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Pilgrimage Shrines, Relics, and the Formation of Identity in Early Byzantium
March 16, 2010 19:00
LECTURE
Presented by
Gennadius Library
Speaker
Derek Krueger (University of N. Carolina at Greensboto)
Derek Krueger, Professor and Head of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro will speak about his latest research on the practices of pilgrimage as essential in the formation of early Byzantine identity. It is part of a larger project that uncovers the role of religious ritual in the formation of ideas about the self in Byzantium from the sixth to the ninth century. For this project, Professor Krueger uses both literary and material evidence to reconstruct lay patterns of self-reflection and self-regard, including the patterning of the moral conscience.
As a historian of Christian culture in Late Antiquity and Byzantium, Professor Krueger has posed a variety of questions about the practice of Christianity in the pre-modern Eastern Mediterranean. His latest monograph Writing and Holiness: The Practice of Authorship in the Early Christian East (2004), explores how Christian literature both reflects and shapes Christian ideas about holiness, society, and literature itself. He explores how the authors of various early Christian saints’ lives and hymns understood the work of authorship as a Christian religious activity. More recently, he has edited a volume on lay Christian practice in Byzantium.
His earlier books include:
•Symeon the Holy Fool: Leontius’s Life and the Late Antique City (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).
•Writing and Holiness: The Practice of Authorship in the Early Christian East (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).
•Byzantine Christianity, edited by Derek Krueger. A People’s History of Christianity 3 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2006).