Early Christian Ireland: Settlement And Environment

The world of early Egyptian Christianity. Language, literature, and social context. Essays in honour of David W. Johnson. Edited by James E. Goehring and Janet A. Timbie. (CUA Studies in Early Christianity.) Pp. xix+226. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2007. $39.95. 10 0 8132 1480 1; 10 0 8132 1480 7 - Volume 59 Issue 3

New Vistas on Early Judaism and Christianity: From Enoch to Montréal and Back

REVIEWS 294 The fourth chapter, “The Relevance of Early Christian Literature to Jesuit Missionaries in Colonial Mexico,” relies heavily on the previously mentioned “constructivist” approach to understand the possible similarities between early Christian and Jesuit texts. Reff also argues that “the lives of the Jesuit missionaries, including their political/institutional context, resembled the lives of early Christian martyrs and saints” (207). He concludes that Jesuits looked to early Christian literature to defend and promote their mission enterprise by equating their missionary project with a long line of martyrs and saints dating from the early Christian period. They not only used hagiography as models, but drew on early church rhetoric to selectively align themselves with the missionary experiences of monks and clerics in the late antique period. Reff’s brief conclusion recaps the vast array of information presented in this book, and emphasizes the clear parallels between sacred narratives and the rise of Christianity in the “Old” World and the “New.” While there is a nine-page index, one particular asset of this book is the remarkable thirty-four page bibliography, separated into primary and secondary sources. Daniel Reff’s book is an important contribution to Latin American and Religious Studies and a paradigm for research. LAUREN GRACE KILROY, Art History, UCLA Lyndal Roper, Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany (New Haven: Yale University Press 2004) xiv + 362 pp., ill. To many Anglophone audiences, the first recollection of witchcraft in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries is of the weird sisters in Macbeth. Representatives (and representations) of contemporary popular belief, these witches offer all of the commonly held tools of their craft in the boiling caldron and sing of all of the commonly held mischief in gallops across stage. Perhaps some audiences will also recall Rowley, Dekker, and Ford, the dramatists who broadened such folkloric antics to a tragedy of the more visible players of witchcraft and its persecutors and victims. The Witch of Edmonton features the old woman, lurking in the shadows of social festivities, her seduction and consultations with her familiar, the nuisances they inflict on neighboring farmers (e.g., animals that cannot produce milk, butter churns that cannot work to desired ends), and the eventual domestic murder among lovers, prompted by jealously and demonic insinuation. A remarkable aspect of witchcraft as practiced and punished from the later fifteenth century onwards is that these elements, so often beginning with the isolated and suspicious old woman, appear in case studies from across Europe. If the Anglophone audience remembers as well that the proliferation of witchcraft plays in seventeenth-century England was due, in some part, to the investigation of witchcraft by James VI of Scotland. Although he had largely neglected this interest by the time he became James I of England, his reputation as a witch-hunter was already solidified. Yet James’ predilection for witch trials was based, as it was for so many individuals of the period, on two influences , intimate contact with Continental knowledge and prosecution of witches and personal experience (the supposed attempts to shipwreck the Scottish king and his new bride on their voyage home). The starting point and hub of the search for knowledge of witchcraft is Europe, although a good deal of the ele- REVIEWS 295 ments that one encounters are culturally universal, once they had sprung form a Continental source. Such, then, are the benefits and challenges facing Lyndal Roper in her book, Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany: the information for scholarship on witchcraft is abundantly present, but how to find where in Europe is not only a starting point but a place that offers a self-contained narrative , as it were, not overly influenced by previous dealings with witchcraft? How then to find an angle of interpretation that will allow the researcher to sort out and explain such a wealth of records, both reliable and unreliable, informed by cultural prejudices and the testimonies of the accused? Roper answers the first question by setting her study in Germany, where the startlingly long period of ca. 1485 up to the Age of Enlightenment witnessed an evolving understanding of the persecution, though persecution nonetheless, of supposed witches. Yet within...

