The Acts of the Ecumenical Councils of Late Antiquity include (purportedly) verbatim minutes of the proceedings, a formal framework and copies of relevant documents which were either (allegedly) read out during the proceedings or which were later attached to the Acts proper. Despite this unusual wealth of documentary evidence, the daunting nature of the Acts demanding multidisciplinary competency, their complex structure with a matryoshka-like nesting of proceedings from different dates, and the stereotype that their contents bear only on Christological niceties have deterred generations of historians from studying them. Only in recent years have their fortunes begun to improve, but this recent research has not always been based on sound principles: the recorded proceedings of the sessions are still often accepted as verbatim minutes. Yet even a superficial reading quickly reveals widespread editorial interference. We must accept that in many cases the Acts will teach us less about the actual debates than about the editors who shaped their presentation. This does not depreciate the Acts’ evidence: on the contrary, they are first-rate material for the rhetoric of persuasion and self-representation. It is possible, in fact, to take the investigation to a deeper level and examine in what manner the oral proceedings were put into writing: several passages in the Acts comment upon the process of note-taking and the work of the shorthand writers. Thus, the main objective of the proposed research project could be described as an attempt to trace the destinies of the Acts’ texts, from the oral utterance to the manuscript texts we have today. This will include the fullest study on ancient transcript techniques to date; a structural analysis of the Acts’ texts with the aim of highlighting edited passages; and a careful comparison of the various editions of the Acts, which survive in Greek, Latin, Syriac and Coptic, in order to detect traces of editorial interference.

The genre of late antique law texts, “constitutions”, appears puzzling to the modern observer: contrary to our expectations of clarity and brevity, they are astoundingly voluminous, hiding away the actual legal core—which can be quite short—in a lengthy and elaborate text. They are composed in an accomplished style, and we actually know that their authorship was entrusted to some of the best contemporary literati. Thanks to a sophisticated system of transmission, these texts would reach each and every town in the area of their intended diffusion. Eagerly attended public readings as well as postings at well-frequented places (sometimes permanently as inscriptions) ensured that vast portions of the population would come to know their contents. These texts’ importance in Late Antiquity contrasts starkly with the current state of research. Nobody has investigated the full imperial constitutions as prime examples of late antique Kunstprosa, nor has much effort been put into appreciating the various subjects raised in their complex introductions. Their communicative role, spanning huge geographic as well as social distances from the very center of power to the remotest corners of the vast empire, has been tentatively interpreted by some scholars as “propaganda”, a simplistic explanation which fails to convince. Clearly, these extraordinary texts are in dire need of reassessment. This project has a twofold purpose: first, on the basis of the evidence from the full constitutions, it will yield the methodically most sophisticated study of top-down communication in Late Antiquity, embracing important conclusions and methods of modern communication theory. Second, in order to obtain reliable results, the full constitutions must be collected, sorted, verified, emended, and published anew. Both the resulting collection itself as well as the completely novel methodology employed to ensure its soundness will have a major impact on other research in Classics, Law, and beyond.

Our primary objective is to set up a Erasmus Mundus Joint Master (EMJM) Programme of the highest-quality that will offer students aninnovative and unique curriculum bringing together computational sciences and economics with a special focus on the complexity oftoday’s world. The envisioned EMJM “Computational and Behavioural Approaches to Policy Design and Evaluation in ComplexEconomies” (COMBEX) will be carried out by four high-quality European Universities: The University of Bamberg in Germany (as thecoordinating institution), the University Jaume I in Castellón, Spain, the Polytechnic University delle Marche in Ancona, Italy, and theWarsaw School of Economics in Poland. These four Full Partner Higher Education Institutions have an outstanding research record and the potential administrative infrastructure for the successful implementation of the EMJM Programme COMBEX.The rationale for our envisioned Joint Master Programme is the fact that the today’s world requires professionals with a solidunderstanding of complex interactions based on an academic training centred around computational and behavioural approaches toeconomics. The overwhelming majority of programmes at the Master level offer a curriculum including macroeconomic and economicpolicy issues, based on theories that downplay to a significant extent the role of heterogeneity of and complex interactions betweeneconomic agents.Against this background, our objective is to develop a Joint Master Programme in Economics with a more holistic curriculum based ontheoretical approaches where complex interactions and dynamics are studied instead carefully through a variety of methods such asagent-based modelling, experiments and state-of-the-art statistical techniques. By including specifically defined courses on e.g. networktheory and/or machine learning, for example, students will acquire already in the first year key skills and competences needed forspecialized courses on agent-based modelling.