Biblical Studies Carnival 29

Patristics Carnival 10

History Carnival 63, History Carnival 64

Carnivalesque 38

History Carnival no. 62 is available on Spinning Clio.

Biblical Studies Carnival no. 26 on Biblicalia

Carnivalesque no. 35 (covering medieval and ancient history) on Highly Eccentric

History Carnival no. 60 on Victorian Peeper

Biblical Studies Carnival no. 15, at Awilum;

Carnivalesque no. 24 (early modern edition), at The Long Eighteenth;

History Carnival no. 49, at History is Elementary.

Phil S. has posted his most recent Patristics roundup.

The 46th History Carnival has also been uploaded over on the interestingly titled blog: “Investigations of a dog: Failing better at understanding the past”.

History Carnival no. 44 is posted on Barista: Heartstarters for the Hungry Mind.

Carnivalesque no. 21, which alternates months between ancient/medieval and early modern historical topics, is available as well.

The indefatigable David Meadows has also posted his most recent ‘Best of the Classical Blogosphere’ Carnival.
Note the variations in my descriptions of each carnival, particularly the use of different vocabulary (even strange words like indefatigable), which is a sure sign that some creativity leading to my own postings may be on the way.

Stoa.org points to an article regarding an ancient Greek ship: Robot explores ancient Greek shipwreck.

There is a new blog by Matt Page (thanks to Mark Goodacre’s mention) devoted primarily to discussing films that involve biblical stories and themes: Bible Films Blog. There are already several posts there about the South African film Son of Man. I wonder if Matt Page will also discuss some of the earlier wave of both Bible and Roman-related films from the 1950s, some of which are hokey (corny), which makes them so enjoyable.

One of the items links to a classical studies related blog that I had not yet noticed, called Memorabilia Antonina, by Tony Keen (an expert on the Lycians in Asia Minor who teaches at Open U.). He has several posts on Greeks and Romans as depicted in modern popular culture (film and TV).

In case you hadn’t noticed, David Meadows has an ambitious daily Classicarnival linking to the most recent posts relating to Greek and Roman topics. How does he keep up with it all?

Among the links there is one to a batch of new history-related blogs connected with the Centre for History and New Media. He also links to Histomats’ list of top ten marxist historical works. G.E.M. de Ste Croix’s The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World (1981) appears there alongside classic E.P. Thompson and Christopher Hill, whose The English Revolution of 1640 (1940) is now available online here. I still remember reading Hill’s books for courses in my undergrad days. His works were among the ones that made quite an impression on me and got me into social history (or “history from below”) in the first place. Among the more exciting of Hill’s works are The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution, The English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution, and Antichrist in Seventeenth-Century England. I bet you never thought this one would come around to the history of Satan and his minions again.

In a recent post she discusses why she blogs as an academic, as well as the value of blogging for research (much of which rings true to me). She writes, in part,

“Blogging research lets you develop the very first drafts of ideas. Bits and pieces that don’t yet amount to articles (or even conference papers), but they may well do some day. And something else, sometimes: last year I was having trouble thinking up any new ideas at all, but blogging old ideas, often attached to new sources, meant that I kept writing, if only a few hundred words a week, without having to worry about it being original or impressive. And now, because it’s all archived and easy to find, I can look back over some of that work and see potential themes, little seeds of ideas that are worth working on, start to make them grow. . . Another thing: writing for a slightly different audience than in the usual academic contexts. This is an amazing opportunity to reach out.”

I also really enjoy the broader audience thing.

UPDATE: Jim Davila and Instapundit point to an online article in the Chronicle of Higher Education on academic blogging.

Among other things, the author of the article, Henry Farrell, notes that perhaps the majority of academic bloggers “see blogging as an extension of their academic personas. Their blogs allow them not only to express personal views but also to debate ideas, swap views about their disciplines, and connect to a wider public. For these academics, blogging isn’t a hobby; it’s an integral part of their scholarly identity. They may very well be the wave of the future.”

I was recently interviewed for an article, “Academics take up blogging,” in our local Thursday Report here at Concordia U, where you can see some of my basic thoughts on academic blogging.

Carlo Ginzburg’s classic social historical study of an obscure peasant living in Italy provides a fascinating window into popular culture during the late medieval and reformation periods. Menocchio, a peasant miller who considered himself among the poor and yet was also literate at a basic level, was put on trial in Italy during the later inquisitions, church run court-cases against heresy (in the late 1500s). As one witness put it, Menocchio “is always arguing with somebody about the faith just for the sake of arguing – even with the priest” (Ginzberg, p. 2). His well-documented testimony and the perspectives of other peasants and priests on his views (from the court records) provide a picture of an independent thinker who was nonetheless in some respects reflecting a deeper stream of medieval popular religion, as Ginzburg argues.

