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In the collected correspondence of Sir Thomas More are found several letters of commission in Latin from Henry VIII to More and other officials granting them plenipotentiary powers to deal with various issues (More, 1947, 16, 14). Two of them in particular, dated 1515, are directed to More, Cuthbert Tunstall, and other officials, giving them full powers to travel to Flanders—which at the time was under Spanish rule—to negotiate, or rather re-establish, an alliance or amity and commercial relations with Charles of Castile, which had apparently fallen into abeyance.

In this paper, I will discuss the political epigrams of Thomas More, with attention given to the main themes, how he tries to influence political behavior amongst kings and courtiers, the sorts of political regime he discusses, and some suggestions about his plausible goals. Over thirty of the 260 epigrams from Thomas More’s Epigrammata (1518) have political themes.

In June 1703, a small band of armed men crossed the Carpathian Mountains from Poland into the Kingdom of Hungary. Their leader was Prince Francis II Rákóczi (1676–1735), a young aristocrat who took the lead of the simmering resistance against the oppressive rule of the Habsburg kings. The uprising spread quickly; within a year, its forces seized control of most of Hungary. Noble parliaments elected Rákóczi Prince of Transylvania and Commanding Prince of Hungary, and he allied with Louis XIV of France during the War of the Spanish Succession.

Political Drama is a theatrical genre intending to criticize governments or to convince people to accept a political idea. The purpose of this paper is to compare a political treatise and a work of Political Drama. Both of them, Speculum Principis Christiani by the Jesuit Pedro Ribadeneira (1526-1611) and Flavia Tragoedia by Jesuit Bernardino Stefonio (1560-1620) propose the Christianus Princeps as a model for rulers.

John Milton arrived in Rome in October 1638 as part of his tour of France and Italy. He was 29 years old and expanding the nexus of his “multiple cultural connections with Italy” managed to meet many persons of importance including Antonio Malatesti, Benedetto Buonmattei, Galileo Galilei, Lucas Holstenius, Cardinal Francesco Barberini, Giovanni Battista Manso and Giovanni Salzilli. Salzilli, senior to Milton in age, was a learned member of the Fantastici, a distinguished academy patterned after Cosimo de Medici’s Platonic Academy.

This paper explores the problems associated with the sudden appearance of mawālī (“clients,” Ar. root walāʾ, “clientage, patronage”) in early Islamic Greek papyri of the late seventh and eighth centuries CE. This otherwise unprecedented Greek title (μαυλεύς) appears in the 680s under the Marwānid governor ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz (r. 685-705), above all in the correspondences of the governor Qurra b. Ishak in the so-called Basileios Archive (P. Lond. IV, see Bell).

The papyri of Graeco-Roman Egypt present us with invaluable opportunities to study institutional change in the ancient world. Traditionally, a dirigiste and interventionist Ptolemaic state is contrasted with a policy of privatization and laissez faire under the Romans (Rathbone 2000). This paper explores these dynamics through the vital vegetable oil industry (sesame, castor, olive, and radish), as the so-called ‘oil monopoly’ introduced by the early Ptolemies represents the most extreme example of state intervention known for the Graeco-Roman period (Bingen 1978; Dogaer 2021).

In this talk, I posit a new framework for conceptualizing the development of the royal administration of Egypt in the early Third Century BCE that foregrounds local agency in institutional change and resolves a long-standing crux in the historiography of the Early Ptolemaic Period.

This paper will argue for the close intertextual relationship between manuscripts of applied magic and the compiled handbooks now known as the Greco-Egyptian magical formularies (Love 2016; Faraone and Torallas Tovar 2022a; Faraone and Torallas Tovar 2022b; Kyrianos Database). Such intertextuality has long been recognized, but this paper will focus on the forthcoming edition of an incompletely published papyrus with a Demotic spell for compulsion that represents a relatively rare example in Demotic of a single-sheet manuscript used in practical application.

This paper analyzes the potential extent of dialogue between P.Mich. IX 532 (inv. 5791, 181/182 CE), a document on the education of orphans, and the wider cultural discourse on paideia, apaideusia, and orphania in the “second sophistic”. Scholarship on this papyrus has noted its unusual titulature, puzzling subscription, insight into legal issues of fatherlessness, apprenticeship, and public funds for children, and archaeological context (Husselman 1971, Wolff 1974, Parsons 1974, Sijpesteijn 1982, Bergamasco 2006, van Minnen 2008).