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March 30–31, 2025
Loyola University Chicago | Lake Shore Campus
Sappho Fresco, Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli.
On Pseudepigraphy
Building on a growing body of recent scholarship on ancient pseudepigraphy and the varied ways in which ancient writers attributed texts to others, this conference will center the genre of the letter with an examination of epistolary fictions. We will consider what features particular to a letter make it particularly well suited for ancient pseudepigraphy, such as the ways it mediates presence across distance and associates itself with a particular personality.
While recognizing the merits of recent scholarship that focuses on authenticity, forgery, and deception, we will seek to examine other facets of epistolary pseudepigraphy, such as aesthetic pleasure, intellectual utility, poetics, and claims to authority. Given the significance of epistolary fictions in both ancient Jewish and ancient Christian literature, the conference will examine pseudepigraphic letters as a broad phenomenon within the literature of the ancient Mediterranean, but also as integral to developing notions of Jewish and Christian scripture and authoritative tradition.
While the majority of the conference will consist of historical and literary analyses of ancient letters, a final session will consider how pseudepigraphic letters inform our understanding of tradition and scripture in ancient Judaism and ancient Christianity, becoming part of what scholar of ancient Judaism Hindy Najman has termed “the vitality of scripture.”
Don Silvestro dei Gherarducci, Prophet in a Historiated Initial “O” from a Gradual. 1392–1399. Art Institute of Chicago.
We have invited papers focused on pseudepigraphic letters in ancient Mediterranean literature particularly in response to the following questions:
● To what extent are these letters reading instructions for audiences who possess earlier works? How do they illuminate relationships between writers, texts, and audiences?
● How do writers employ pseudepigraphic letters to build new worlds and invite audiences to inhabit them?
● How do pseudepigraphic letters overwrite previous literary works, functioning as a corrective or alternative?
● Where do we detect a pseudepigraphic impulse that goes beyond deception or pure utilitarianism? Where and how does pseudepigraphic epistolarity demonstrate aesthetic delight or poetic imagination?
● How do pseudepigraphic letters negotiate between past horizons and future trajectories, whether intellectual, political, literary, poetic, and/or theological?
Conference Plan
The event will begin with a pre-conference graduate student symposium, drawing students from the University of Notre Dame and Loyola University Chicago for lightning-round presentations of their research and faculty responses.
The conference will officially commence with an invited plenary lecture. On the second day, scholars from the fields of classical studies, ancient Judaism, and ancient Christianity will present pre-circulated papers in seminar format.
Contact
For more information, contact Dave Lincicum (david.n.lincicum.1@nd.edu) or Olivia Stewart Lester (ostewartlester@luc.edu)
Horned Animals with Stars Overhead; Cylinder seal impression; Basalt, serpentine; Khafajah, Sin Temple II (Iraq), Late Uruk-Jamdat Nasr period (3350-2900 BCE). Oriental Institute, University of Chicago. Photographed by Karen Barrett-Wilt.
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