Journal of Late Antiquity最新文献

{"title":"The Classical Canon and its Uses in Late Late Antiquity: 600–775 CE","authors":"Michael W. Herren","doi":"10.1353/jla.2023.a906776","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/jla.2023.a906776","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: This essay has two essential aims. The first is to provide an overview of classical Latin texts known in Western Europe ca. 600–ca. 775 ce. The second is to establish what classical works were favored and formed literary tastes and literary techniques. The survey concentrates on a few regions and several influential writers of late Late Antiquity. It draws evidence from dated manuscripts, book-lists, glossaries, and quotations to provide a rounded picture of the literary culture of western Europe in those years. Using the terms Old Canon (works written 200 bce–150 ce) and New Canon (works written 150–550 ce), evidence shows that few Old Canon works were copied or read in comparison to New Canon works. By contrast, some New Canon works were received in the seventh century and copied and commented in profusion from the late eighth century onwards. Although book production was determined chiefly by the principle of utility, selecting works essential to Bible study, reading tastes tell a different story. Some \"elite\" authors imbibed New Canon writings and imitated their techniques, including narrative structure, forgery, parody, and satire. The essay invites a re-evaluation of the literary culture of the years 600–ca. 775 ce.","PeriodicalId":16220,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Late Antiquity","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135346779","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Hand of the Slave and the Hand of the Martyr: Pamphilus of Caesarea, Autography, and the Rise of Textual Relics","authors":"Sabrina Inowlocki","doi":"10.1353/jla.2023.a906771","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/jla.2023.a906771","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: This paper analyzes a specific reconfiguration of the text as body in the framework of martyrdom and the retrieval and preservation of the Origenian textual corpus. In this context, I suggest that autographic copies and corrections (that is, textual gestures performed in one's own hand) took on a new meaning. I will focus on the subscriptions left by Pamphilus of Caesarea and his students, and on Jerome's notice 75 of the De uiris illustribu s to trace a shift in the cultural and religious significance of autography. From the hand of the enslaved copyist at the beginning of the Roman empire to the hand of the martyr in Late Antiquity, such a shift ultimately led to a process of \"relicization\" in which the martyr's handwritten text was conceptualized as a physical relic.","PeriodicalId":16220,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Late Antiquity","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135346599","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"La fin de la cité grecque: métamorphoses et disparition d'un modèle politique et institutionnel local en Asie Mineure, de Dèce à Constantin by Anne-Valérie Pont (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/jla.2023.a906782","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/jla.2023.a906782","url":null,"abstract":"new mode of ethical self-evaluation—a practical exercise of the imagination to nurse preventative caution where it had not existed before” (141). Why was death so fearful to Christians in this period? While the teachings of the church were clear that the soul lay in wait after death, as though asleep until the general resurrection and judgment at the end of time, contemporary apocryphal writings like the Vision of Paul depicted an afterlife immediately after death but preceding the judgement, where human souls persisted in recognizable bodies that were vulnernable to physical punishment commeasurate with their sins (Chapter 4). Muhlberger dubs this alarming new phase of human existence the “postmortal.” It is the fear of punishment in the postmortal state of the soul, determined at the moment of death, that lent late antique sermons on dying their efficacy. One of the strengths of this chapter is the insight that pseudepigrapha like the Vision of Paul did not introduce these ideas but rather responded to their growing popularity long before they achieved any official authority as doctrine. Muhlberger argues that this new understanding of the immediate fate of the soul after death justified forcing others to adopt correct Chrisian beliefs in order to help them to avoid the fates awaiting them in their postmortal state (Chapter 5). In doing so, she shows how pastoral care could have a direct influence on political action by “chang[ing] the boundaries of [Christians’] ethics, in particular what they thought it acceptable to do to one another” (184). There is much to admire in this thoughtful and eloquent book. While some of the sources are well known from other studies of death culture in Late Antiquity—most notably, Augustine’s letters—Muhlberger also brings to light new material in support of her argument. Her examination of Jacob of Serugh’s unpublished Syriac sermon On the Hour of Death is both moving and revelatory. The question of causation lingers throughout the book. Why did Christian preachers evoke with such realism the moment of death across the late ancient world at this particular time? Did their rhetorical training inspire them to take up this topic so vividly, or did they simply apply this training to an emergent pastoral concern? Mulhberger acknowledges these questions (140, note 90), but they remain unresolved. In addition to its other merits, Moment of Reckoning also serves as a stimulating point of departure for a longer conversation about the fate of the soul in late ancient thought.","PeriodicalId":16220,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Late Antiquity","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135298409","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Jerome in Rome: Memory and Project","authors":"Mark Vessey","doi":"10.1353/jla.2023.a906777","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/jla.2023.a906777","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: \"What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.