Browse
Recent Submissions
- ItemPedagogical reflections on New Testament apocrypha: more noncanonical scriptures, volume 2(2023) Hannan, SeanIn this review article, the author makes the case for Tony Burke’s recent second volume of New Testament Apocrypha: More Noncanonical Scriptures (Eerdmans, 2020) as a publication that can help historians and scholars of religion navigate the convoluted warrens of ancient Christian literature. Adopting a pedagogical lens, the author argues that this volume goes deeper than standard tomes like Marvin Meyer’s Nag Hammadi Scriptures (HarperOne, 2007), offering its audience a more rigorously up-to-date picture of the state of Apocrypha research. The level of rigour and detail on display here might also make the volume more suitable for graduate or upper-level undergraduate courses. In order to support his presentation of the pedagogical value of Burke’s work, the author draws on specific examples rooted in several primary sources contained therein, from the Old Uyghur Adoration of the Magi to the Byzantine Life of Mary Magdalene.
- ItemCaravans and long-distance trade in Roman Egypt(2021) Gibbs, MattIn 163 AD, Harpagathes, son of Satabous, from the village of Soknopaiou Nesos, a small community on the northern edge of the Fayum in Egypt, reported to the strategos—the chief official of the nome—that a camel he owned had been pressed into Imperial service as part of the poreia, the supply caravan, which moved along the route that travelled from Berenike on the coast of the Red Sea, some 800 kilometers away (P.Lond. 2.328; cf. BGU 3.762). Evidently, Harpagathes was not alone; the Roman administration of Egypt requisitioned many animals who were used in the movement of various supplies, ranging from military provisions through to stone, as parts of private and state-sponsored caravans (see Adams 2001, 2007; Cuvigny 2003; Hirt 2010; Russell 2014). This papyrus reveals the state’s interest in overland transport, as well as how some caravans—at least those that supplied remote communities—were created, and the distance that they travelled. More broadly, through the evidence within the Greco–Egyptian papyri and the available archaeological evidence, this chapter considers private and imperial caravans and long-distance trade across the Eastern and Western Desert routes in Roman Egypt (30 BC – c. AD 350). It focuses not only the composition of caravans, but also the distances travelled, the communities and private individuals involved in the movement of goods, and the Roman state’s interest in both the goods transported and the transport system itself.
- ItemWallace K. Ferguson Prize Forum author’s response: barbed-wire imperialism: some Canadian connections and contemporary considerations(2021) Forth, AidanThis article reassesses the argument of Barbed-Wire Imperialism for a contemporary Canadian readership. The concentration and segregation of indigenous communities on demarcated reserves in western Canada exhibited many of the same dynamics as British concentration camps erected in the context of colonial famines, pandemics, and guerilla warfare. As Canada encounters its own colonial past in cities like Kitchener (named after the infamous British General who detained African civilians in dirty and disease-ridden wartime camps), the colonial mantra to concentrate and control also finds resonance in Canada’s “racialized state” and in the burgeoning prisons, migrant labour facilities, and refugee camps of contemporary North America.
- ItemPhysical and figural animals in Patrick Deville's Peste & Choléra(2022) Epp, MarlaThis article studies the ways in which animals are represented as both “real” and “symbolic” fgures in Patrick Deville’s Peste & Choléra (2012). The novel focuses not only on the scientifc and medical developments in which its principal subject, the scientist Alexandre Yersin, was involved, but also presents the corresponding dark underside of this progress and the violence that accompanied the lifesaving and lifechanging innovations. Deville is known for exploring the complicated repercussions of historical events that continue to be felt to the present-day. I argue that throughout Peste & Choléra, scenes with animals serve as particularly sharp reminders that human advancement does not come without a cost. Although the animals appear primarily confned to scientifc laboratories or relegated to the edges of human settlements, Deville writes about them in an expansive style, constructing a complex web of layered biblical and literary references. I contend that, through these passages, Deville encourages a multiplicity of ways of reading animals and refuses to let them be carelessly cast as simply scientifc elements, forgotten victims of modernity.
- ItemShamelessness and despair in America(2021) Beauclair, AlainThis article offers a diagnosis of the current state of political rhetoric in America, arguing that the prevalence of shamelessness and despair in our age is a result of an injury to the imagination. Taking its bearings from both Aristotle and Dewey, it claims that this injury has its origins in our increasing inability to articulate the objects of our fear in a manner that fosters intelligent inquiry, and consequently inhibits our collective capacity to reconstruct our desires in a manner commensurate with our current circumstances. In an effort to meliorate this challenge, the article points in the direction of the potential fecundity in such positive dispositions as respect and goodwill.