Susan Ashbrook Harvey

2000 NAPS Presidential Address Spoken Words, Voiced Silence: Biblical Women in Syriac Tradition

Biblical women have a distinctively prominent verbal role in late antique Syriac homilies and hymns. Syriac writers granted these women a rhetorical voice often lacking in their biblical narratives, through the favored technique of imagined speech; and those words found a performative voice when womens choirs sang certain of these hymns in the liturgies of civic churches. This study asks how womens speech was represented in these Syriac texts, how that representation functioned in Christian teaching, and how the ritual performance by womens liturgical choirs contributed to the social meaning of womens voices in the late antique Syrian Orient.

Liturgy and Ethics in Ancient Syriac Christianity: Two Paradigms

Early Syriac Christianity presents two notable paradigms for understanding liturgy as a means for the ethical formation of the congregation. Ephrem the Syrian (d. 373) in his hymns for the Nativity vigil, and Jacob of Sarug (d. 521) in his verse homilies, each addressed their congregations in ways that utilized ritual participation in the liturgy for ethical and moral cultivation. Ephrem sought to instill his congregation with a biblical and theological understanding of the Nativity that would yield ethical enactment in the world. Jacob worked to use the experience of liturgical participation to mold the Christian’s moral disposition. For both, God’s salvation enabled the healing of the human condition in its various dimensions: physical, social, ecclesial. Liturgy as disciplined ritual activity provided the tools by which their congregations could learn, experience, and enact that healing.

Including the ‘Despised Woman’: Jacob of Serug at the Nativity Feast

Twenty-five articles in art history, social history, literature, epigraphy, numismatics and sigillography pay tribute to Alice-Mary Talbot in a coherent volume related to her abiding interest in the study of Byzantine religious practices in their social context.

The Cambridge History of Christianity, Vol. 3: Early Medieval Christianities c .600–c. 1100 (review)

There are few tasks so daunting for scholars at present as that of presenting a history for Christianity. Indeed, the volume title for this third installment of the Cambridge History of Christianity signals from the start that a changed paradigm is now firmly in place, no matter the era: there are histories and Christianities with which to reckon. Happily, scholars will welcome the results. If the enormity of the task defies cohesion,yet the boldness of this volume and the energy of its wide-ranging contributions can only command admiration.