Antiquitopia

I just finished reading Caroline Walker Bynum's Metamorphosis and Identity .  It is a good read--I finished it in a day.  It is a smart collection of essays. Although somewhat disparate (as is typical of collections of essays), she has some especially interesting historiographical reflections when delineating the problems surrounding the endurance of the self through different forms of change from quotidian aging and social changes to Ovidian metamorphosis, given primarily through the prism of werewolves.  Yes, werewolves!  Whatever one thinks of each individual essay, it is worth taking a look to see one of the better historians of the medieval period talk about werewolves to open up important insights into the 12th and 13th centuries.  Why werewolves?  The strange, the weird, and the awe-inducing are, in fact, important historiographical and, what is more, pedagogical tools that reveal and engage us and our students: ...we write the best history...

I just picked up the now-decade-old volume by the eminent medieval historian Caroline Walker Bynum called Metamorphosis and Identity .  It is a collection of somewhat disparate essays spun together by the Ovidian thread of metamorphosis in 12th and 13th century Europe.  She uses the resurgent medieval fascination with concepts of the perduring individual identity among changes and transformations (including the quotidian aging, social changes, etc., but also the Ovidian radical changes in werewolf stories, the Eucharist, and so forth).  She uses these stories that challenge social structures and established boundaries, these stories that suggest fluidity and chaos, as a means to discuss the historian's task.  In an interesting historiographical reflection, she writes: The history we attempt to write is always metamorphosis--a flux to which we have access only through texts and objects that bear vestiges of past lives to us from across time.  To historians as t...

Well...sort of...at least according to this Huffington Post article by Michael Gilmour.  Zombie imagery and resurrection imagery often do have quite an uncanny resemblance.  Here are three of my favorites from Gilmour's list: 2. The Book of Revelation: "the sea gave up the dead that were in it" (Revelation 20:13). John the Seer's creepy statement reminds me of a scene in George A. Romero's "Land of the Dead" (2005) that features slow-moving corpses walking out of the surf, and Max Brooks' "World War Z" with its account of the boy returning from a swim with a bite mark on his foot. He also describes the zombie hoards roaming the world's oceans: "They say there are still somewhere between twenty and thirty million of them, still washing up on beaches, or getting snagged in fisherman's nets." ..... 5. The Gospel of Matthew: "The tombs also were opened, and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep we...

It appears that Jodi Magness's team has unearthed a high-quality Mosaic of Sampson tying torches to foxes in a late-antique synagogue. See the news article and some initial photos here and here .

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...

The qualities of religious experience mirror those of poetry--and, indeed, some of the best accounts of religious experience are related through poetry (think of St. John of the Cross); as one bends and bursts beyond the typical conventions of language, so does the other.  The most engaging poetry pulls at all five senses.  So too, the expression of religious experience.  I realize that what follows may not be technically be poetry in the sense of ancient meter and verse (though it has some of those things!), but one could easily consider it "prose poetry."  Indeed, St. Augustine of Hippo, trained as a rhetor and as a professor of rhetoric, was a master of style, and his Confessions is a masterwork on many levels including its means of expression.  Late have I loved you, Beauty so old and so new: Late have I loved you. And see, you were within And I was within the external world And sought you there, And in my unlovely state I plunged into those lovel...

            Continuing my pursuit of ancient quirks, I want to discuss the strange first-century interest in Moses’ beauty.   I have discussed it in Hebrews 11 and Acts 7, in Philo of Alexandria’s recounting, and now that other prominent first century Jewish writer: Josephus. Josephus picks up on this broader first-century promotion of the fine physique of Moses, but there are some major alterations, dislocations, and expansions.               To briefly recap, previous traditions directly relate Moses’ beauty at birth as the reason why his parents, particularly his mother, decided to save him from infanticide.   Although Acts 7:20 merely notes that Moses at birth “was beautiful (ἀστεῖος) before God,” Hebrews 11:23 reasons that, “By faith Moses, when he was born, was hid for three months by his parents, because they saw that the child was beautiful (ἀστεῖον)...