Studies in Late Antiquity, volume 3, number 1 (Spring 2019).
CONTENTS INCLUDE
Revolutionizing the Status Quo: Appeals to Pre-Islamic Christianity in the Writings of Anastasius of Sinai
Jessica Lee Ehinger
The works of Anastasius of Sinai offer an important window into the lives of Christians living under Muslim rule at the end of the seventh century. Writing after spending several decades traveling the Muslim-conquered Near East, Anastasius produced works that spoke simultaneously to both the theological significance of Muslim rule and to the continued doctrinal debates between Chalcedonians and anti-Chalcedonians. This article focuses on comparing how Anastasius characterizes Muslims and anti-Chalcedonian Christians, particularly in his Viae dux and collections of edifying tales. Although he often discusses Muslims in connection to demons or other evil forces, these references lack any real sense of horror. Moreover, his works have only limited references to Muslims, and he often use their presence as a pretext to discuss doctrinal variation and heresy instead. It is worth noting that modern study of Anastasius’ corpus has been complicated by confusion over authorship because his works also often lack internal historical references that could be used for consistent dating. Moreover, many aspects of his theology relate to post-Chalcedon doctrine, and therefore could easily be attributed to an author of the sixth century. However, given the monk's travels, which took place during the height of the Muslim incursion into the Levant, the Muslims’ absence may not be merely an accidental omission, but may rather represent a conscious choice by Anastasius to create works that echo pre-Islamic writing, in order to create a sense of continuity and a unified Christian world that was, in reality, disrupted by Muslim rule.
Soundscapes of Salvation: Resounding Refrains in Jewish and Christian Liturgical Poems
Ophir Münz-Manor and Thomas Arentzen
We do not know how hymns in Late Antiquity sounded. We do know that refrains became an important aspect of hymnody in the period, not only among Christians in the capital accustomed to acclamations, but also among Hebrew-speaking Jews and Syriac-speaking Christians further east. This article investigates ways that the refrains contributed to shaping soundscapes or sonic space. The article constitutes a study of three of the era's most outstanding liturgical poets: Yose ben Yose and Yannai who wrote piyyutim in Hebrew and Romanos the Melodist who wrote kontakia in Greek. Refrains should ring loudly, and all three poets show a distinct awareness of the refrain's ability to shape the performative space. Throughout the song, the refrain would return repeatedly as an echo and saturate the room with loud voices. The hymnographers used this feature semantically, to dye the soundscapes with highly charged or pregnant notions, so that eventually the singing of the songs themselves gave way to the experience of community and deliverance. Conducted by poets, voices gathered to create soundscapes of salvation.
Italian Narratives of Oppositional IdentityHagiography and Affect in Distancing the Late Antique and Medieval Saracen, and the Modern Migrant
Kalina Yamboliev
Drawing together scholarship on the late antique and medieval holy man, and modern theoretical work on affect and identity, this article seeks to analyze one method by which group identities in the Mediterranean region broadly, and in Italy specifically, have been defined trans-historically through rhetorical emphasis on the “invasion” of foreignized bodies. The discussion first focuses on late antique Near Eastern Passio texts commemorating Christians who faced persecution under Muslim Saracens, before then shifting to tenth- and eleventh-century southern Italy and Sicily, and to the corpus of Italo-Greek Vitae in which holy individuals regularly encountered the Saracen as a dangerous invader. Such discourses of opposition obscured the inter-reliance between populations, and reduced relations to inherited, primordial struggles, simultaneously shifting attention away from the heterogeneity of non-Muslim resident populations. A similar approach is pursued in modern Italian discourse on migrants, where a selective rhetoric of “invasion” forefront the risks posed by migrants in ways that create a sense of unity in an otherwise-fragmented nation. Urging academic dialogue that incorporates the pre-modern and modern, this article examines the construction of oppositional identity and explores how such narratives reveal collective fears amongst populations threatened by the destabilization of pre-established hierarchies.