Since early-Christian times, a specific iconography was developed around the story of the woman with the Haemorrhage (Mark 5 : 24b-34parr). The textual and visual tradition of the so-called Haemorrhoïssa is related in a specific way to Christ's healing miracles and the blood taboo concerning women, releasing an intense energy with regard to touching, the gaze and sacred space. In fact, the medieval reception of the story became an important catalyst for uterine taboos, menstruations and magic. ©Taylor & Francis.

Autor raspravlja o fenomenu ranokršćanskih i srednjovjekovnih trikonhosa na istočnoj obali Jadrana, pretežno u Dalmaciji. Prema formi, funkciji i vremenu nastanka razvrstava ih u pet skupina. Prvu tvore relativno rane, malene cellae trichorae koje prvotno bijahu funerarne memorije na privatnome posjedu. Nastale su, čini se, pretežno do sredine 5. stoljeća. Drugu tvore nešto složeniji triconchosi koji za razliku od prethodnih cela imaju ispred svetišta dugi naos. Nalaze se na području antičke Dalmacije po čemu ih autor i naziva dalmatinskim trikonhosima. Oni sadržajem i množinom predstavljaju problemsko težište članka koji je po njima i naslovljen. Nastali su uglavnom poslije sredine 5. ili početkom 6. stoljeća. Treću skupinu tvore oni primjeri iz prve i druge grupe koji su od prvotne memorije naknadno postali trikonhosi kao kompleksne bazilike. Poput ostalih tipova prvotnih memorija koje su naknadno preuređene u kongregacijske crkve i oni su prepravljeni uglavnom poslije sredine 6. stoljeća. Četvrtu skupinu tvore predromanički trikonhosi, morfološki vrlo zanimljiva skupina centralnih građevina, ali i dviju longitudinalnih, koje su nastale pretežno tijekom 9. stoljeća, međutim s primjerima već u 8. stoljeću (rotonda Sv. Trojstva u Zadru), te još u 10. stoljeću (rotonda u Ošlju). Konačno, petu skupinu tvore romanički trolisti nastali pretežno u 12. stoljeću.

The Art of Listening in the Early Church. By Carol Harrison. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Pp. 336. $ 125.00.Many students and scholars mine the primary and secondary literature of early Christianity in an attempt at retrieving the various theological assumptions and conclusions of the church fathers. Those of us who do this quite often-unwittingly-operate in a manner in which we receive, assess, and explain early Christianity in almost exclusively visual terms. The writings of the church fathers arrive in our mailboxes in neatly bound volumes and are read in the relative silence of our offices or homes. Of course, we have never seen or met the author of these works. But we also seldom meet the authors of the secondary literature. When we have completed these works, we often put the volumes down without engaging their authors. When we actually produce assessments of these works (much like what you are currently reading!), they are usually found in academic journals or monographs, to be read by other academics, silently. While we are, in some sense, learning how early Christian authors thought about the Christian faith, we are not hearing these thoughts. So much of our existence and activity is lived and done in silence. Therefore, ironically, an important, perhaps essential, element of early Christian experience is lost on the modern reader: the art of Carol Harrison wants to challenge this modern tendency by making our account of early Christianity more robust and holistic.The recently appointed Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at the University of Oxford, Harrison is a noted church historian and theologian best known for her work on Augustine of Hippo. Not surprisingly, her reading of Augustine plays an integral role in the present work. There are two central questions her book seeks to answer. How did early Christians think about listening? What evidence we have of it? The answers provided to these important questions are wide-ranging and often quite intriguing. Her approach utilizes insights from fields ranging from cognitive science to theology. She also exhibits a nimble touch in dealing with various Patristic and Late Antique ecclesial and social realities. This is an ambitious attempt at giving today's reader a sense of how Christians in the ancient world listened, and what this meant in terms of identity and formation.Early in the book Harrison establishes her methodological basis by challenging the post-Enlightenment bias toward the visual. The culture of the ancient world was profoundly oral and aural. The role preaching played thus becomes a central focus of her work. Harrison makes the assertion that around two-thirds of what we now possess of early Christian were originally intended for hearers rather than readers. This, of course, begs the question of how these texts were received. Early Christians distrusted the senses and this presented a significant challenge to Since an aural culture is by nature fleeting and unstable, one can see how the challenges begin to mount. On the other hand, such a culture presented great opportunities for early Christians. With literacy rates hovering around 10% in the ancient world, the vast majority of Christians found themselves necessarily engaged in regular participatory activities. These activities created a certain facility for literate listening. Such literacy was not formal nor was nourished within the class of the educated elite. It was nevertheless embraced and nurtured in the ancient world among the masses. Its importance is obvious when one thinks about the individual's journey from first hearing the Gospel, to catechesis, to baptism and beyond. It would probably be difficult to overstate the importance of listening in the early Christian understanding of salvation.Harrison's book is divided into three parts. In the first part Harrison situates the reader within the context of the ancient world of rhetoric. …