\" What happened to Jerome in Rome has proved harder to contain. Sixteen centuries and several decades later, gossip still circulates, helping shape the meanings we attach to the names \"Rome\" and \"Jerome.\" The proceedings of a recent conference provide an opportunity for historical and critical reflection on the earliest recoverable forms of that Jerome/Rome discourse, as mediated by late fourth-century texts. One such—Letter 27 in the collection of Epistolae ex duobus codicibus nuper in lucem prolatae edited in 1981 in CSEL 88 by Johannes Divjak as part of the Sancti Aurelii Augustini Opera —enables us to watch Jerome, in Bethlehem in the early 390s, building his personal literary profile \"in real time\" as he narrates an incident supposed to have taken place in Rome in the mid-380s. Unlike the rest of the documentation we have on and from this author down to the time of its writing, Ep . 27* inter Augustinianas can be securely dated in the form in which it is extant—a point of difference made more salient now by one of the essays in the new proceedings. Pursuing a line of argument re-opened by that essay, and drawing resources from other essays in the same conference volume, this article invites students of Jerome to begin to consider how much of the standard chronology of his life and works—dependent as it is in large part on the terminal notice of his catalogue, De viris illustribus —may be an artefact of his purposive, post-Roman projection of a Vegas-style, Jerome-themed Rome of collective memory.","PeriodicalId":16220,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Late Antiquity","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135298898","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Julian Romance : A Full Text and a New Date","authors":"Marianna Mazzola, Peter Van Nuffelen","doi":"10.1353/jla.2023.a906772","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/jla.2023.a906772","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: The Syriac Julian Romance, a tripartite fictional account of the reign of the Emperor Julian, was hitherto only partially known from two manuscripts. This article publishes the missing first section from Vat. Sir. 37, a section that narrates the death of Constantius II. The complete text allows us to demonstrate that the narrative was composed by a single author and that the tripartite structure does not reflect three older, separate texts. Further, we identify the Miscellaneous Chronicle of 640 as the source for most of the historical information in the Romance. This implies a new date in the first half of the seventh century, which is supported by other chronological indications in the Romance.","PeriodicalId":16220,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Late Antiquity","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135297942","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Saint Stephen in Africa: On Saints, Spinsters, and Synagogues in Late Antiquity","authors":"Hagith Sivan","doi":"10.1353/jla.2023.a906775","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/jla.2023.a906775","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: This study forges a novel link between an image molded unto an oil lamp from Carthage and the text that inspired it. Wrongly considered unique and misinterpreted for over a century, the lamp features a hallowed figure holding a cross in its right arm and crushing a serpent-dragon under its feet. This triad—man, cross, beast—is planted atop an inverted seven-branch candelabra, the ubiquitous Jewish symbol of Late Antiquity. Behind the story of the pictured saint simultaneously subduing a dragon and a candelabra is a tradition of vehement anti-Judaism based on the New Testament and richly laced with African theology and martyrology. Using as interpretative keys a group of oil lamps manufactured in North Africa for Christian and Jewish customers, this study traces the evolution of new, peculiarly African discourses of sainthood, of martyrdom, and of Jewishness.","PeriodicalId":16220,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Late Antiquity","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135300062","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Hagiography, Historiography, and Identity in Sixth-Century Gaul: Rethinking Gregory of Tours by Tamar Rotman (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/jla.2023.a906784","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/jla.2023.a906784","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Hagiography, Historiography, and Identity in Sixth-Century Gaul: Rethinking Gregory of Tours by Tamar Rotman Richard Shaw Hagiography, Historiography, and Identity in Sixth-Century Gaul: Rethinking Gregory of Tours Tamar Rotman Social Worlds of Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022. Pp. 