- Early Christianity, Late Antiquity, New Testament and Christian Origins, Gregory of Nazianzus, Religion, Ancient History, and 14 moreLiterary Theory, Roman History, History of Christianity, Greek Language, Byzantine History, Apostle Paul and the Pauline Letters, Byzantine Literature, Syriac Studies, Historical Jesus, Religious Conversion, Coptic Studies, Cappadocians, Origen of Alexandria, and Byzantine Studiesedit
- I am Associate Professor of the History of Christianity in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Loui... moreI am Associate Professor of the History of Christianity in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Louisiana State University. My research tracks how early Christians used traditional literary genres (epistolography and hagiography) for the purposes of self-presentation and community construction. I am also engaged in several ongoing translation projects.edit
Research Interests: Christianity, Late Antique and Byzantine Studies, Patristics, History of Christianity, Early Christianity, and 11 moreAutobiography, Byzantine Studies, Cappadocians, Late Antiquity, Epistolary literature, Gregory of Nazianzus, Epistolography, Basil of Caesarea, Patristics and Late Antiquity, Greek Patristics, and Cappadocian Fathers
Research Interests: Christianity, Late Antique and Byzantine History, Late Antique and Byzantine Studies, Patristics, History of Christianity, and 11 moreEarly Christianity, Autobiography, Cappadocians, Late Antiquity, Gregory of Nazianzus, Epistolography, Basil of Caesarea, Early Christian Literature, Byzantine epistolography, Greek Patristics, and Cappadocian Fathers
The Cambridge Edition of Early Christian Writings offers new translations of a wide range of materials from c.100 CE to c.650 CE, including many writings that have not previously been accessible in English. The volumes will focus on... more
The Cambridge Edition of Early Christian Writings offers new translations of a wide range of materials from c.100 CE to c.650 CE, including many writings that have not previously been accessible in English. The volumes will focus on selected themes and will include translations of works originally written in Greek, Latin, Syriac, and Coptic, together with introductions, notes, bibliographies, and scriptural indices to aid the reader. Taken together they should greatly expand the range of texts available to scholars, students, and all who are interested in this period of Christian thought.
General Editors:
Andrew Radde-Gallwitz, University of Notre Dame, Indiana
Mark DelCogliano, University of St Thomas, Minnesota
Ellen Muehlberger, University of Michigan
Bradley K. Storin, Louisiana State University
General Editors:
Andrew Radde-Gallwitz, University of Notre Dame, Indiana
Mark DelCogliano, University of St Thomas, Minnesota
Ellen Muehlberger, University of Michigan
Bradley K. Storin, Louisiana State University
Research Interests:
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Bringing together an international team of historians, classicists, and scholars of religion, this volume provides the first comprehensive overview of the extant Greek and Latin letter collections of late antiquity (ca. 300–600 C.E.),... more
Bringing together an international team of historians, classicists, and scholars of religion, this volume provides the first comprehensive overview of the extant Greek and Latin letter collections of late antiquity (ca. 300–600 C.E.), illustrating how letter collections advertised an image of the letter writer and introducing the social and textual histories of each collection. Each chapter addresses a major collection of Greek or Latin literary letters, examining their assembly, publication, and transmission. In addition, contributions reveals how late antique letter collections operated as a discrete literary genre with their own conventions, transmission processes, and self-presentational agendas. This book will fundamentally change how people both read these texts and use letters to reconstruct the social history of the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries
Research Interests: Libanius, Theodoret of Cyrrhus, Emperor Julian, Augustine, Late Antiquity, and 20 moreGregory of Nazianzus, Augustine of Hippo, John Chrysostom, Epistolography, Late Antique Literature, Basil of Caesarea, Evagrius Ponticus, St Jerome, Latin epistolography, Ausonius, Cassiodorus, Ambrose of Milan, Sidonius Apollinaris, Byzantine epistolography, Choricius of Gaza, Paulinus of Nola, Synesius of Cyrene, Procopius of Gaza, Q. Aurelius Symmachus, and Aeneas of Gaza
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Over the past fourteen centuries, Gregory of Nazianzus (ca. 330–390 C.E.) has been the subject of more than a dozen biographical narratives and monographs, beginning with the late antique hagiography of Gregory the Presbyter and... more
Over the past fourteen centuries, Gregory of Nazianzus (ca. 330–390 C.E.) has been the subject of more than a dozen biographical narratives and monographs, beginning with the late antique hagiography of Gregory the Presbyter and concluding with the modern biography by John McGuckin. This is likely the result of Gregory's vast autobiographical corpus, which has provided scholars with a chronological narrative and character perspective from which to start their own secondary narratives. By examining this tradition of biography, I argue that two trends remain regularly operative. First, each biographer has consistently endowed his subject with his own values, ideals, and theological commitments. Second, each biography has given pride of place to Gregory's autobiographical voice. To make a precise demonstration of the latter trend, I follow the notorious Maximus affair from its presentation in Gregory's autobiography and in the biographical tradition, showing how Gregory'...
