Welcome
Welcome to the website of the North American Patristics Society! NAPS promotes the study of late antiquity and early Christianity primarily through our journal and annual meeting. For further information about our activities and membership in the society, follow the links in the column to the left. The annual meeting will take place at the Holiday Inn Mart Plaza in Chicago from May 23 to 25, 2013. Vice-President Robin M. Jensen has organized a wonderful program, further details about which are posted at the Call for Papers. I look forward to seeing you in May.
Kenneth B. Steinhauser, 2012-2013 President of NAPS
Membership & Subscriptions
Subscription to the Journal of Early Christian Studies is included with your membership. *Student Discount Available
Interested in having your work published in an upcoming volume? Read our Submission Guidelines.
Call for Nominations
Now accepting nominations for two Board Members-at-large, one Student Board Member, and one Vice President/President Elect.
News
Eusebius of Caesarea (c.260 – 339/340)′s Ecclesiastical History counts among the leading productions of world literary heritage. The first ‘history’ to be composed by a Christian, it constitutes an invaluable source for the first three centuries of Christianity, up until the ‘Great Persecution’, which Eusebius witnessed directly , and Contantine’s obtaining power. This rich and complex work has however never been the object of a complete commentary. Historians and philologists have now come together to rectify this omission. The commentary stricto sensu will consist of four volumes providing the Greek text of the Ecclesiastical History, a completely new translation and historical, philological and literary observations.
This first volume serves as an introduction to the work and to its commentary. Produced with the collaborative assistance of French and Italian researchers together with a Swiss colleague, it will provide the specialist, students, and the widest public, with the status quaestionis on Eusebius’ biography, the chronology of his works and his intellectual profile; the relations between the Ecclesiastical History and what goes by the name of ‘’Chronicle’’; the literary genre of the work; the various adjustments made by Eusebius himself; the manuscript translation of the Greek text; the ancient Latin, Coptic, Syriac and Armenian versions of the work. The volume also provides a revised index of allusions and quotations in the Ecclesiastical History, and concludes with a reasoned bibliography permitting rapid access to the present state of knowledge regarding the work.
Sébastien Morlet is a Maître de Conférences at Paris-Sorbonne University and a member of the Institut Universitaire de France. A Hellenist working in the field of Patristics, he specializes particularly in Eusebius of Caesarea and polemical literature in Late Antiquity.
Lorenzo Perrone teaches the history of Christian literature in Antiquity at the University of Bologna. Founder of the Italian Group for Research on Origen and the Alexandrian Tradition (Pisa, 1994), he has edited the review ‘’Adamantius’’ since it was established in 1995. His researches cover the history of the Holy Land and monasticism in Late Antiquity as well as writers of the Alexandrian tradition, notably Origen and Eusebius of Caesarea.
See http://www.lesbelleslettres.com/livre/?GCOI=22510100070640
Open Call for Authors for a Handbook on Latin Patristic Sermons in Brill series A New History of the Sermon.
To all who might be interested,
Patristic sermons have enjoyed a particular academic interest during the last decades. Several aspects of this genre have been explored through a variety of methodologies. More than a few conferences, articles, and monographs have been devoted to this topic. In collaboration with Brill’s series, A New History of the Sermon (http://www.brill.com/publications/new-history-sermon), the Research Departments of Latin Literature (Arts Faculty) and History of Church and Theology (Theology Faculty) of the University of Leuven (Belgium) will compose a handbook on Latin Preaching in the Patristic Era: Sermons, Preachers, Audiences (working title).
Edited by B. Bitton-Ashkelony & L. Perrone
approx. x + 400 p., 156 x 234 mm, 2013, CELAMA 15, HB, ISBN 978-2-503-54131-0, approx. $167 / € 115
Publication scheduled for Summer 2013
This book addresses change and continuity in late antique Eastern Christianity, as perceived through the lens of the categories of institutional religion and personal religion. The interaction between personal devotion and public identity reveals the creative aspects of a vibrant religious culture that altered the experience of Christians on both a spiritual and an institutional level. A close look at the interrelations between the personal and the institutional expressions of religion in this period attests to an ongoing revision of both the patristic literature and the monastic tradition. By approaching the period in terms of ‘revision’, the contributors discuss the mechanism of transformation in Eastern Christianity from a new perspective, discerning social and religious changes while navigating between the dynamics of personal and institutional religion.
Recognizing the creative aspects inherent to the process of ‘revision’, this volume re-examines several aspects of personal and institutional religion, revealing dogmatic, ascetic, liturgical, and historiographical transformations. Attention is paid to the expression of the self, the role of history and memory in the construction of identity, and the modification of the theological discourse in late antique culture. The book also explores several avenues of Jewish-Christian interaction in the institutional and public sphere.
More info:
www.brepols.net
www.isdistribution.comBy Giselle de Nie
xii + 530 p., 156 x 234 mm, 2012, SEM 31, HB, ISBN 978-2-503-53148-9, $189 / € 130
The unexpected return of contemporary public Christian miracles in the late antique Latin west, after a centuries-long assumption that these had ceased after apostolic times, helped to create a religious mentality there that would continue to characterize the western European Middle Ages. While the social and political functions of the new miracles have been gaining greater scholarly attention, this study is the first in-depth treatment of their experiential dimension. It examines this dimension in the first reactions to the new phenomenon – enthusiasm, puzzlement, deep suspicion, and outright rejection – as they are reflected and, especially, imagined in the earliest contemporary narrative and poetic sources that describe them. And it traces how the new imaginative representations transformed, for many, the up to then precept-centered way of thinking about religion into one that immersed itself in the supralogical dynamics of symbolic images. The tendency of these image-clusters to precipitate transformations, not only in perception but also in physical condition, is examined for the period from 386, when a first public miracle caught everyone’s attention in the ostensibly flourishing Christian Roman Empire, to c. 460, when this empire was crumbling under the onslaught of Germanic tribes.
www.brepols.net
www.isdistribution.com
