The Late Antique Cult of Saints in Eastern Christianity
4–5 May, 2023
ERTEGUN HOUSE,OXFORD
4–5 MAY 2023
Scholarship on Late Antique Christianity has long focused on the Christian West, often ignoring communities and liturgical traditions in the Eastern regions of the early Christian world. This resulted in a relative lack of interest, and therefore, scholarship, on numerous communities whose heritage is in danger of disappearing.
However, the last couple of decades has seen an increasing focus on these arguably long-forgotten ‘Christianities’ and their communities, heritage, and literary productions.
Following this crucial shift in scholarship, we wish to invite young scholars to a conference at the University of Oxford to further explore the various traditions cultivated in Christian communities residing in these marginalised areas of the Late Antique world. As a tribute to Peter Brown’s legacy in the study of Late Antiquity, the conference will survey these communities through the prism of the cult of saints.
The conference will take place between 4–5 May, 2023 and will be hosted by the Ertegun Scholarship Programme House, The University of Oxford. Attendees of all levels of scholarship are welcome to register to attend the conference. The conference will also be broadcasted on zoom, to which those who are interested will need to register as well.
Contact us: easternsaints.conf@gmail.com
The organisers:
Chloé Agar recently completed her DPhil in History (Late Antique and Byzantine Studies) at the University of Oxford and was the Deutsch Scholar in African History at St Cross College from 2018 to 2021. She researches hagiography preserved in Coptic and teaches Egyptology students in the Griffith Institute, and is also a research assistant at the Faculty of Theology and Religion and Harris Manchester College. Previously, she completed an MA in Archaeology with German at the University of Liverpool in 2018 and a BA in Egyptology with Coptic at the University of Oxford in 2017.
Andrew Hochstedler OFM Conv. loves a good debate. During his M.A. in Early Christian Studies at the University of Notre Dame (2017-19), late antique Syriac liturgical poetry piqued his interest with its creative retellings of debates between Biblical characters, in particular, the Virgin Mary haggling with the Angel Gabriel over his announcement of Christ’s birth. During a subsequent MSt in Syriac Studies (2019-20), and an ongoing DPhil in Asian Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Oxford, his work has expanded to focus on the earliest accounts of Mary’s Dormition and the origins of her cult in Syriac Christianity. As a Franciscan Friar working in Istanbul, Turkey, his interests range from medieval Byzantine monasticism, to the cultural background of the Qur’an’s formation, to the intersection between Psychology and Patristic sources in modern day religious formation.
Ya'el Nu'emah Kremer received her B.A and M.A degrees in Talmud and Comparative Religion from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (2017–2020; 2020–2022), where she studied the transformation of a local-Antiochian Jewish worship of the Maccabees into a full-scale Late-Antique Christian cult. She is currently conducting her doctoral research at the faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Oxford, which sheds light on the emergence of the Maccabean Mother as a central figure within the Late-Antique Syriac pantheon of saints. She is broadly interested in the transmission of religious and cultural knowledge and in her qanun.