Bodies in Motion. Religion and Corporeality in Late Antiquity

In Late Antiquity, certain forms of religious poetry were important media of education and entertainment. Popular religious songs instructed people about God, but they also taught about the human condition. Narrative displays of sinners and saints showed the faithful how to behave and how not to behave. Christian poetry can be read as an interpretation of human life and a script for corporeal performances. How did late ancient Christians in Constantinople construe their embodied selves in song? What role and significance did they assign to their sexuality and senses? How did their ritual texts script gendered performances? Their songs did not merely describe spiritual ascents; late ancient hymns spoke body language. "Bodies in Motion. Religion and Corporeality in Late Antiquity" shed new light on early Christian corporeality, from a ritual perspective. In Late Antiquity, Constantinople emerged as the metropolis to which the Christian world would look. This project engaged the songs and sermons that filled the ritualized streets and naves of the Imperial city and examines how the texts situate Christian bodies. The project focused on liturgical texts for Holy Week, often seen as the most solemn period of the Christian year. Preachers and poets in Late Antiquity used the story of the re-invigoration of Lazarus to create complex and grotesque displays of the embodied human condition. The liturgical texts address human beings as mortal and as subject to the laws of putrefaction. They reflect corporeal human fear of decay and the vulnerability in relation to the forces of death. The authors express no joy regarding decomposition, but reveal an ambivalent perplexity concerning the work of the death worms in human bodies created by God. Surprisingly, hymns for Monday through Wednesday of Holy Week goes in the opposite direction and stage sexual bodies, desirous bodies, and gendered bodies. The project has given new perspectives on the celebration of Holy Week in late ancient Constantinople and has demonstrated the nuance with which the writers engaged human bodies. Sensual and corporeal experiences constituted a much more central part of the preaching than previous scholarship has assumed. At the same time, the texts reveal tension and ambivalence towards gender roles, sexuality, and decay.

Virkninger Prosjektet har vist forskningsmiljøet og kirkelige miljøer hvordan kroppslig erfaring formet kristen forkynnelse i senantikken, og hvorledes forkynnelsen fortolket og formet kroppslig erfaring. Prosjektleder har opparbeidet seg selvstendig forskningskompetanse. Han har fått bedrive et utstrakt samarbeide med internasjonale kolleger. Et halvår som gjesteforsker ved Brown University (2016) utgjorde en del av prosjektet, mens ett år som forskningsstipendiat ved Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection ble gjennomført innenfor prosjektets tidsrammer (2018-19). Under prosjektet har han blitt tilkjent ulønnet dosentur ved Lunds Universitet og kjent professorkompetent. Effekter Effekten av humanistisk forskning kan ikke måles som en direkte konsekvens av ett enkelt prosjekt. Prosjektets funn har dog potensial til å forandre samfunnets og kirkenes forståelse av den tidlige kristendommen og dens tolkning av seksualitet, kjønnethet og forgjengelighet.

How did late ancient Christians in Constantinople construe their embodied selves in song? What role and significance did they assign to their sexuality and senses? And how did they imagine other bodies - angelic or inanimate - to act? How did their ritual texts script gendered corporeal performances? This project rests on the hypothesis that late ancient hymns spoke body language. Common knowledge as well as scholarly approaches still reveal relatively simplistic attitudes towards these questions: It is often assumed with Nietzsche that early Christianity was vulgar Platonism and thus hostile to bodily experience. It favored intellect over the corporeal, nous over senses, male over female, and contemplation over motion. Scholars like Peter Brown have contributed to a discourse that breaks down these simple dichotomies in our approaches. The senses, for instance, constituted an important aspect of early Christian epistemology, and yet the Byzantines lived with their senses quite differently than moderns do. As scholars are becoming increasingly aware of this, they also acknowledge a gaping need for more comprehensive research. "Bodies in Motion. Religion and Corporeality in Late Antiquity" attempts to fill one part of the void - from a ritual perspective. In Late Antiquity, Constantinople emerged as the metropolis to which the Christian world would look. The project engages the poetic works that filled the ritualized streets and naves of this city. I work on a selection of hymns, prioritizing those that marked important conjunctions in the liturgical rite and those that came to stand out as exceptionally popular. Hymns such as kontakia often tell long stories, and thus the project applies methods of literary performative analysis to show how the texts situate bodies and address the sensory apparatus of the listeners.