From the beginning, SPE has focused on knowledge dissemination in four fundamental areas, which I refer to as the core disciplines: drilling, completions, reservoir (including geosciences), and production operations. These disciplines make up the bulk of coursework in most petroleum engineering degree programs, as well as the content of the SPE Petroleum Engineering Certification test. Still today, most of our members can identify themselves as being either a drilling, completions, reservoir, or production engineer. However, there are many other disciplines within our industry, such as HSE, management, economics, facilities, and materials, to name a few. Over time, SPE has added content and programs covering topics outside of the core disciplines, and our membership has grown as a result. Most of us work on multidisciplinary teams and collaborations that extend beyond the core disciplines, so it made sense for SPE to adopt this expansion strategy. While we must continue to welcome all disciplines and professions involved with providing the world’s hydrocarbons, we must still deliver quality content and programs for fundamental petroleum engineering disciplines at the field level - closest to the wellhead. In 2019, two-thirds of our total professional membership listed their primary discipline as being a core discipline. Note that some members still appear in the legacy drilling and completions category because they have not updated their profile after completions became a separate category. In response to the digital revolution our industry is currently experiencing, the SPE Board of Directors recently redefined the Management and Information discipline into Data Science and Engineering Analytics (DSEA) and Management. As we continue to expand and welcome more disciplines, we must ensure that we do not dilute the offerings and erode the value of being an SPE member for those in our core disciplines. At the same time, we need to ensure that these offerings are easily accessible, as many of these members work at field locations. I recently compared the technology focus areas covered in JPT in 2000 to focus areas of today. Over the past 20 years, JPT has been able to expand its coverage into other disciplines without compromising articles and features focused on the core disciplines. For a magazine, this is relatively easy, as one can simply add pages. Next, I compared the technical sessions for our Annual Technical Conference and Exhibition (ATCE) from the years 2000 and 2020. Having served on the ATCE program committee in the past, I know there are a finite number of sessions available for allocation among all the disciplines. I found there was approximately a 30% reduction in sessions for reservoir and geosciences at ATCE in 2020 compared to 2000. This decrease is not due to the encroachment of new disciplines but primarily because of the increased activity into hydraulic fracturing and the doubling of sessions allocated for the completion discipline. The ATCE program committees have done an excellent job of being able to include sessions of interest for a wide variety of disciplines while still serving the needs of our members in the core disciplines.

