The early cult of saints across Christendom

Public lecture with Prof. Bryan Ward-Perkins, University of Oxford

Please register for this free online event

Prof. Bryan Ward-Perkins is an Emeritus Professor of Oxford University, where he taught History. He specialises in the period of ‘Late Antiquity’, roughly the years 250-750 AD; years which saw the disintegration of the Western Roman Empire, and the rise of both Christianity and Islam. In 2014-18 he directed a major research project on the emergence and development of the cult of Christian saints, finding and analysing all the evidence for saintly cult up to around AD 700, in all the languages that have left evidence from this period (Armenian, Coptic, Georgian, Greek, Latin and Syriac). The project has produced a freely-available online database – http://csla.history.ox.ac.uk/ – and is currently working towards print publication of its wider results. In this fascinating lecture, Prof. Ward-Perkins will share some new insights that have been obtained from the first systematic collection of evidence of the early cult of saints across Christendom.