Antiquitopia

I just finished reading Caroline Schroeder 's Monastic Bodies : Discipline and Salvation in Shenoute of Atripe , which I recommend to anyone studying late antique Egypt, ancient monasticism, or uses the body as a critical lens of analysis.  I do not offer a comprehensive review here, but a series of impressions as I now step away from the book. There is, indeed, too little scholarship on Shenoute, and Caroline Schroeder, through some close analyses of key documents, draws out Shenoute's concept of the body. She relies upon much similar work done on the body and how it relates to larger groups (Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger ; Peter Brown, The Body and Society ; Dale Martin, The Corinthian Body ) as well as Foucault's analyses on discipline and discourse (e.g., Discipline and Punish , and I believe some History of Sexuality was involved as well), as a broader lens by which to read Shenoute's writings. If I read Schroeder correctly, Shenoute makes a series of correspo...

In an earlier post , I had noted Moses' importance in Greco-Egyptian magic, riffing off of a statement that John Gager made.  I wrote: The Moses of the magical papyri provides another piece of the puzzle of what Jews, Christians, and others on the ground thought, what they did, and, again, reasons for his exaltation and, just as often, suppression.  It is a clear example, here, of exaltation.  I wonder, what Christians did with this view of Moses as magician?  Does his exaltation here mirror his exaltation in contemporary Christian sources of the mid-second to fourth centuries?  How does it compare with contemporary Egyptian Christian sources of different opposing parties of the hierarchy, the monks, and the traditions of Nag Hammadi?  Indeed, it is fascinating territory into which the magical Moses takes us.  It is a messy, difficult terrain, but ultimately a fruitful one. In this post, I would like to delve a little deeper in the Mose...

I have been fascinated with the traditions of Moses in the first to fourth centuries CE lately.  In connection with my "Christian Moses" project, I have been reading up on how his reputation developed in contemporary sources.  For this, there are many important scholarly works, but perhaps one of the most helpful ones in considering his broader significance in the ancient world is John Gager's Moses in Greco-Roman Paganism .  Of any figure from the Jewish tradition, Moses was the best-known to outsiders.  And while many erudite Greeks and Romans (and Egyptians) tended to refer to Moses as a lawgiver (usually as one inferior to Plato, among others), perhaps the most widespread view of Moses was that of a magician.  He is invoked among the Greek and Demotic magical papyri as an authority--sometimes works are written in his name (such as the much under-studied Eighth Book of Moses) or his name is invoked in surviving amulets because it was thought to have power in ...