The study of early Christianity overlaps with closely related fields of study such as New Testament canonical literature, Historical Jesus studies, and early Christian history (or church history/patristics). This survey will concentrate on the broader conceptualization of the formation of the religio-historical phenomenon named Christianity, the religio-historical contexts that formed the matrix for the emergence of Christianity, Christianity as the taxonomizer for a number of cultural practices or as a subset of the broader Greco-Roman Mediterranean culture including its cultural production, and the history of scholarship on early Christianity. Broadly speaking, early Christianity as a historical phenomenon is framed by two “events,” namely, at the one end, the career of Jesus of Nazareth and the subsequent formation of Jesus- or Christ-groups in the 1st century ce, and at the other end, in the 4th century ce, the Constantinian revolution which signaled the Christianization of the Roman Empire (or which goes by the shorthand of “Nicaea”—after the Council called in 325 ce). These are not hard and fast boundaries as there are good reasons to include subsequent developments beyond the Council of Chalcedon, into the 6th century ce, in the purview. Beyond that, the study of early Christianity also encompasses the newly emerged field of “Christian origins,” by which is specifically referred to the interdisciplinary, non-theological theorizing of the origins of Christianity. All in all, this bibliographic overview assumes, in line with new directions in scholarship on early Christianity, that the study of early Christianity is best approached from the perspective of the newly defined study field of early Christian studies. The difference between early Christian studies and disciplines such as early church history and patristics is constituted by the fact that early Christian studies is informed by theories of history and of religion and is practiced as a kind of cultural studies.

The Cambridge Edition of Early Christian Writings provides the definitive anthology of early Christian texts, from ca. 100 CE to ca. 650 CE. Its volumes reflect the cultural, intellectual, and linguistic diversity of early Christianity, and are organized thematically on the topics of God, Practice, Christ, and Community. The series expands the pool of source material to include not only Greek and Latin writings, but also Syriac and Coptic texts. Additionally, the series rejects a theologically normative view by juxtaposing texts that were important in antiquity but later deemed 'heretical' with orthodox texts. The translations are accompanied by introductions, notes, suggestions for further reading, and scriptural indices. The fifth and final volume focuses on the theme of community within early Christian writings-how Christians joined the community, how they managed the community, how they conceptualized the community, and how they policed the community. It will be an invaluable resource for students and academic researchers in early Christian studies, history of Christianity, theology and religious studies, and late antique Roman history.

Reviewed by: The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies Philip Rousseau The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies. Edited by Susan Ashbrook Harvey and David G. Hunter. (New York: Oxford University Press. 2008. Pp. xxviii, 1020. $150.00. ISBN 978-0-199-27156-6.) In books of this kind, two features count for the most: coverage and structure. The structure here, clearly, has been the object of great care. After three chapters headed “Prolegomena” and a splendidly practical section on material and textual evidence (archaeology, epigraphy, codicology, and so on), there are six sections devoted to (1) identities; (2) regions; (3) structure and authority; (4) cultural expressions; (5) rituals, piety, and practice; and (6) theological themes. However, it is not a handbook about early Christianity, with “cogent summary introductions” as the editors put it (p. 2), but about the study of early Christianity. The content of each section consists for the most part in an account of how the modern view of early Christianity has been determined by the methods and preoccupations of those who have studied it: “Contributors were asked to reflect on the main questions or issues that have animated research, to provide an introduction to the relevant primary sources, and to offer some guidance on the directions in which future research might be profitably pursued” (p. 2). The tone is inevitably set, therefore, by Elizabeth Clark’s introductory chapter “From Patristics to Early Christian Studies” (pp. 8–41, including a 13- page bibliography). The story is of a dissolving of disciplinary boundaries. As in the case of “Late Antiquity,” the centuries that are covered no longer disclose their integral meaning to the specialized scrutiny of theologians or classicists, the hands-on expositors of material culture, or even of historians. Most of the more than forty contributors to the volume have led much of their academic lives within exactly those enclaves. Yet, each chapter here echoes with the industry of its neighbors. Indeed, one may argue, early Christian “studies” are governed as much by loyalty to ancestors and associates as by adherence to the structural principles of a newly defined discipline. Clark’s account of multiplicity is matched by the accompanying chapters on textuality (by Mark Vessey, pp. 42–65) and on the complex variety of belief and practice that “early Christianity” represents (by Karen King, pp. 66–84). For Vessey, the range of genres and the relational fabric of “textual communities” now familiar to the student of the period are very much in the eyes of the modern beholders, themselves the masters of differing genres and enrolled in textual communities of their own. We are now students of form. How one presented the Christian position—to what audience, through what medium, in what venue—mattered as much as the thought deployed. The result was an increasingly unfettered engagement with the litterati of the age. The voice on the page was a Christian voice, but it was “part of a history unconfined by the Church” (p. 51). The mark of purpose in a text was its desire to renegotiate the boundary between those who spoke and those who [End Page 585] listened—always with a sense of precarious and conditional encroachment or withdrawal. King’s argument follows from that. Inquiry governed by academic ecumenism lays bare a fluidity of circumstance that precisely made necessary (or at least useful) a corresponding rigidity of discourse. The articulation of “orthodoxy” was a formal reaction to obscure or shifting boundaries, not their outcome or nemesis. Early Christianity was not, in other words, a single entity, nor indeed a static one. “Negotiation” was conducted by early Christians as much with one another as with those who did not share their beliefs. That is not to suggest mere chaos or raw competition, nor did it mean defeat for the multiple and victory for the hegemonic. Early Christians justly laid claim to a single arena, but they constantly moved within it according to a complex choreography of argument and historical appeal. In the section on “Identities,” chapters on Jews (Andrew Jacobs), pagans (Michele Salzman), gnostics (Antti Marjanen), and Manichees (Samuel Lieu) are followed by treatments of Arians (Rebecca Lyman) and Pelagians (Mathijs Lamberigts). The first...

