The fine details of this map are worth close attention. The design, layout, judicious employment of spot colour, inscriptions, inclusions and exclusions are carefully modulated to provide rich material for ruminative viewing. This folio does, after all, present the sacred omphalos of the world, a space layered with ancient meanings and caught up…[Read more]

“Here there be Dragons”

Αριστοτέλειο Πανεπιστήμιο Θεσσαλονίκης, Θεολογική Σχολή, Τομέας Ηθικής και Κοινωνιολογίας, Καθηγήτρια Νίκη Παπαγεωργίου της Κοινωνιολογίας της Θρησκείας
Μάθημα:
Θρησκείες και Κοινωνίες της Μέσης Ανατολής
στην Εισαγωγική Κατεύθυνση Μουσουλμανικών Σπουδών
Καλημέρα σας,
Δράττομαι της ευκαιρίας να ευχαριστήσω την Καθηγήτρια κυρία Νίκη Παπαγεωρ…[Read more]

The line “Enge anpaðas uncuð gelad” [narrow path, unknown way] appears twice in the Old English corpus: once in the Old English Exodus (a tale from Old Testament narrative poetry that tells us a story of the Israelites fleeing the Egyptians) and once in Beowulf (an epic story of masculine bravado, intense alienation and Otherness, and time past…[Read more]

This study centers on issues of marginality and monstrosity in medieval England. In the middle ages, geography was viewed as divinely ordered, so Britain’s location at the periphery of the inhabitable world caused anxiety among its inhabitants. Far from the world’s holy center, the geographic margins were considered monstrous. Medieval geography,…[Read more]

The field of monster studies has grown significantly over the past few years and this companion provides a comprehensive guide to the study of monsters and the monstrous from historical, regional and thematic perspectives. The collection reflects the truly multi-disciplinary nature of monster studies, bringing in scholars from literature, art…[Read more]

2019 _ Εβραίοι Έλληνες: Διδάσκοντας για τους γνωστούς – αγνώστους. Σχόλια & addenda στα κείμενα των Φακέλων του Μαθήματος των Θρησκευτικών για τον Ιουδαϊσμό & α. Ιουδαίοι στο Ισραήλ – β. Ο Μεσσίας στον Ιουδαϊσμό Παρασκευή, 10 Μαΐου 2019 Καθηγητής Παναγιώτης Παχής & Αναπληρώτρια Καθηγήτρια Αγγελική Ζιάκα Θεολογική Σχολή ΑΠΘ Πωλ Ισαάκ Χάγου…[Read more]

Bound with Beowulf, the Old English Wonders of the East, a catalogue of marvelous beings, describes the very creatures it depicts as ungefrægelicu (unheard of, inconceivable). Insistently, these representations, both visual and textual, provoke questions about the nature and possibility of representation itself. In doing so, they also destabilize…[Read more]

University courses on monsters are becoming widespread as many disciplines use monsters to think about what it means to be human. To date no source collection on the literature of the monstrous exists, and this volume offers the key primary readings on monsters from ancient times to the present day. Each work is preceded by a critical…[Read more]

BEACHES GIVE AND TAKE, bringing unexpected surprises to society, and pulling essentials away from it. The ocean offers monsters— whales and whirlpools—but when a massive creature is pushed into human proximity by the ocean’s wide shoulders, the waves deposit and erode human assumptions about itself and its environment: words, sounds, breath, water…[Read more]

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

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

The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship seeks scholarly submissions on the technical, theoretical, cultural, and historical aspects of comics studies that gives vitality to the form and challenges readers’ assumptions about it. This document is the full call for papers published on 30th October 2019 on the journal web site.

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.

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.

The article discusses the presence of a generative principle called Mōt in a short cosmogony found in the Phoenician History of Philo of Byblos (c. 100 CE). The Phoenician History’s Mōt has been usually understood as the euhemeristic interpretation of a Semitic god of death, which is well documented in late Bronze Age documents from Ugarit. I a…[Read more]

This paper was originally prepared for a meeting of the Methodology Seminar of the Distant Worlds Graduate School (LMU, Munich) and was meant as an introduction to the use of the category of magic in the study of ancient Greek and Roman religions offered to a group of scholars coming from different disciplines.

The study of ancient magic is…[Read more]