Workshop: Reorienting, Reframing, and Reinventing Memory in the Early Christian World (Oxford 2019)

In association with the Memories of Utopia project, post-doctoral research fellow Dr. Rajiv Bhola and Dr. Ryan Strickler (University of Queensland) have organised a workshop to take place at the 18th International Conference on Patristic Studies at Oxford University (19-23 August 2019). Details below:

Description

In Antiquity, the remembrance of the shared past – both distant and recent – was instrumental in giving meaning to the present, as well as shaping an ideology for the future. While this can be said of the Greco-Roman world generally, utilising past models as a strategy, rhetorical and practical, to qualify the present was integral to the formation of Christian identity in the early centuries, whether the intention was to authorise or disqualify, conserve or innovate, commemorate or condemn. Perhaps just as important as the act of recollection itself is the methods by which events and figures were being remembered, as these goals were often accomplished not through the faithful maintenance of the past, but rather through the reinterpretation, alteration, or even active misrepresentation of cultural memory. The papers in this workshop address the phenomenon of reconfiguring the past in several realms of religious experience in the early Christian world and investigate the various strategies employed to make the past ‘new’ to meet the needs of the present.

Presentations

Rajiv Bhola, Spiritual Echoes: Some Parallels in Eusebius’ Portrayals of Constantine and Judeo-Christian Figures of the Past.

Edward Mason (University of Kentucky), Constantine and the Donatists: The Origins of Imperial Christianity.

Katherin Papadopoulos, (Australian Lutheran College | University of Divinity), Disordered Memory: Remembering Earthquakes in the Late Antique Eastern Mediterranean.

Karin Schlapbach (University of Fribourg), Remembering the Christian Saints, or: The Silencing of the Holy Men.

Ryan Strickler, Memory and Authority in the Seventh-Century Christological Controversies.