Stable isotopes as indicators of change in the food procurement and food preference of Viking Age and Early Christian populations on Gotland (Sweden)

Although various New Testament texts reflect the importance of literacy and illiteracy in early Christianity (for example, Mark 13:14; John 7:15; Acts 4:13; 8:30; 1 Corinthians 16:21), these issues have taken on greater significance in New Testament studies since the 1980s. This period witnessed an explosion of interdisciplinary research on ancient literacy and illiteracy in cognate disciplines such as classics, cultural anthropology, literary criticism, and media criticism. Cumulatively, these interdisciplinary studies have established a new and sustained scholarly majority opinion that most ancient persons were illiterate. As a result, New Testament scholars now see literacy and illiteracy as important factors for interpreting New Testament and early Christian texts in their socio-historical contexts, especially for understanding the diffusion of social power in the text-centered cultures of Second Temple Judaism and early Christianity. Such a perspective has breathed fresh life into old debates, such as the education of Jesus and his followers or the identity of Jewish scribes, and has introduced, or participated in, new perspectives, such as “performance criticism” and the “material turn” in studies of early Christian book culture. Most of these studies accept that the majority of the population in Second Temple Judaism and early Christianity was illiterate and proceed to understand the social consequences of the use of books and literate skills in a predominantly oral environment. Along these lines, further studies have increasingly come to indicate the overall inadequacy of the terms “literate” and “illiterate” for understanding the complex manifestations of literate skills in practice. Complicating factors include the facts that reading and writing skills were acquired and used separately, reading and writing skills existed in varying levels and varying languages even for an individual, and that literacy (the ability to access written tradition for oneself) should not be confused with textuality (the awareness and appreciation of written tradition). These factors and others have impacted New Testament scholars’ understanding of the authorship, reception, and circulation of texts in Second Temple Judaism and early Christianity.

