Actio seu malum carmen - metodologie badatelské práce
| Title in English | Actio seu malum carmen - Methodology of scientific work |
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| Year of publication | 2016 |
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| Description | Curse tablets form an important part of the Mediterranean magical tradition in the Antiquity (circa 1600 tablets have been preserved, their number constantly increasing due to new archeological findings). In the last decade, scholarly debates focused on the issues connected with curse tables in judiciary context and on so-called prayers for justice, whose relation to other types of curses remain controversial. The lecture focuses on the intention to create the corpus of all Greek and Latin judiciary curses and prayers for justice and to interpret them in alignment with legal practices of the day. In addition to the typological analysis of the tablets and the identification of legal terminology they contain, we will focus on answering the following questions: To what degree are legal practices mirrored in the curses with judiciary context and prayers for justice? Given the limited enforceability of the law for various social groups (women, soldiers, freed slaves), is it possible to demonstrate that a curse was, for many inhabitants of the Empire, the only option available to achieve justice? |
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