A Ph.D. dissertation considering nearly 200 sarcophagi from the late ancient necropoleis of Jewish communities at Beth She’arim and Rome. This corpus captures a wide range of the possibilities open to Jewish patrons as they went about acquiring or commissioning a sarcophagus and sculptural program. The variety reflects not only the different…[Read more]

The New Handbook of Syriac Literature (NHSL) is a born-digital TEI-encoded reference work for the study of Syriac literature. The first volume, Bibliotheca Hagiographica Syriaca Electronica, was published by Syriaca.org in 2016 using a simple TEI schema to describe a single genre (hagiography) (Saint-Laurent et al. 2016; see also Saint-Laurent…[Read more]

The New Handbook of Syriac Literature (NHSL) is a born-digital TEI-encoded reference work for the study of Syriac literature. The first volume, Bibliotheca Hagiographica Syriaca Electronica, was published by Syriaca.org in 2016 using a simple TEI schema to describe a single genre (hagiography) (Saint-Laurent et al. 2016; see also Saint-Laurent…[Read more]

A paper delivered at in the 2017 Colloquia of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Considers how a group of sarcophagi from the Jewish catacombs of Rome reflect on the subject of Jewish art and Jewish patrons in Late Antiquity.

What did it mean to ‘be Jewish’ in the Greco-Roman world? Jews, Greeks and Romans will explore the myriad ways that Jewish communities across the Mediterranean engaged with Greco-Roman culture and constructed their own ways of being Jewish. Using texts, artifacts and images–from rabbinic commentaries to Roman catacombs–we will investigate…[Read more]

Front-matter and conclusions to my Ph.D. Dissertation (2017). The project considers nearly 200 sarcophagi from the late ancient necropoleis of Jewish communities at Beth She’arim and Rome. This corpus captures a wide range of the possibilities open to Jewish patrons as they went about acquiring or commissioning a sarcophagus and sculptural…[Read more]

Final proofs of an article that appeared in Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis 125 (2013). The only real mistake in this proof is that the captions of two images have been inadvertently swapped (p.165 and 170).

Final proofs of my contribution to Settimane 61 (Spoleto, 2014).

This is the final proof of a chapter in Rob Meens, Dorine van Espelo, Bram van den Hoven van Genderen, Janneke Raaijmakers, Irene van Renswoude and Carine van Rhijn eds., Religious Franks. Religion and power in the Frankish kingdoms. Studies in honour of Mayke de Jong (Manchester 2016).

The text known to modern historians as Vita altera Bonifatii – the ‘second’ or ‘other’ Life of Boniface – is a very different text than the far better known Vita Bonifatii composed by Willibald in the decade after Boniface’s death. This paper presents some preliminary thoughts on the anonymous author’s purpose in writing the Life by placing the t…[Read more]

Fakes, Forgeries, and Fictions examines the possible motivations behind the production of apocryphal Christian texts. Did the authors of Christian apocrypha intend to deceive others about the true origins of their writings? Did they do so in a way that is distinctly different from New Testament scriptural writings? What would phrases like…[Read more]

This paper provides an analysis of the attitude towards non-Franks in the late Merovingian period, distinguishing between the ethnic community of the Franks and the political community of the regnum Francorum, which were conceived of existing side by side. The paper attempts to show that, unlike in the early Carolingian period, ethnic labels were…[Read more]

“Forbidden Texts on the Western Frontier: The Christian Apocrypha from North American Perspectives” features papers presented at the second York Christian Apocrypha Symposium held in September 2013 at York University in Toronto, Canada. The papers focus on what makes North American Christian Apocrypha scholarship unique, on what has come to def…[Read more]

In 1958, American historian of religion Morton Smith made an astounding discovery in the Mar Saba monastery in Jerusalem. Copied into the back of a seventeenth-century book was a lost letter attributed to Clement of Alexandria (ca. 150-215 CE) that contained excerpts from a longer version of the Gospel of Mark written by Mark himself and…[Read more]

This article investigates the ecloga of passages on death collected from works attributed to John Chrysostom and preserved in New College Manuscript 83, which is classified as CPG 4886. It describes New College Manuscript 83, the contents of its ecloga on death, and provides a direct comparison of this ecloga with another on death published in…[Read more]

The lines between death and life were neither fixed nor finite to the peoples of the ancient Mediterranean. For most, death was a passageway into a new and uncertain existence. The dead were not so much extinguished as understood to be elsewhere, and many perceived the deceased to continue to exercise agency among the living. Even for those more…[Read more]

In the turmoil around the turn of the fifth century, controversy over the legacy of Origen took center stage, and questions regarding the nature of the resurrection were among the main points of contention. What was the nature of the resurrection body? In what sense will post-resurrection life represent a continuation or a break with the present…[Read more]

In this paper I examine three pieces of early ninth-century Frisian hagiography: Liudger’s Vita Gregorii abbatis Traiectensis, Altfrid’s Vita Liudgeri and the anonymous Vita altera Bonifatii. Between them, these texts commemorate three generations of missionaries who left a lasting impact on Frisia. This commemoration was vital for cementing the…[Read more]

A sense of an ending dominates accounts of African Christianity after the Vandal conquest of the 430s, not least as a result of the apparent disappearance of the Donatists in an Africa now ruled by Homoian Christians. In fact, the transfer from Donatist schism to new ‘Arian controversy’ more closely resembles the broader picture of Vandal Afr…[Read more]

Of all the antagonists to feature in the eighth- and ninth-century sources, Radbod of Frisia isone of the most prominent, featuring heavily in both historical and hagiographical texts.Because of his prominence, though, there was no fixed vision of Radbod, and he could be different things to different authors working at different times.…[Read more]