Francisco de Goya, Confesiones en la cárcel (1808-1812) Real Monasterio de Santa María de Guadalupe, Spain. [Wikimedia].
Francisco de Goya, Confesiones en la cárcel (1808-1812) Real Monasterio de Santa María de Guadalupe, Spain. [Wikimedia].
In her work Henning proves herself to be the first real textual archaeologist of hell: she plumbs depths and asks questions that, with few exceptions, previous scholars did not.
Read MoreFigure 1. Screen capture of Edith Massey in Pink Flamingos (1972).
Figure 1. Screen capture of Edith Massey in Pink Flamingos (1972).
One of the many strengths of Henning’s book is the multiple references to contemporary practices and conversations, which highlight the importance of engaging the ancient and medieval tours of hell.
Read MoreCuicul civic prison (2nd century CE). Image taken from 3D model of the space, © Letteney and Larsen.
Cuicul civic prison (2nd century CE). Image taken from 3D model of the space, © Letteney and Larsen.
For my part, I want to examine some of the evidence for the material realities of punishment in the Roman world, exploring a few spaces that bring archaeological and affective texture to the penal and carceral language informing tours of hell to which that Henning so insightfully points in her book.
Read MoreGeorge Romney, A Procession of the Damned: Study for the Damned in Dante's Inferno (undated) Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.
George Romney, A Procession of the Damned: Study for the Damned in Dante's Inferno (undated) Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.
What we find when we do so—with Henning as a surefooted guide through these hellscapes—is a stunningly vivid and visceral picture of how the Christian anthropological imagination actually worked during the formative centuries of the movement and extending into late antiquity.
Read MoreAuguste Rodin, The Gates of Hell (modeled 1880-1917 and cast by Alexis Rudier 1926-1928) Philadelphia Museum of Art - Rodin Museum.
Auguste Rodin, The Gates of Hell (modeled 1880-1917 and cast by Alexis Rudier 1926-1928) Philadelphia Museum of Art - Rodin Museum.
Building upon scholarship that sees juridical contexts at the heart of these conceptions of punishment and just desserts, Henning pushes such conclusions further by asking what other assumptions, namely concerning bodies and gender, are brought into our scholarly interpretations of Hell and the afterlife.
Read MoreEmil Nolde, The Last Supper (1909) National Gallery of Denmark [WikiArt].
Emil Nolde, The Last Supper (1909) National Gallery of Denmark [WikiArt].
Augustine drew on the central Christian idea of sacramentum—a technical but expansive concept indicating the mysterious conjoining of the sensible to the intelligible, the human to the divine—to produce a unified theory of existence that stands in contrast to the dualisms of his time.
Read MoreUnfamiliar Selves invites biblical studies to engage in broader discussions in the study of religion through comparison of our primary texts with ethnographic work on spirit possession practices across the world today.
Read More“Christianity is a subtler, quieter apparition in this book than it is in much past scholarship on the topic—but it lurks nevertheless, going bump in the night and thereby shaping the discussion in implicit ways.”
Read MoreMerely establishing the existence of “spirit” language in ancient Jewish texts, rather than identifying its particularity–the local realities with which it intersects and the specificity of the literary representations by which it is constituted–risks evaluating ancient Judaism from the standpoint of Christianity.
Read More“I think we rather need to compare how the modern conceptualizations of spirit possession are similar or dissimilar to the ones in biblical texts. To put it bluntly: We do not need to see what makes an angel in ethnographic data and how people describe angels in order to see which beings in biblical texts might qualify as angels. Rather, we may compare different angel conceptualizations and narratives.”
Read More“Flying in the face of scholarship’s “hermeneutical exorcism,” Carlson tells ethnographic stories about people who experience spirit phenomena. Reading their stories has the potential to generate what Édouard Glissant calls the “poetics of relation.” Opportunities for renewed and reconnective perception and perspective-taking, Glissant’s poetics of relation are his key to the project of “transforming mentalities and reshaping societies.””
Read MoreThe 2022 SBL Book Review panel of Unfamiliar Selves in the Hebrew Bible: Possession and Other Spirit Phenomena (De Gruyter 2022) by Reed Carlson. The panelists were: Jutta Jokiranta (University of Helsinki), David Lambert (University of North Carolina), Ingrid Lilly (Wofford College), and Ethan Schwartz (Villanova University).
Read MoreSteven Fraade provides a preview of his forthcoming publication on Multilingualism and Translation in Ancient Judaism (Cambridge University Press, June 2023).
Read More4QDeuteronomyⁿ (All Souls Deuteronomy). Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
4QDeuteronomyⁿ (All Souls Deuteronomy). Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
“I often think that scholarly understanding of the biblical Dead Sea Scrolls and I grew up together; over the years, and now decades, a paradigm shift has occurred in the field, and my own views have changed along with it.”
Read MoreAnnette Reed introduces the dynamic range of scholarship in a new edited volume discussing Enoch’s modern reception.
Read MoreReuven Kiperwasser shares his process of writing Going West: Migrating Personae and Construction of the Self in Rabbinic Culture in his own transient state.
Read MoreThe project Kotzé sets out on, then, is more than a guide for text critical issues in Lamentations. It seeks, rather, to blend text criticism with an interpretive process keen on finding contemporary parallels in neighboring cultures.
Read MoreAn illustration on vellum from the "Compendium of Chronicles" (Jami' al-Tawarikh) by Rashid al-Din, published in Tabriz, Persia, 1307 CE. This image depicts a young Mohammed being recognized by the monk Bahira. Now found in the collection of the Edinburgh University Library, Scotland [Wikimedia].
An illustration on vellum from the "Compendium of Chronicles" (Jami' al-Tawarikh) by Rashid al-Din, published in Tabriz, Persia, 1307 CE. This image depicts a young Mohammed being recognized by the monk Bahira. Now found in the collection of the Edinburgh University Library, Scotland [Wikimedia].
By thinking with premodern Christians as they imagined Muslims and Jews, we can also take a reflexive look at ourselves in the present. How and why do we identify with objects, particularly those from the past?
Read MoreRembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, The Parable of the Rich Fool (1627) Berlin, Gemäldegalerie [Wikimedia].
