The invitation to participate in this panel put the project this way:
Each presenter is being asked to offer a close reading of a short text (a "fragment" broadly understood), but a text that is *not* a late ancient source. Rather, we're asking presenters to read a modern text – a scholarly piece, part of a technical source outside the field, perhaps even a poem or a piece of literary prose – in order to investigate provocative problems, ideas, and disciplinary techniques pertaining to the study of the late ancient world. What, we are asking, does it look like to "do a reading" of something like this in a way that can illuminate the field from a new and unanticipated direction?
My thinking about this challenge begins with the word itself: “fragment.” The word suggests breakage, fracture, damage, brittleness, fragility—violence, accident, loss, absence, partialness. A fragment implies the whole but marks its absence at the same time.
Bit, chip, flake, fraction, morsel, paring, particle, piece, portion, remnant, scrap, shard, shaving, shred, sliver, smattering, snippet, speck, splinter, snippet, tatter, wisp; chapter, excerpt, extract, movement, part, section; or, in its verbal form: blow apart, break, break down, break into pieces, break up, burst apart, collapse, come to pieces, crack open/apart, disintegrate, dismember, disrupt, explode, fall apart, fall to pieces, fracture, implode, rive, shatter, smash, splinter
It is worth pondering how the English language comes to have so many ways of signifying what lies behind the word itself.
As researchers working on antiquity, in some ways we are used to the fragment: we routinely turn to snippets of text, lacunae-pocked manuscripts, epitomes and florilegia to reconstruct our archives. But I would suggest that the fragmentary and the archival continue to cross through almost every historical period, whether distant or proximate. In the summer of 2018, having recently become the Director of the Barnard Center for Research on Women, I have found myself suddenly in the position of collaborating with the College archives in managing a large archive of ephemera from the mid-twentieth century—Wages for Housework pamphlets, Marxist-feminist manifestos, white papers on sterilization abuse, newsletters from short-lived radical separatist feminist collectives that took the “men” out of “women” by spelling it w-o-m-y-n, [or new-agey feminist collectives that spelled it w-o-m-b-m-o-o-n], audio recordings of conferences where academics and activists tussled over theory and strategy, chapbooks of poetry written by incarcerated women, mimeographed directions addressed to anonymous women in distant parts of the country on how to induce abortion, and so on. As it happens, a lot of this archived material harkens back to my own lived experience—I was part of those 1970s and onward movements, and I was an unofficial archivist who religiously saved flyers and newsletters and meeting minutes and so on, thinking ahead to a time when future historians would tell this story. I was often mocked for this hoarding behavior. In looking at all this archival material now—material that represents a history I have myself lived—I find myself remarking on its profoundly—even essentially—fragmentary nature, how it lifts up certain aspects of the work (the open letters, the budgets, the public gatherings, the language of engagement) but cannot begin to represent so many other elements of the time (the personal relationships, the private affinities and affiliations, the fashion and style, the feeling of it all)—this, even when the archive represents the lives of people many of whom are still living, and even when one of the major slogans of the time was “the personal is the political.”
This experience in trying to manage the partiality of a very contemporary archive inspires in me a sense of humility about any work we do with our archives of fragments for the study of religion in late antiquity. While it is a commonplace that our evidence skews toward the privileged, the socially and institutionally dominant, the literate, and often, the urban. But more than that, the archive of fragments to which we are heirs is the messy produce of the jumbling of accident and intention, purposeful preservation and incidental stashing away. The fragment whispers, suggests, gestures, directs us to the fantasy of the whole picture flickering and dissolving in the middle or far distance like a handful of frames from a mostly lost silent movie.
“My fragment”
When I selected my fragment for this panel, I cheated a little bit: my “fragment” is not “a” fragment but rather a collection of fragments, intentionally created. It is a book of poetry called Nets imagined and realized by poet and artist Jen Bervin.[1] (Bervin’s work is conceptual and deeply interdisciplinary. Her most recent project is called Silk Poems, and involved the use of nanotechnology to print her poems on liquified silk that could easily be implanted under the skin.[2]) Perhaps by contrast, the Nets project will seem downright ordinary: in Nets, Bervin took a selection of sonnets by William Shakespeare—sixty out of the total canonical number of 154—and erased the majority of the words in the sonnets to open them up and create new poems. At the end of the book, she includes a “working note,” which reads:
I stripped Shakespeare’s sonnets bare to the “nets” to make the space of the poems open, porous, possible—a divergent elsewhere. When we write poems, the history of poetry is with us, pre-inscribed in the white of the page; when we read or write poems, we do it with or against this palimpsest.
This project is simultaneously whimsical and scandalous. Some of the poems “revealed” through the practice of “erasure” are lovely, evocative, delicately observed moments.
Brought to the surface through the project of erasure, Bervin’s poems—a sort of reverse palimpsest—shift the subject voice, disrupt the straightforward meaning of the sonnet, and create a poetic trace.
We could pick out any number of the poems:
In #22, the gesture of erasure turns time and temporality into an eternal now:
In #45, the melancholy of separation from the beloved turns into an evocation of the balance of thought and want:
Poem #55 turns explicitly political, the persistence of the lover’s memory transformed into a didactic anti-war sentiment:
And Poem #150 transforms an address to the lover into a reflection on the very notion of the fragment:
***
Bervin’s project foregrounds the observation that texts emerge out of the history of other texts, but then she flips this insight into what I am calling a reverse palimpsest. If traditional historiography involves positing or reconstructing a coherent story out of the clever and considered assemblage of fragments, Bervin challenges us to take the received text apart and to make it anew. Moreover, she creates a book of manufactured fragments out of some of the most uber-canonical literature in the history of the English language: Shakespeare. It is a project of reformatting and remixing the canonical for the now.
