This session offers a variety of new research papers on pre-modern Christian history.
A common scholarly narrative in the history of Christianity proposes that early Christians did not laugh. While this narrative compile compelling evidence from their primary sources, they often treat the equally compelling evidence of Christian laughter as exceptional. I suggest that this narrative simplifies the diversity found between sources and within individual ones to represent a proto-orthodox antigelasticism defined in opposition to either Jewish or Gnostic groups who, unlike the early orthodox Christians, laugh. I linger on the rhetorical use of laughter by John Chrysostom to differentiate between Antiochene Christians and Jews, and by Irenaeus to differentiate between his own orthodoxy and Gnostic heresy. I suggest that scholars should take these claims as rhetorical strategies of social formation rather than statements of pre-existing orthodoxy. I call for a remapping of early Christian laughter in all its diversity, showing connections across categories of Christian/Jewish/Pagan and diversity within each community.
Is addiction voluntary self-enslavement or an inherited disease of the will? Lawmakers and clinicians have debated this question for hundreds of years; however, despite centuries of investigation, one important aspect of the concept of addiction remains entirely unexamined—its deep theological history. Christian theologians writing in Latin from the second to the seventeenth century used the Roman legal term addictio—originally denoting debt-bondage—as a metaphor to describe the sinful human condition. In this talk, I uncover the genesis and development of the Christian addiction metaphor in the writings of Roman Church Fathers Tertullian, Ambrose, and Augustine. I analyze their theologies of addiction to show how the language and logic of Roman pecuniary jurisprudence structures their thinking about sin, salvation, and the free will. I contend that the disease-delinquency ambivalence constitutive of today's understanding of addiction originated in their paradoxical definition of sin as both generational enslavement and willful servitude.
This paper addresses the roles of human and non-human animals in the religious narratives of early medieval Ireland. Texts are drawn from the *Acta Sanctorum Hiberniae* with an emphasis on those found in the *Codex Salmanticensis*. Selected narratives betray a construction of both human and non-human animals as together occupying the community of the Created—the Incarnated--- with the Divine functioning as the powerful Other. The problematic categorizations of “domestic”, “wild”, and “fabulous” animals will also be explored leading to a discussion on the role of traditionally “wild” animals in conjunction with sacred texts and non-human animals as participants in the cosmological transformations of early medieval Ireland. The paper concludes with a comparison of the manner in which human and non-human animals are conceived in the narratives of St. Francis versus the early Irish saints, particularly in the concept of their relationship and access to the Divine Other.