Christians do dialogue.
In the shifting intellectual terrain of late antiquity, the genre remained a vital
form for philosophical and religious expression, as shown in Averil Cameron’s
recent work (Cameron 2014). From Origen to Augustine, from Gregory of Nyssa to
Gregory the Great, many of the most influential early Christian authors chose
to employ the literary genre of the dialogue in their writing. The late ancient
world was crowded with new ideas and competing voices, and the dialogue was one
venue in which those debates were regularly staged.
By attending to the diversity of
dialogic texts, we will explore the limits of the form. We will proceed from
close readings of individual examples of the genre, in an attempt to understand
the interplay of literary structure and philosophical or religious content; the
relationship between literary production and a text’s social logic; the
persistence of ancient literary forms and the influence of novel religious
ideas. Between Plato and the rise of the Christian dialogue stand the
impressive and influential dialogue corpora of Cicero, Plutarch and Lucian. How
does the dialogue tradition change over its long history? In what ways
are Christians participating in new developments within the genre? What do
dialogue writers hope to accomplish?
This workshop will bring
together scholars working on dialogic texts that span a broad chronological and
geographical range: Methodius in Asia Minor, Augustine in North Africa, Julian
the Apostate in Constantinople and Sulpicius Severus in Gaul. Study of the
dialogue in antiquity is currently undergoing a revival of interest, and we
hope to further the conversation by offering a fresh set of readings of some of
the many late ancient dialogues, across linguistic and geographical boundaries.
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