Quite captivating is Menocchio’s view on creation, his cosmogony, which draws on the analogy of putrefaction:

“I have said that, in my opinion, all was chaos, that is, earth, air, water, and fire were mixed together; and out of that bulk a mass formed – just as cheese is made out of milk – and worms appeared in it, and these were the angels. The most holy majesty decreed that these should be God and the angels, and among that number of angels, there was also God, he too having been created out of that mass at the same time, and he was made lord, with four captains, Lucifer, Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael” (Menocchio as cited by Ginzburg, pp. 5-6 )

The inquisitorial judges just could not get their minds around these elaborate and imaginative ideas of a relatively uneducated peasant. The angels emerged like worms in rotting cheese? God was created as one of these angels? Where did you come up with this stuff, and why do you insist on continually sharing your strange ideas with others (was the sentiment)?

More on Menocchio and popular religion later, which you can also read about in Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller (trans. by John and Anne Tedeschi; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992 [1980]).

Ginzburg was among the pioneers of “microhistory“, a type of social history which focusses attention on detailing what we can known about one particular individual, family or village, for instance. You can read an online interview with him about microhistory and his work on the witches’ sabbat here.

Another social historian that engages in microhistory is Natalie Zemon Davis, well known for her book on The Return of Martin Guerre: Imposture and Identity in a Sixteenth-Century Village (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983). As you may know, Martin Guerre’s story was also made into a film (in French, 1982) followed by a less historically-injected Hollywood version called Sommersby (1993), which was instead set in post-Civil War America (rather than a 16th century French village).

Carlo Ginzburg’s classic social historical study of an obscure peasant living in Italy provides a fascinating window into popular culture during the late medieval and reformation periods. Menocchio, a peasant miller who considered himself among the poor and yet was also literate at a basic level, was put on trial in Italy during the later inquisitions, church run court-cases against heresy (in the late 1500s). As one witness put it, Menocchio “is always arguing with somebody about the faith just for the sake of arguing – even with the priest” (Ginzberg, p. 2). His well-documented testimony and the perspectives of other peasants and priests on his views (from the court records) provide a picture of an independent thinker who was nonetheless in some respects reflecting a deeper stream of medieval popular religion, as Ginzburg argues.

Quite captivating is Menocchio’s view on creation, his cosmogony, which draws on the analogy of putrefaction:

“I have said that, in my opinion, all was chaos, that is, earth, air, water, and fire were mixed together; and out of that bulk a mass formed – just as cheese is made out of milk – and worms appeared in it, and these were the angels. The most holy majesty decreed that these should be God and the angels, and among that number of angels, there was also God, he too having been created out of that mass at the same time, and he was made lord, with four captains, Lucifer, Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael” (Menocchio as cited by Ginzburg, pp. 5-6 )

The inquisitorial judges just could not get their minds around these elaborate and imaginative ideas of a relatively uneducated peasant. The angels emerged like worms in rotting cheese? God was created as one of these angels? Where did you come up with this stuff, and why do you insist on continually sharing your strange ideas with others (was the sentiment)?

More on Menocchio and popular religion later, which you can also read about in Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller (trans. by John and Anne Tedeschi; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992 [1980]).

Ginzburg was among the pioneers of “microhistory“, a type of social history which focusses attention on detailing what we can known about one particular individual, family or village, for instance. You can read an online interview with him about microhistory and his work on the witches’ sabbat here.

Another social historian that engages in microhistory is Natalie Zemon Davis, well known for her book on The Return of Martin Guerre: Imposture and Identity in a Sixteenth-Century Village (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983). As you may know, Martin Guerre’s story was also made into a film (in French, 1982) followed by a less historically-injected Hollywood version called Sommersby (1993), which was instead set in post-Civil War America (rather than a 16th century French village).

The current History Carnival XVI is hosted on Respectful Insolence (a.k.a. “Orac Knows”), a very wide-ranging blog by an “academic surgeon and scientist” whose historical interests are in WW II and the Holocaust. The next History Carnival (XVII) will be hosted by Lisa Roy Vox, a doctoral candidate at Emory U. (aka the Apocalyptic Historian), an expert in modern apocalypticism. So I’m looking forward to that one as well. Perhaps I should soon slip in a few more apocalyptic entries in my own blog to see if I make it into mention. (After all, I’m teaching a course on NT Apocrypha. . . maybe something on the Apocalypse of Peter to come;).

