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One of the greatest obstacles encountered in the study of the early modern period is one of definitions. For the two major intellectual movements there is a wide range of opinions as to how they should be defined. Scholasticism is alternately a philosophy rejected by the humanists or a methodology appreciated and appropriated by them, while humanism is either a cultural program, a movement towards civic-mindedness, a secular challenging, if not flaunting, of norms, or a development driven by real religious fervor.

Michael Serveto or Servetus was born in Spain in 1511 and on his mother’s side, belonged to a distinguished family of converted Jews. After a brilliant career as an author and physician, he was burned at the stake for heresy in Geneva in 1553, an act for which Serveto held John Calvin primarily responsible.

On May 26, 1742, Count Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf und Pottendorf (1700–1760) gave a speech in Philadelphia, in the British colony of Pennsylvania—in Latin. It was his birthday, and he had come to a momentous decision: he would renounce his nobility and be known henceforth simply as John. Aware that even the best educated men in Philadelphia would have trouble following his Latin oration, he took care to have copies of the text printed in advance by the city’s foremost printer, Benjamin Franklin, which were then distributed to his audience.

In 1561, the English poet Nicholas Allen published in Paris his translation of Aratus’ Phaenomena, a popular and much-admired Hellenistic poem in dactylic hexameters that described the fixed constellations and a variety of weather signs, both celestial and terrestrial. Allen’s translation offers an unparalleled opportunity to analyze the practice of poetic translation from the Greek during the sixteenth century because it stands at the end of a long history of Latin translations of Aratus’ poem that were published during a period of over 1,500 years.

The political turmoil that characterized the Roman state during the 3^rd century CE strongly affected the economic stability of the empire. The continuous debasement of coinage caused high inflation as commodity prices were adjusted to fit the new value of the minted currency and its diminished precious metal content. Subsequently, trust in imperial currency declined almost completely throughout the provinces.

Can the study of a provincial coinage provide useful elements for a better understanding of the Roman idea of sovereignty? Are sovereignty and the right to issue coinage related?

Was the currency of one ancient culture ever utilized to express the sovereignty of another? This paper explores how the relationship between sovereignty and money in the ancient world changes when a currency created by one state travels well beyond the extent of its sovereign control and becomes an integral feature in other monetary systems. In order to elucidate this phenomenon, I address one example in particular, namely the large presence of imperial Roman coinage in India.

This paper aims to provide a comparative approach of the epigraphic evidence for instalments and for the acquisition of debt from the city of Athens by private individuals in order to understand question of sovereignty as it pertains to the use of currency by centralized authorities. Hunter initially categorized types of loans by the apparent relationship of the state to the citizen, as well as different types of penalties placed upon debtors (Hunter 2000).

In this paper I reexamine Byzantion’s first autonomous issues of coinage in the classical Greek period and how their dating can have an impact on the interpretation of Byzantion’s politico-economic relationship with Athens. This approach broadens the topic of money and sovereignty from a local to an interstate context. By so doing, this case study demonstrates the compatibility of a city-state both minting its own coinage and possessing a formal political alliance (symmachia) with Athens.

It should come as no surprise that Christian writers in late antiquity did not hold much admiration for Ovid, whose poetry was condemned in his own lifetime for corrupting public morals. In contrast with his close contemporary Virgil, he is almost completely ignored by patristic prose authors like Jerome and Augustine – and on the few occasions when his work is mentioned, it is disparaged and dismissed.