The articles are about noble ideas and thoughts evinced in Tamil Literature.

The dominant literate culture of early medieval England – male, European, and Christian – often represented itself through comparison to exotic beings and monsters, in traditions developed from native mythologies, and Classical and Biblical sources. So pervasive was this reflexive identification that the language of the monstrous occurs not onl…[Read more]

The dominant literate culture of early medieval England – male, European, and Christian – often represented itself through comparison to exotic beings and monsters, in traditions developed from native mythologies, and Classical and Biblical sources. So pervasive was this reflexive identification that the language of the monstrous occurs not onl…[Read more]

Susan Kim and Asa Simon Mittman, “Keeping History: Images, Texts, Ciphers, and the Franks Casket,” with Susan Kim, in A Material History of Medieval and Early Modern Ciphers, ed. K Ellison and S Kim (New York: Routledge, 2017)

Medieval Christians arguably lived in a ‘real’ world – a tangible place in which they lived, worked, loved, hated, and died – but through a process of worldbuilding continually reconstructed it anew around themselves as the mythical land they called ‘Christendom.’ This was predicated first on reconceptualizing and then ultimately on removing (o…[Read more]

An exploration of the paradoxical celebrity of ascetic renunciants in early Christianity, using the example of Simeon Stylites, the pillar saint.

Review of Greek Alchemy from Late Antiquity to Early Modernity. Edited by EFTHYMIOS NICOLAIDIS. Pp. 198, illus., index. Brepols: Turnhout. 2018. £72. ISBN: 978-2-503-58191-0.

My essay highlights differences between how Edwards and I approach ancient sources and the scholarship on them. My response also provides a dossier of a dozen or so passages where Origen portrays paradise as a divine or incorporeal place, distinct from this earth, and as a residence for pre-existent rational creatures. Edwards denies such a portrait.

This article treats late ancient rabbinic texts (ca. 1st-early 3rd cents. CE), reading them as biology, and following their ideas about the limits and possibilities of reproductive and species variation. I read sources from the tractates of Niddah, Kil’ayim, and Bekhorot, in the Mishnah and Toseta, as expressions of a science of generation, or a b…[Read more]

D. Kruisheer, ‘A Bibliographical Clavis to the Works of Jacob of Edessa (revised and expanded)’, in B. ter Haar Romeny (ed.), Jacob of Edessa and the Syriac Culture of His Day (Monographs of the Peshitta Institute Leiden 18; Leiden: Brill, 2008), 265–293.

D. Kruisheer, ‘Ephrem, Jacob of Edessa, and the Monk Severus. An Analysis of Ms. Vat. Syr. 103, ff. 1–72’, in R. Lavenant (ed.), Symposium Syriacum VII (Orientalia Christiana Analecta 256; Rome: Pontificio Istituto Orientale, 1998), 599–605.

D. Kruisheer, ‘Reconstructing Jacob of Edessa’s Scholia’, in J. Frishman and L. Van Rompay (eds.), The Book of Genesis in Jewish and Oriental Christian Interpretation. A Collection of Essays (Traditio Exegetica Graeca 5; Leuven: Peeters, 1997), 187–196.

D. Kruisheer, [Review of] H.G.B. Teule (ed. and transl.), Gregory Barhebraeus, Ethicon (Mēmrā I) (CSCO 534, 535, Syr. 218, 219; Leuven: Peeters, 1993), Bibliotheca Orientalis 53.5/6 (September-December 1996), 815-818.

D. Kruisheer, ‘Theodore bar Koni’s Ktābā d-’Eskolyon as a Source for the Study of Early Mandaeism’, Jaarbericht van het Vooraziatisch-Egyptisch Genootschap “Ex Oriente Lux” (Journal of the Ancient Near Eastern Society “Ex Oriente Lux”) 33 (1993-1994), 151-169.

Writing Demetrias: Ascetic Logic in Ancient Christianity

***For a copy of the article please write to RNEIS@umich.edu***

While biologists argue about the limits and definition of a species, the urge to cluster and distinguish among the plenitude of lifeforms that populates the planet remains. Contemporary concerns about attempts to clone monkeys and to engineer human-porcine chimeras point to…[Read more]

A review of Pantheon by Jörg Rüpke

The fourth-century Syriac corpus known as the Demonstrations, attributed to Aphrahat, the Persian Sage, provides a unique window into the early development of Christianity among Syriac-speaking communities. Occasionally these writings attest to beliefs and practices that were not common among other contemporaneous Christian communities, such as…[Read more]

A reflection on what notions of angels suggest about how late ancient people knew the world and its inhabitants.

Scholarly reflections on the concept of the will as it is articulated in late ancient texts have centered on the male individual and the difficulties he faces as he tries to train or direct his intentions. By contrast, in this article we seek to explore late ancient concepts and negotiations of the will by considering a cluster of ancient Jewish…[Read more]