• Cartularium: Primary Sources, sources for the study of women and monasticism (Monastic Matrix)
• Christian Classics Ethereal Library: Writings by monks, nuns, or mystics: Johannes (Meister) Eckhart(c. 1260-1327), Ignatius of Loyola (1491-1556), John of the Cross (1542-1591), Julian of Norwich (c. 1342-c. 1413), Richard Rolle of Hampole (c. 1290-c. 1349), Henry Suso (c. 1296-1366), John Tauler (c. 1300-1361), Teresa of Avila (1515-1582). Writings by “reformers”: John Calvin (1509-1564), Martin Luther (1483-1546)
• English Reformation Sources (Julie P. McFerran)
• Hanover Historical Texts Project: Council of Trent, Catholic (“Counter-”) Reformation (Hanover College)
• Internet Medieval Sourcebook (Paul Halsall, Fordham U.)
• Internet Modern History Sourcebook: Reformation Europe (Paul Halsall, Fordham U.)
• The Labyrinth: Resources for Medieval Studies (Georgetown U.)
• Martyrs Mirror (1660), Anabaptist history of martyrs from the first to the seventeenth century
• Medieval Heresy (Internet Medieval Sourcebook)
• Project Wittenburg: Selected Works of Martin Luther (1483 – 1546)
• Reformation, including links to online works by Luther, Melanchthon, Zwingli, and others (Hans Rollmann, Memorial U.)
• John Wyclif and the Lollards (Geoffrey Chaucer page)

OTHER RESOURCES

• Bodleian Library: Western Manuscripts to 1500, images of manuscripts (University of Oxford)
• Digital Scriptorium, image database of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts (U. California, Berkeley)
• Hagiography, Lives of Saints (Thomas Head, ORB Online Encycl.)
• Monastic Matrix: Resources for the Study of Women’s Religious Communities from 400 to 1600 AD
• Monasticism in Medieval Christianity (Metropolitan Museum of Art)
• NetSERF: Medieval Religion (Catholic U. of America)
• Relics and Reliquaries in Medieval Christianity (Metropolitan Museum of Art)
• The Reformation (Metropolitan Museum of Art)
• Reformation Picture Gallery: People, Places
• Religious Orders (Kimberly Georgedes, ORB Online Encycl.)
• Women and Hagiography in Medieval Christianity (Thomas Head, ORB Online Encycl.)

NOTE ON USING THE INTERNET FOR STUDYING THE HISTORY OF RELIGIONS: Internet sites are not all equally valuable and reliable when it comes to historical information, and it is not always easy for everyone to distinguish which ones are reliable. Above I have limited myself primarily to sites which collect together or link sources from the time period we are studying (“primary sources”) and to sites with ties to legitimate educational institutions or produced by professors. This means that they will be relatively reliable. However, at this point in history, the internet is never a substitute for doing proper reading and research in primary sources, journal articles and books.

Other posts in the late-medieval and reformations series.

• Early Christian Writings, including the Apocrypha and Gnostic writings (Peter Kirby)
• Early Church Fathers, including the so-called heresiologists (combaters of “heresy), such as Irenaeus, Tertullian, and others (Christian Classics Ethereal Library)
• The Five Gospel Parallels, including the Coptic gospel of Thomas (John W. Marshall, U of Toronto)
• Noncanonical Literature: Documents to Aid Students and Scholars in Biblical Interpretation, including M.R. James’ introductions and translations from The Apocryphal New Testament (1924) (Wesley Center)

RESOURCES ON CHRISTIAN APOCRYPHA AND GNOSTICISM

• Apocryphal Acts Homepage (István Czachesz, U. Groningen)
• Christian Apocrypha (Section of the Society of Biblical Literature)
• From Jesus to Christ: Gnostics and Other Heretics (PBS Frontline)
• NT Gateway: Non-Canonical Christian Texts (Mark Goodacre, Duke U.)
• Nag Hammadi Library, an historical introduction to the discovery
• Middle Platonism in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Edward Moore; St. Elias School of Orthodox Theology)

RESOURCES ON SPECIFIC APOCRYPHAL WRITINGS

• Papyrus Egerton 2 Homepage (Wieland Willker)
• The Coptic Gospel of Judas (Iscariot) (Roger Pearse)
• The Secret Gospel of Mark Homepage (Wieland Willker)
• Gospel of Thomas Commentary (Peter Kirby)
• Grondin’s Interlinear Coptic/English translation of the Coptic Gospel of Thomas
• The Acts of Thecla: A Pauline Tradition Linked to Women (Nancy A. Carter)

ONLINE DOCTORAL DISSERTATIONS ON APOCRYPHAL WRITINGS

• The More Spiritual Gospel: Markan Literary Techniques in the Longer Gospel of Mark by Scott G. Brown (U. Toronto; now available as a book; interview with author here)
• The Infancy Gospel of Thomas: The Text, Its Origins, and Its Transmission, by Tony Chartrand-Burke (U. Toronto)
• Apostolic Commission Narratives in the Canonical and Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles, by István Czachesz (U. Groningen)
• The Apocryphal Acts of Andrew, by Fernando Lautaro Roig Lanzillotta (U. Groningen)

(Thanks to Tony Chartrand-Burke [Atkinson College, York U.] for sharing with me the links he had already found in connection with his course on gnosticism).

In the future, I will have more entries on Apocryphal Gospels and Acts in connection with the graduate course I’m teaching in the Fall on the “Diversity of Early Christianity”, which is focusing on the above this time around.