Interdisciplinary Colloquium: Souls and Sounds of the City

Recent discoveries of copies of a letter from King Seleucus IV to his minister Heliodorus and of a dedication by Legio X Fretensis to the Emperor Hadrian on Jerusalem’s Third Wall, have caused scholars to rethink the origins of the first and last Jewish uprisings against Graeco-Roman rule.  Namely, the Maccabean Revolt (167–160 BCE) and the Bar Kokhba Revolt (132–36 CE). Taking the new discoveries as a starting-point, Professor Rowe’s lecture will reflect on the use of inscription as historical evidence generally - considering such aspects as monumentality, serial character, official bias, and capacity to create facts on the ground. The lecture is also intended as an introduction to epigraphical methodology and to the Greek and Latin epigraphy component of the new Jerusalem Studies Program, which he will be teaching this fall.

GREGORY ROWE is Associate Professor of Roman History at the University of Victoria, Canada. Gregory’s research concerns Roman politics during the shift from republic to monarchy in the first centuries BCE–CE. He is the author of Princes and Political Cultures: The New Tiberian Senatorial Decrees (University of Michigan Press, 2002) and a series of revisionist articles on the Res Gestae of the emperor Augustus. He is currently writing a book on meetings of family councils (consilia), arguing that elite women played a far greater role in Roman political life than is commonly thought. Gregory also has an abiding interest in Greek and Latin pedagogy and expanding the classical canon.  He has spent the past year studying ancient Greek at Polis.

Since antiquity Jerusalem has served as a center for writers, theologians, poets, and thinkers. However, it has also endured a great number of wars that relinquished its libraries and manuscripts. Against all odds, hundreds of manuscripts have survived from medieval Jerusalem in more than 12 different languages. These include religious as well as non-religious writings, some of which exhibit great works of art. Professor Mack has embarked on a project to systematically assemble and compare these manuscripts for the first time. This lecture is a look at her work in progress and an opportunity to share early findings and research dilemmas.

MERAV MACK received her PhD in Medieval History from Cambridge University. Her dissertation focused on Genoa and the Crusader States, for which she has published various articles - most recently in Brill’s Companion to Medieval Genoa, 2018. At the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute she led a number of interdisciplinary programmes culminating in a series of international conferences and publications (Transnationalism and Contemporary Christian Communities in the Middle East, 2013; Shvuim [Captives], 2014; Post-Subjectivity, 2014). Since 2005 she has been studying the historical libraries and archives of Jerusalem including 300 medieval codices which were produced in between the years 900 and 1500.  In 2019 she published a book, Jerusalem: City of the Book (Yale University Press). 

Professor Keys will give an overview of her forthcoming book Pride, Politics, and Humility in Augustine’s City of God (Cambridge; expected in June 2022). Augustine reveres Jerusalem as an image of the perfection of the City of God, which he must reconcile with the city’s political and cultural reality. How does he depict and defend humility as a virtue in political, philosophical, and religious life? How does he dissuade us from the pitfalls of vicious pride? Set alongside the imperial cities of Babylon and Rome, Jerusalem has much to reveal to the classical and contemporary reader concerning humility and pride in Divine teaching and human affairs.

MARY M. KEYS is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame (Indiana, USA). Her research and teaching interests span a broad spectrum of political theory with a focus in Christianity, ethics, and political thought. She is the author of Pride, Politics, and Humility in Augustine's City of God (forthcoming) and Aquinas, Aristotle, and the Promise of the Common Good, both from Cambridge University Press. Her work includes articles and chapters in the American Journal of Political Science, History of Political Thought, Perspectives on Political Science, and The Cambridge Companion to Augustine's City of God.  She holds an NEH Fellowship supporting her ongoing research project on Humility, Modernity, and the Science of Politics, and she has been a visiting scholar at Harvard University and the University of Chicago.