After another panel at this conference, devoted to the new material philology,[3] where several of our colleagues challenged much of the conventional practice of how we do things with manuscripts and artifacts, I thought again about Bervin’s anti-canonical move in exposing the “nets” of Shakespeare’s sonnets by erasing them. The erasing of the canonical aligns itself, I would argue, with the new material philological commitment to ask different kinds of questions about the materiality of the text itself and to turn our focus and attention to the marginalia, to the traces of scribal attention-getting, to the textual variations as not problems to be solved but as windows onto a different historical horizon.
I have been thinking about all this while teaching—for the umpteenth time—a survey course on Christianity in late antiquity. Each time I teach the course, I find myself shrinking the parts of the syllabus devoted to the reading of early Christian polemic, treatise, and public letter so that I can add more fragmentary artifacts that trouble the still-dominant and hard-to-shake narrative of the “rise” of a thing called “Christianity.”
A papyrus letter pock-marked with lacunae sent from one community of Christian “sisters” to another.[4] The letter’s writer is not engaged in deep theological reflection on the meaning of virginity but instead is meticulously cataloguing specific quotidian items sent to the other “sisters” and impatiently demanding payment;
A burial inscription that laments the death of an enslaved child from the imperial household, the stone clumsily marked by a homely anchor and ill-drawn scaly fish;[5]
A small ampulla for water or oil, bearing only the worn relief of a human figure;[6]
A portion of a third- or fourth-century amulet found in Pisidian Antioch, bearing the liturgical formula for an exorcism by the power of “the right hand of God, the blood of Christ,” “angels and the church.”[7] And so on.
When we talk about these fragments in class, inevitably we come up against a whole series of questions about provenance, about the conditions under which such objects would have been produced and preserved, about how a deracinated object relates to other deracinated objects and to the intellectual history preserved in more conventionally taught early Christian sources—apologies, heresiologies, treatises on the ascetical life, letters, polemics, sermons, commentaries, and more. Quite apart from the substance or content of the “fragments,” the very fact of their existence undermines the tenability of the overarching narrative, the big story. And here, it seems, is perhaps the most important insight from this exercise of ruminating on the work of the “fragment”: fragments, in their partiality, their accidental nature, their brokenness standing in for absence and multiplicity at once—fragments disrupt the fantasy of a fully reconstructed history and remind us insistently and repeatedly of the impossibility of completing our historiographical task.
I close with a narrative fragment, an epigraph to a recent book by Belgian art historian Barbara Baert, a book itself entitled Fragments.[8] Consisting of a curated series of 110 short entries, each of which engages a different iconological fragment, Fragments constitutes Baert’s response to being awarded a major Belgian prize in the human sciences in 2016 and invites the reader into her entire body of work by means of an archive of fragments. The epigraph derives from The Infatuations, a novel by the Spanish writer Javier Marías, and evokes the haunting and the persistence at the heart of the fragment, the ruin, the perduring remainder. He writes:
Yes, everything becomes attenuated, but it’s also true to say that nothing entirely disappears, there remain faint echoes and elusive memories that can surface at any moment like the fragments of gravestones in the room in a museum that no one visits….
We never eliminate all vestiges, though, we never manage, truly, once and for all, to silence that past matter, and sometimes we hear an almost imperceptible breathing.[9]
[1] Jen Bervin, Nets (Brooklyn, NY: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2004).
[2] Jen Bervin, Silk Poems (Brooklyn, NY: Nightboat Books, 2007); http://jenbervin.com/projects/silk-poems.
[3] https://www.ancientjewreview.com/articles/2019/5/23/textual-objects-and-material-philology
[4] P. Berl. Inv. 13897 ( = SB VIII.i.9746); Mario Naldini, Il cristianesimo in Egitto: lettere private nel papyri del secoli ii-iv (Firenze: Le Monnier, 1968), no. 36; Alanna M. Emmett, “An Early Fourth-Century Female Monastic Community in Egypt?” in Maistor: Classical, Byzantine, and Renaissance Studies for Robert Browning, ed. Ann Moffatt (Byzantina Australiensia 5; Canberra: Australian Association for Byzantine Studies, 1984), 77-83.
[5] ICUR V 12892 (EDB 781); an undated inscription from the Catacombs of Saint Sebastian on the Via Appia: “Atimetus, slave of Augustus, eight years and three months old; Earinus and Potens for their son.” This inscription has a rich body of scholarly literature associated with it. See, most recently, Michael Flexsenhar III, Christians in Caesar’s Household: The Emperors’ Slaves in the Makings of Christianity (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2019), 115-20.
[6] Terra-cotta pilgrim ampulla, Saint Thecla’s Martyrdom, date uncertain; London British Museum EC 882. This object has also been well-studied. See Elizabeth A. Castelli, Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture Making (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 165-71.
[7] The object in question, a silver lamella bearing an inscription that reads: “For (evil) spirits: ‘Phōathphro, depart from Basilius, by the right hand of God, and the blood of Christ, and by her (sic) angels and (the) Church,” is in the collection of the Archaeological Museum in Ankara, Turkey. “35. A Liturgical Exorcistic Amulet,” in Roy Kotansky, Greek Magical Amulets: The Inscribed Gold, Silver, Copper, and Bronze Lamellae, Part I: Published Texts of Known Provenance (Papyrologica Coloniensia XXII.1; Wiesbaden: Springer, 1994), 169-80.
[8] Barbara Baert, Fragments, ed. Stephanie Heremans (Studies in Iconology 14; Leuven: Peeters, 2018).
[9] Javier Marías, The Infatuations, trans. Margaret Jull Costa (New York: Penguin, 2014), 310-11.