The thesis is concerned with the issue of religion in the relationship between the Roman Empire and Sassanid Persian Empire in the course of the 4th to 6th century. The main topics of the thesis work are: the rise and the development of the christological conflict within the Roman Empire, the relationship between the Persian monarchs and the mazdaistic priesthood and the spreading of Christianity in Sassanid Empire. The introductory part of the paper contains information about the development of the Roman and the Persian Empire in the given period, with a special concern for the issue of religion, and the history of the border regions (Armenia, Arabia, Caucasian kingdoms), which both the Romans and the Persians attempted to dominate in the time period concerned. The analytical part, using the Latin, Greek, Armenian, Syrian and Persian sources, examins to what extent the religious policies influenced the policies of the Roman emperors and the Persian kings towards the opposing power as well as the policies adopted towards the buffer states.

A part of the Special Collections of Utrecht University Library is a file of parchment fragments collected as flyleaves from the early printed books. Little is known about this fragmented material apart from the fact that they were discarded in the early modern period and re-used within the books of known titles. Among these was a number of related fragments from a breviary, which turned out to be parts of the benedictine monastic breviary of the former benedictine foundation of St. Paul's Abbey in Utrecht. This breviary was dated back to the 12th century and connected with St. Paul's golden age and the period of its intense contacts with Germanic benedictine monasteries within a reform movement. The paper contains critical transcription of all the fragments with commentary and furthermore a structural analysis of its liturgical contents and a paleographic analysis of its script and layers of usage. Altogether two different parts of breviary were identified - proper of the saints for the end of June and beginning of July and a common of saints pertaining to a single martyr and multiple martyrs.

Virtutes Apostolorum, a collection of Latin apocryphal texts about the deeds and the passions of the early Christian personages have their oldest prototypes in the Greek Apocryphal Acts from the 2nd and the 3rd centuries, but contain also other texts for which we do not possess Greek originals and might have been significantly younger. By all indications, the corpus existed in a collected form by the end of the 6th century and was clearly extant by the early 9th century to which the earliest manuscript evidence can be dated. This thesis focuses on one aspect of the collection, namely the usage of the references to Scripture, in order to provide more information about the first few centuries of the existence of the collection uncharted by the extant manuscripts

Passio Iudeorum Pragensium, a late fourteenth-century pogrom narrative from Bohemia, provides us with many unique insights into the medieval tradition of pogrom narratives. It is preserved in the form of a number of related but distinct textual units that allow us to examine the discursive nature of texts such as these. This discursiveness is illustrated in this article by the transformations that the narrative material underwent, temporally and spatially, as well as with respect to different language communities and audiences. Furthermore, I discuss some models of relationship between the Passio material and the historical reality of a pogrom that led to the formation of this material, as well as to alternative accounts of the event preserved in some of the contemporary chronicles. Most important in this respect are three prosaic texts that seem to fall into the oldest layer of formation of Passio Iudeorum Pragensium. All three are elaborate compositions which employ traditional modes of narration with distinct new purposes and functions and which voice different, even conflicting perspectives on the significance of pogrom violence and its causes. This is particularly obvious when the representation of bodies - of the massacred Jews as well as of the supposedly desecrated Corpus Christi - is contrasted, particularly as the three narratives make a point of blurring the boundaries between the two entities.

A report on a fragment of an unknown liturgical book removed from an early printed book at Utrecht University library. The fragment can be dated to the second half of the 9th century and associated with St. Amand. It may be classified as a sacramentary cum graduale, since it contains both prayers and chants, integrated into a single body of text. For this reason, it is a remainder of a very unusual, highly innovative exemplar.

The Prague pogrom of 1389 is considered the largest outbreak of anti-Jewish violence in Bohemia prior to the World War II. Its extent can be ascertained also by the fact that this event triggered composition of numerous texts - in Latin, Czech and German, but also in Hebrew - which captured the experience of the pogrom from different perspectives. Six of such textual compositions exist in Hebrew and may be compared and contrasted in terms of the treatment of the event. They are anchored in various medieval Hebrew literary traditions, ranging from liturgical poetry (Et kol Ha-Tela of rabbi Avigdor Kara) to genuine historiography (Cemach David of David Ganz), and thus use distinct symbolic languages to describe the trauma of the pogrom. The same is true for the compositions in Latin and Czech, particularly for a corpus of five literary texts known as Passio Iudeorum Pragensium, which employs the Christian narrative models. Although the two sets of texts - in Hebrew and in Latin - emerged from distinct, even contradictory narrative traditions, they cannot be perceived as independent or unrelated. Rather, they are parts of a single discourse on the nature and purpose of the pogrom violence and strive to contain such a event, traumatic both for the Jews and the Christians. There are many examples of how the two sets of texts mutually interact, whether more indirectly, by employing the conflicting narrative traditions, or more directly, by referring one to another. I will introduce the Christian and the Jewish literary compositions pertaining to the pogrom of 1389 and examine their discursive interaction, showing where they conflict or overlap, and what may be deduced from such an interaction.

This paper focuses on the Latin Acts of Peter (BHL 6663) and Acts of Paul (BHL 6575), two apocryphal acts of the apostles which can be found in the collection of the apocryphal acts of the apostles known as the Virtutes Apostolorum. Both these acts contain a series of excerpts from the Bible and other early Christian texts which, thanks to their exact nature, can be used to assess when, where and how these two texts came into being. Such an assessment in turn provides one with invaluable information about the formation of the Virtutes Apostolorum and the early history of this collection.