The Baptized Muse

Abstract

Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.My interest in early Christian poetry began with my PhD work on the anonymous Carmen adversus Marcionitas (published Göttingen 1991), supervised and examined by the classicist Siegmar Döpp and the historical theologian Wilhelm Geerlings, both then at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany. It is a Christian didactic poem which is as intricate as it is unknown. Its author cannot be determined and its controversially debated time of origin was located by me into the early fifth century at the very earliest. From then onwards this area of research has never ceased to fascinate me. This volume presents a collection of articles containing some of the ensuing fruits of my further studies in the field of early Christian poetry over the last two decades in a revised and updated form. The Principal's Fund of the University of St Andrews, Scotland, gave a generous award to allow for the translation of six of the contributions in this volume from German into English. I am much indebted to Alastair Matthews and Madeleine Brook for their hard and diligent work with translating the sometimes very technical German. Their astute and critical minds not only helped to clarify some of the original statements but also removed a few factual infelicities. I am very grateful to Professor Irmgard Männlein-Robert and to the SFB 923 'Threatened Orders' who invited me to spend the summer of 2014 as a visiting professor at the University of Tübingen, and generously funded two research assistants, Therese Hellmich and Sarah Blessing. I owe deep-felt thanks to both of them, as well as to Thomas G. Duncan, University of St Andrews, and my PhD student Lorenzo Livorsi, Universities of Kent, and then Reading, for helping me with various stages of finalizing this manuscript. Naturally all remaining errors are my own. Some of these chapters have in the meantime become 'classics' (such as Chapter 4), while others are more the coveted gems of connoisseurs (like Chapter 6 and 9). By offering these and selected other studies, all of them now in English, updated in line with recent scholarship, and with a few corrections-partly also following suggestions made by reviewers-added where necessary, this volume will make these chapters more widely and easily accessible to the academic community.As this research interest has accompanied me throughout my entire academic career, it seems appropriate to acknowledge some of the people that have supported and inspired me on this academic journey. Professor Siegmar Döpp was the first to introduce me to the exciting and intricate field of early Christian poetry. He taught me to ask critical, imaginative, and unbiased questions and discover intellectually valid and exciting connections in unexpected areas. For this I am most grateful, as for his kindness, good sense of humour, contagious enthusiasm, and high academ...