| From 12 to 17 april 2012 will take place the LX Week of Study on the subject "FIRE IN THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES".The Sixtieth Week of Studies intends to focus on little known research and to promote new investigations, having a clear “mandatory” interdisciplinary character, on a topic that is suitable for a plurality of readings. The opening speech has been entrusted to the famous scholar André Vauchez, in consideration of his double competence of historian of the Church and symbolic systems. The week will then be divided into sections, the first one of which will deal with the subjects of culture, religion and images: from the biblical exegesis of iconography, from the flames of hell to the cults of eastern religions, from the metaphoric to the liturgical uses. A second part of the lectures will be devoted to justice and rituals, where the leading international experts will observe the fire in legislation, in judicial evidence, in the political use of other-worldly threats, in heresies.
Two large sections will be devoted to the countryside and to the aspects of material culture. The topic of the relationships between fire and countryside will be dealt with in a broad sense: it will be discussed of lightning and volcanoes, the burning of cities and churches, toponomastic traces and domestic fireplaces, and finally, from a methodological standpoint, the utility of medieval fires for stratigraphic investigations. Obviously, the field of material culture is the one where the novelties in the subject of fire are highlighted with greater clarity: agricultural practices, cooking, metallurgy, ceramics, medicine, lighting, fuels and military uses.
More than in the preceding Weeks it is fundamental on this subject the meeting of historians, scholars, philosophers, liturgists, art historians, archeologists, linguists: with a convergence of competences that has always been the added value of Spoleto Weeks with regard to the international medievalist scene.
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