Reviewed by: The Early Christian Book Megan Hale Williams The Early Christian Book. Edited by William E. Klingshirn and Linda Safran. [CUA Studies in Early Christianity] (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press. 2007. Pp. xiv, 314; 28 plates. $39.95. ISBN 978 0-813-21486-3.) This volume collects twelve papers delivered at a conference held in June 2002 at The Catholic University of America. The revised papers, divided into six pairs dealing with topics ranging from the physical form of books to literary theory, are preceded by a helpful introduction by Philip Rousseau. The papers deal with a still underdeveloped area of inquiry: the physical form and cultural implications of the book as created, used, and imagined by early Christians, from the third to the seventh centuries of our era. The topic is both timely and genuinely important. Over the last few decades, scholars in a variety of fields have produced a substantial literature on the history of reading and the book. Relatively little work has been done, however, on books and reading in early Christianity—for all that the new faith was, as the preface to this volume notes, "quintessentially a religion of books" (p. ix). The Early Christian Book comprises papers written from a dazzling array of perspectives, by scholars with varying disciplinary affiliations and at all stages of their careers, including several who were still completing the doctoral degree at the time of writing. Unsurprisingly—as in the case of so many collections of conference papers—the quality of the contributions varies. The end result, therefore, is more suggestive than definitive: the book's influence will follow more from the questions it raises than from the answers it gives. Some of the less successful contributions share common weaknesses. Constant reference to a limited canon of secondary works produced within the field of early Christian studies sometimes gives the volume a hermetic quality. Correspondingly, the rich body of relevant literature produced by historians and critics working on other periods is at times neglected (but see the article by Mark Vessey, p. 250, n.25, for a summary of key references). Reliance on a narrow evidence base also makes some of the same papers less convincing. Finally, the balance between papers dealing with the book as material object and those addressing primarily literary issues perhaps falls too heavily toward the latter. Many of the articles, however, make substantial contributions—too many even to list here. Particularly impressive are John Lowden on the early Christian codex, specifically on book covers and their liturgical function; Claudia Rapp on books as holy objects, placing "Holy Scripture," and potentially also hagiography, alongside the "Holy Man" at the center of late-antique Christianity;and Mark Vessey's rather oracular concluding essay "Theory, or the Dream of the Book (Mallarmé to Blanchot)." This last is a new departure, in that it reads formative moments in modern literary history and in the history of modern literary theory through the lens of patristic texts, rather than the other way around. [End Page 763] Both the volume's editors and the individual contributors are to be commended for taking on a vast, fascinating, and relatively unexplored area of research and for pioneering a range of different approaches to what will surely become a major focus of investigation for scholars of early Christianity. Although the individual articles are of somewhat uneven quality, the volume as a whole—unlike so many in its genre—is a resounding success. Megan Hale Williams San Francisco State University Copyright © 2008 The Catholic University of America Press

Vorstellungen von Evangelium und Legitimität im frühen Christentum.

In the UK, treatment recommendations for patients with cancer are routinely made by multidisciplinary teams in weekly meetings. However, their performance is variable.The aim of this study was to explore the underlying structure of multidisciplinary decision-making process, and examine how it relates to team ability to reach a decision.This is a cross-sectional observational study consisting of 1045 patient reviews across 4 multidisciplinary cancer teams from teaching and community hospitals in London, UK, from 2010 to 2014. Meetings were chaired by surgeons.We used a validated observational instrument (Metric for the Observation of Decision-making in Cancer Multidisciplinary Meetings) consisting of 13 items to assess the decision-making process of each patient discussion. Rated on a 5-point scale, the items measured quality of presented patient information, and contributions to review by individual disciplines. A dichotomous outcome (yes/no) measured team ability to reach a decision. Ratings were submitted to Exploratory Factor Analysis and regression analysis.The exploratory factor analysis produced 4 factors, labeled “Holistic and Clinical inputs” (patient views, psychosocial aspects, patient history, comorbidities, oncologists’, nurses’, and surgeons’ inputs), “Radiology” (radiology results, radiologists’ inputs), “Pathology” (pathology results, pathologists’ inputs), and “Meeting Management” (meeting chairs’ and coordinators’ inputs). A negative cross-loading was observed from surgeons’ input on the fourth factor with a follow-up analysis showing negative correlation (r = −0.19, P < 0.001). In logistic regression, all 4 factors predicted team ability to reach a decision (P < 0.001).Hawthorne effect is the main limitation of the study.The decision-making process in cancer meetings is driven by 4 underlying factors representing the complete patient profile and contributions to case review by all core disciplines. Evidence of dual-task interference was observed in relation to the meeting chairs’ input and their corresponding surgical input into case reviews.