450 Jane Stanford Way, Building 160, Stanford, CA 94305
433A
Lunch will begin at 11:45 a.m. for in-person attendees.
Our next lunchtime seminar will feature Michael Penn, Teresa Hihn Moore Professor of Religious Studies at Stanford.
How does our understanding of Christianity change when we recognize that for over half its history Christianity’s geographic center was not Rome, nor even Constantinople, but rather Baghdad? To help answer that question we’ll use DH techniques to investigate a recently published corpus of letters from Timothy I who, for forty-three years, headed a church stretching from Turkey, throughout the Middle East, across Afghanistan, down to India, up to Tibet, and into China.
After his predecessor’s poisoning in 780, Timothy was one of four competing candidates to head the Church of the East. Allegedly bribing fellow-clergy but later not paying-up, Timothy’s election led to a two-year schism. But by the time of his death in 823, Timothy had become his church’s most successful patriarch. Timothy forged ties with five successive Muslim caliphs, wrote about the discovery of ancient Hebrew biblical texts near Jericho that sound surprisingly like the Dead Sea Scrolls, accompanied a military campaign against Byzantine Christians, composed the longest surviving early Christian-Muslim dialog, expanded his church to its greatest size and made the momentous decision to move the patriarchate to the newly constructed city of Baghdad. From Baghdad, Timothy sent hundreds of letters throughout the Middle East, Central Asia, and India. Fifty-nine survive providing unprecedented access to the day-to-day workings of the most extensive church the pre-modern world had ever seen.
The unbelievably detailed nature of Timothy’s epistles also makes them amenable to DH techniques such as GIS, social network analysis, and corpus linguistics. His letters thus serve as a particularly rich case study for exploring the benefits and the challenges of combining distant and close readings of pre-modern texts. The results immerse us in a medieval world extending far beyond Byzantium and enable us to query just how big “the global Middle Ages” must be in order to accommodate first-millennium Christians.
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About the Speaker
Michael Penn specializes in the history of early Christianity with a particular focus on middle eastern Christians who wrote in the Aramaic dialect of Syriac. He has applied digital techniques, including computerized analysis of ancient Aramaic handwriting, to his research in these areas. He leads Social Networks in the Early Islamic Middle East, a project that applies the visualization and quantification approaches of Social network analysis to the Book of Governors, a hagiography written by Thomas, Bishop of Marga in the mid-9th century.