195. ISBN: 978-9463727730. This book by Tamar Rotman, based on her doctoral dissertation, puts forward three hypotheses: Gregory of Tours' Glory of the Martyrs (GM) as well as his [End Page 565] Glory of the Confessors (GC) covered \"eastern\" saints for whom there were no contemporary cults in Gaul (Chapter 2); the GM, GC, and the Life of the Fathers (VP) were planned as an \"ecclesiastical history\" to serve as a counterpart to the \"secular history\" offered in the Ten Books of Histories (LH) (Chapter 3); and this \"ecclesiastical history\" was intended to establish a sense of \"Gallo-Christian identity\" (Chapter 4). It is easier to pose stimulating questions about Gregory and his works than it is to provide persuasive answers. Gregory is an enigma, and his corpus is sufficiently large and varied as to defy simplistic explanation. Rotman raises—and incidentally inspires—many interesting questions about Gregory of Tours's approach—and about how he should be approached—but the arguments made—and the ways the arguments are made—in this slim volume are unlikely to convince many. The argument proper begins in Chapter 2, following what amounts to two introductions: the \"Introduction,\" which introduces Gregory and begins setting out the aims of the study via intense criticism (running throughout the book) of the perceived limitations of the work of all previous scholars in the field; and Chapter 1, which (re)introduces Gregory, providing an effective tour of elements of his life, as well as a synopsis of some, but not all, of his hagiographical writings. Chapter 2 (\"'When the Saints Go Marching In': Eastern Saints in Merovingian Gaul\") attempts to show that Gregory included accounts of saints, especially from the east and especially in the GM, that were not venerated in Gaul. The method followed is to test an assumption that is said to be the consensus among scholars: that Gregory only wrote about and to promote saints for whom there was a local cult (47). There is no such academic consensus, as far as the present reviewer is aware. Disposing of this straw man, therefore, restricts one to conclusions that are already generally accepted: \"Therefore, one must break free from traditional definitions of hagiography and accept the idea that hagiographical texts such as Gregory's collections may have been written for other reasons than merely commemorating the saints and promoting their cults.\" (104). Does any scholar doubt this? Despite the uncontroversial nature of the chapter's principal finding—that Gregory wrote stories about saints for whom there was no local cult in Gaul—the argument employed is unpersuasive. Rotman","PeriodicalId":16220,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Late Antiquity","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135300057","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"John Chrysostom's Homily against the Jews 8 as a Response to Antiochene Jewish Healthcare","authors":"Chance Bonar","doi":"10.1353/jla.2023.a906773","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/jla.2023.a906773","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: This article argues that John Chrysostom's Homily against the Jews ( Adv. Iud . 8), preached at Antioch in 387 ce, is produced as a response to the popularity of Antiochene Jewish healers among John's congregants. As a solution to the perceived problem of Christians seeking out Jewish healing, John develops a model of anti-medicinal martyrdom by which he calls congregants to seek out death by fever. The article is split into three sections. The first section situates the argument amidst recent scholarship on Antiochene space, religious affiliation and ambiguity, and John's rhetorical strategies. The second situates John's anxiety regarding the religious ambiguity of amulets and other medicinal practices alongside late ancient Antiochene material culture. The final section provides a close reading of Adv. Iud . 8 that underscores how John uses biblical exempla to produce his model of anti-medicinal martyrdom.","PeriodicalId":16220,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Late Antiquity","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135297931","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Slow Fall of Babel: Languages and Identities in Late Antique Christianity by Yuliya Minets (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/jla.2023.a906778","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/jla.2023.a906778","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: The Slow Fall of Babel: Languages and Identities in Late Antique Christianity by Yuliya Minets Carson Bay The Slow Fall of Babel: Languages and Identities in Late Antique Christianity Yuliya Minets. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. Pp. xvi + 418. ISBN: 978-1-108-83346-2 Presses are encouraged to submit books dealing with Late Antiquity for consideration for review to any of JLA's three Book Review Editors: Maria Doerfler (maria.doerfler@yale.edu); John Weisweiler (j.weisweiler@lmu.de); and Damián Fernández (dfernandez@niu.edu). Minets' illuminating study of sociolinguistic history is a helpful and ambitious—and, in retrospect, natural—extension of the idea of (Mediterranean) Late Antiquity qua period of study et qua era of cultural diversity established by Peter Brown, among others. The study maps linguistic usage among Christians through the late sixth to early seventh centuries, elucidates Christian ideas about such multilingualism, and attempts to \"explicate the ways in which Christian intellectuals 'used' language … in their ideological