The Life and Miracles of Thekla

The Life and Miracles of Thekla PDF

Author: Scott Fitzgerald Johnson

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780674019614

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The Life and Miracles of Thekla offers a unique view on the reception of classical and early Christian literature in Late Antiquity. This study examines the Life and Miracles as an intricate example of Greek writing and attempts to situate the work amidst a wealth of similar literary forms from the classical world. The first half of the Life and Miracles is an erudite paraphrase of the famous second-century Acts of Paul and Thekla. The second half is a collection of forty-six miracles that Thekla worked before and during the composition of the collection. This study represents a detailed investigation into the literary character of this ambitious Greek work from Late Antiquity.

Acts of Paul

Acts of Paul PDF

Author: Glenn E. Snyder

Publisher: Mohr Siebeck

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 348

ISBN-13: 9783161527739

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Acts of Paul is a collection of early Christian traditions that were not included in the canonized Acts: the Acts of Paul and Thekla, 3 Corinthians, the Martyrdom of Paul, and other fabulous stories, such as Paul baptizing a lion. By the end of the second century, there was a rumor in North Africa that Acts of Paul had been fabricated by a presbyter in Asia Minor (Tertullian, De baptismo 17.5) and to this day, it is alleged that Acts of Paul is later than and inferior to the traditions preserved in Acts - historically, theologically, and otherwise. But what evidence is there for the composition and reception of Acts of Paul? In this study, Glenn E. Snyder critically examines Greek, Latin, and Coptic witnesses to Acts of Paul from the second to sixth centuries, with chapters on the independently circulating acts, extant collections, and other evidence for the formation of Acts of Paul.

Miracle Tales from Byzantium

Miracle Tales from Byzantium PDF

Author:

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2012-05-14

Total Pages: 473

ISBN-13: 0674059034

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Miracles occupied a unique place in medieval and Byzantine life and thought. This volume makes available three collections of miracle tales never before translated into English. They deepen our understanding of attitudes toward miracles and display the remarkable range of registers in which Greek could be written during the Byzantine period.

Apophasis and Pseudonymity in Dionysius the Areopagite

Apophasis and Pseudonymity in Dionysius the Areopagite PDF

Author: Charles M. Stang

Publisher: Oxford University Press on Demand

Published: 2012-02-09

Total Pages: 245

ISBN-13: 0199640424

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This book examines the writings of an early sixth-century Christian mystical theologian who wrote under the name of a convert of the apostle Paul, Dionysius the Areopagite, and argues that the pseudonym and the corresponding influence of Paul are the crucial lens through which to read this influential corpus.

Greek Literature in Late Antiquity

Greek Literature in Late Antiquity PDF

Author: Scott Fitzgerald Johnson

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-04-22

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 1317124758

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Late Antiquity has attracted a significant amount of attention in recent years. As a historical period it has thus far been defined by the transformation of Roman institutions, the emergence of distinct religious cultures (Jewish, Christian, Islamic), and the transmission of ancient knowledge to medieval and early modern Europe. Despite all this, the study of late antique literary culture is still in its infancy, especially for the Greek and other eastern texts examined in this volume. The contributions here presented make new inroads into a rich literature notable above all for its flexibility and unparalleled creativity in combining multiple languages and literary traditions. The authors and texts discussed include Philostratus, Eusebius of Caesarea, Nonnos of Panopolis, the important St Polyeuktos epigram, and numerous others. The volume makes use of a variety of interdisciplinary approaches in an attempt to provoke discussion on change (Dynamism), literary education (Didacticism), and reception studies (Classicism). The result is a study which highlights the erudition and literary sophistication characteristic of the period and brings questions of contextualization, linguistic association, and artistic imagination to bear on little-known or undervalued texts, without neglecting important evidence from material culture and social practices. With contributions by both established scholars and young innovators in the field of late antique studies, there is no work of comparable authority or scope currently available. This volume will stimulate further interest in a range of untapped texts from Late Antiquity.

