of Wilsnack, which is also the main aim of her dissertation project. Besides her studies, she works part-time as a researcher at a museum, where she focuses on the history of book and book printing in Europe in the early modern era. She is also a curator of the so-called Faust book collection.