speculations on what it means to be a Christian\" (11). The \"Introduction: Awakening to Linguistic Otherness\" grounds the study methodologically and bibliographically at the crossroads of socio-linguistics and ancient history, defining key concepts—the \"alloglottic other,\" \"sociolects,\" and so on—and arguing that linguistic alterity as an object of thought and discourse constitutes a productive analytical lens. \"Chapter 1: Meeting the Alloglottic Other\" provides historical context: a later Roman world structured by Greek-Latin bilingualism; a Near East characterized by a complex multilingual past; an Egypt largely split between Greek-dominated Alexandria and the Coptic of rural, monastic Upper Egypt; a North Africa forged from the interface between Latin and local languages (for example, Punic); and a Europe-Balkan region where Latin came to dominate literature even as numerous languages and dialects enjoyed largely non-literary existence across regions and eras. All this glottal multiplicity also operationalized trans-regional doctrinal controversies. This wonderful survey of socio-linguistics across late antique Christianity depicts \"an astonishing mosaic of dynamic combinations\" (52) and provides a mountain of socio-historical data within which any reader will learn things she did not know before. \"Chapter 2: Languages and Identities in Greco-Roman and Jewish Antiquity\" steps back in time to argue that Jewish and Greco-Roman traditions provided frameworks for Christian ways of thinking/talking about other languages, their speakers, and cross-linguistic communication. Minets surveys by genre and chronology a self-consciously monolingual Greek antiquity that gave way through the Hellenistic period to a bilingual Greek and Roman/Latin world—multilingualism could now be imagined as praiseworthy. Simultaneously, \"the linguistic universe of the ancient Jews was quintessentially multilingua","PeriodicalId":16220,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Late Antiquity","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135297936","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Mary and Early Christian Women: Hidden Leadership by Ally Kateusz (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/jla.2023.a906779","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/jla.2023.a906779","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Mary and Early Christian Women: Hidden Leadership by Ally Kateusz Michael Beshay Mary and Early Christian Women: Hidden Leadership Ally Kateusz Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave MacMillan, 2019. Pp. xvii + 295. ISBN: 978-3-030-11111-6. What did the Virgin Mary mean to ancient Christians? Many historians of the early church might say, \"very little,\" given the slim record of her significance in the New Testament and patristic sources prior to the Council of Ephesus in 431 ce. Accordingly, Mary's then authorized status as \"Mother of God\" (theotokos) [End Page 552] prompted the church to sponsor her veneration, elevating her status to something quasi-divine, while increasingly holding her up as a model of obedience, submission, and self-sacrifice. Over the last decades, however, new insights have emerged about the Virgin's prominence prior to Ephesus, thanks to the concerted efforts of Marian scholars, like Ally Kateusz, who highlight Mary's conspicuous roles in apocryphal and \"heretical\" sources. Contrary to patristic writings, extracanonical sources portray Mary as a liturgical and apostolic leader. But how ancient, widespread, and enduring were these views of the Virgin Mary's authority? Ironically, feminist scholarship most accustomed to investigating this question, as it has in the case of other Marys (most prominently the Magdelene, less so Martha's sister), has resisted including the Virgin among its cast of exemplars of women's leadership. As Kateusz observes, \"modern Protestant, Orthodox, and Catholic interpretation, not to mention layers of their associated gender theology\" has conditioned scholars to deny the Virgin the same favorable treatment as other New Testament women, despite the abundance of extracanonical literary and artistic evidence of her leadership (13). Kateusz's goal is to recover this history, \"hiding in plain sight,\" of Mary's authority as priest and bishop—roles which indicate a persistent \"discipleship of equals\" (as Elizabeth Shüssler Fiorenza described the Jesus movement), which ancient scribes, the church of the West, and modern researchers have occluded. The first three chapters establish the book's aims, methods, and scope. Chapter 1 (re)introduces readers to the Virgin Mary as a founding Abrahamic figure through a cursory survey of principal sources, such as the Proto-Gospel of James and the Gospel of Bartholomew. Kateusz foregrounds redaction analysis in her methodology, a means to investigate the ancient church's ideological struggles over gender roles. Kateusz approaches iconographic artifacts in much the same way, treating outlying depictions of women's leadership in the early record as evidence of wider patterns of female authority based on their unlikely survival through centuries of repression. In chapter 2, Kateusz challenges the standard of lectio brevior potior (preferring the shortest reading) by meticulously demonstrating the tendency of scribes to excise or shorten texts around the markers of fe","PeriodicalId":16220,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Late Antiquity","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135297939","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}