The Corporeal Imagination

The Corporeal Imagination PDF

Author: Patricia Cox Miller

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2012-02-28

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 0812204689

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With few exceptions, the scholarship on religion in late antiquity has emphasized its tendencies toward transcendence, abstraction, and spirit at the expense of matter. In The Corporeal Imagination, Patricia Cox Miller argues instead that ancient Christianity took a material turn between the fourth and seventh centuries. During this period, Miller contends, there occurred a major shift in the ways in which the human being was oriented in relation to the divine, a shift that reconfigured the relationship between materiality and meaning in a positive direction. The Corporeal Imagination is a groundbreaking investigation into the theological poetics of material substance in late ancient Christian texts. From hagiographies to literary descriptions of sacred paintings to treatises on relics and theurgy, Miller examines a wide variety of ancient texts to reveal how Christian writers increasingly described the matter of the world as invested with divine power. By appealing to the reader's sensory imagination, Christian texts endowed phenomena like relics, saints' bodies in hagiography, and saints' presence in icons with a visual and tactile presence. The book draws on a variety of contemporary theoretical models to elucidate the significance of all these materials in ancient religious life and imagination.

From Constantinople to the Frontier: The City and the Cities

From Constantinople to the Frontier: The City and the Cities PDF

Author:

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2016-05-30

Total Pages: 546

ISBN-13: 9004307745

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From Constantinople to the Frontier: The City and the Cities provides twenty-five articles addressing the concept of centres and peripheries in the late antique and Byzantine worlds, focusing on urban aspects of this paradigm between the fourth and thirteenth centuries.

The Life of Thecla

The Life of Thecla PDF

Author: Andrew S. Jacobs

Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers

Published: 2024-05-31

Total Pages: 121

ISBN-13: 1666746401

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Thecla was one of the most venerated saints in late antiquity. One of her followers created the Life of Thecla as an act of devotion in the fifth century, rewriting the popular Acts of Thecla and transforming it into the heroic saga of a saint. Replete with long speeches, dramatic flourishes, and literary flamboyance, the Life of Thecla gives modern readers insight into the ways a gender-bending apostolic saint could be reframed and reimagined for later audiences. This first modern English translation of the Life explores its relationship with the earlier Acts as well as its place in fifth-century concerns about miracles, healing, sainthood, and sexuality.

Literary Territories

Literary Territories PDF

Author: Scott Fitzgerald Johnson

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2016-01-04

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13: 0190493348

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Literary Territories introduces readers to a wide range of literature from 200-900 CE in which geography is a defining principle of literary art. From accounts of Holy Land pilgrimage, to Roman mapmaking, to the systematization of Ptolemy's scientific works, Literary Territories argues that forms of literature that were conceived and produced in very different environments and for different purposes in Late Antiquity nevertheless shared an aesthetic sensibility which treated the classical "inhabited world," the oikoumene, as a literary metaphor for the collection and organization of knowledge. This type of "cartographical thinking" stresses the world of knowledge that is encapsulated in the literary archive. The archival aesthetic coincided with an explosion of late antique travel and Christian pilgrimage which in itself suggests important unifying themes between visual and textual conceptions of space. Indeed, by the end of Late Antiquity the geographical mode appears in nearly every type of writing in multiple Christian languages (Greek, Latin, Syriac, and others). The diffusion of cartographical thinking throughout the real-world oikoumene, now the Christian Roman Empire, was a fundamental intellectual trajectory of Late Antiquity.

Where Dreams May Come (2 vol. set)

Where Dreams May Come (2 vol. set) PDF

Author: Gil Renberg

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2017-06-01

Total Pages: 1130

ISBN-13: 9004330232

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In this book, Gil H. Renberg analyzes in detail the vast range of sources for “incubation,” dream-divination at a divinity’s sanctuary or shrine, beginning in Sumerian times but primarily focussing on the Greeks and Greco-Roman Egypt.