Research Interests: Philosophy and Art
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This chapter introduces the reader to the book as a whole. The volume establishes a few basic starting points for interpreting late antique letters and letter collections. First, it rejects the letter/epistle dichotomy established by... more
This chapter introduces the reader to the book as a whole. The volume establishes a few basic starting points for interpreting late antique letters and letter collections. First, it rejects the letter/epistle dichotomy established by Adolf Deissmann in the early 20th century in favor of a much broader conception of the epistolary genre. Second, it insists that readers conceive of authorship, complete with generic design and self-presentational concerns, in relation to the editorial activity of compiling late antique letter collections. Third, it suggests that the engine driving the popularity of letter collections was the dramatic increase in civil and military bureaucracy beginning in the 4th century. Social competition was in full force, and letter collections offered new tools with which elites could construct novel self-presentations.
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In Ep. 53, Gregory notes that the purpose of his self-made epistolary collection is to aid his grandnephew Nicobulus in pursuing eloquence. In Ep. 52, he describes the collection as consisting of Basil’s letters followed by his own. By... more
In Ep. 53, Gregory notes that the purpose of his self-made epistolary collection is to aid his grandnephew Nicobulus in pursuing eloquence. In Ep. 52, he describes the collection as consisting of Basil’s letters followed by his own. By keeping these two insights at the forefront, we can posit estimations at the original contents of the collection and then account for why Gregory developed this collection. In short, the collection highlights Gregory’s mastery of paideia and his authority within elite culture while allowing this grandnephew to participate in that culture by association with him. This chapter will attend to the collection’s organizational logic, the social situation that it addresses, and the way that critical editions of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries have distorted both.
Research Interests:
In Ep. 53, Gregory notes that the purpose of his self-made epistolary collection is to aid his grandnephew Nicobulus in pursuing eloquence. In Ep. 52, he describes the collection as consisting of Basil’s letters followed by his own. By... more
In Ep. 53, Gregory notes that the purpose of his self-made epistolary collection is to aid his grandnephew Nicobulus in pursuing eloquence. In Ep. 52, he describes the collection as consisting of Basil’s letters followed by his own. By keeping these two insights at the forefront, we can posit estimations at the original contents of the collection and then account for why Gregory developed this collection. In short, the collection highlights Gregory’s mastery of paideia and his authority within elite culture while allowing this grandnephew to participate in that culture by association with him. This chapter will attend to the collection’s organizational logic, the social situation that it addresses, and the way that critical editions of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries have distorted both.
Research Interests:
Over the past fourteen centuries, Gregory of Nazianzus (ca. 330–390 C.E.) has been the subject of more than a dozen biographical narratives and monographs, beginning with the late antique hagiography of Gregory the Presbyter and... more
Over the past fourteen centuries, Gregory of Nazianzus (ca. 330–390 C.E.) has been the subject of more than a dozen biographical narratives and monographs, beginning with the late antique hagiography of Gregory the Presbyter and concluding with the modern biography by John McGuckin. This is likely the result of Gregory’s vast autobiographical corpus, which has provided scholars with a chronological narrative and character perspective from which to start their own secondary narratives. By examining this tradition of biography, I argue that two trends remain regularly operative. First, each biographer has consistently endowed his subject with his own values, ideals, and theo- logical commitments. Second, each biography has given pride of place to Gregory’s autobiographical voice. To make a precise demonstration of the latter trend, I follow the notorious Maximus affair from its presentation in Gregory’s autobiography and in the biographical tradition, showing how Gregory’s narrative remains almost entirely intact and unscrutinized. Ultimately I contend that the generic boundaries between autobiography, hagiography, and biography have broken down and suggest that readers subject autobiographical texts, along with their content, structure, style, and narrative, to rhetor- ical analysis rather than treat them as texts that reveal, with varying degrees of transpar- ency, the authentic personality of their author.