Teaching the Saints:  Hagiography in the Classroom

 

A Colloquium sponsored by the Friends of the Saints, the Medieval Studies

Program and the History Ph.D. Program of the CUNY Graduate Center

Friday, April 20, 2018, at the CUNY Graduate Center,
365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10016, in Room 9206

 

Moderators:

Jay Gates (CUNY John Jay College)

Eric Ivison (CUNY College of Staten Island)

 

Panelists:

Dina Boero (The College of New Jersey)

Jennifer Brown (Marymount Manhattan College)

Charles Kuper (Haverford College and Bryn Mawr College)

Nicole Lopez-Jantzen (CUNY Borough of Manhattan Community College)

John Shean (CUNY LaGuardia Community College)

Laura Smoller (University of Rochester)

The “Teaching the Saints” colloquium brings together some eight panelists, covering hagiographic traditions in Western and Eastern Medieval Christianity, combining scholars of the Medieval West and Byzantine East, as well as those of Late Roman Antiquity.  The goals of the colloquium are pri­marily pedagogical, asking scholars of hagiography to share and discuss their teaching strategies and the source materials they use to teach sanctity and hagiographical texts to undergraduate students.

Due to CUNY GC rules, we cannot provide refreshments during the colloquium, but coffee and tea
are available in the GC Café off the first floor lobby.  Although lunch is not catered, in addition to
this GC venue, there are numerous cafés and restaurants in the immediate vicinity of the building.  Following the colloquium, attendees are invited to a reception in Room 5114.

 

SCHEDULE

10:00 -10:20 a.m. – WELCOME AND OPENING REMARKS  (Eric Ivison)

 

10:20 -11:50 a.m. – PANEL 1:  TEACHING THE SAINTS IN SURVEYS

Moderator: Jay Gates (CUNY John Jay College)

Panelists:  Jennifer Brown (Marymount Manhattan College)

                  Nicole Lopez-Jantzen (CUNY Borough of Manhattan Community College)

                  Laura Smoller (University of Rochester)

 

12:00 -1:00 p.m. – LUNCH BREAK (not catered)

 

1:00 - 2:30 p.m. – PANEL 2:  TEACHING THE SAINTS IN THEIR CULTURAL, HISTORICAL AND MATERIAL CONTEXTS

Moderator: Eric Ivison (CUNY College of Staten Island)

Panelists:  Dina Boero (The College of New Jersey)

                  Charles Kuper (Haverford College and Bryn Mawr College)

                  John Shean (CUNY LaGuardia Community College)

 

2:30 - 3:00 p.m. – CONCLUDING DISCUSSION  (Jay Gates)

 

3:00 p.m. –  RECEPTION – Please join us for a post-colloquium Reception sponsored by
the History Ph.D. Program, downstairs in the History Lounge, Room 5114.

 

MODERATORS

Jay Paul Gates

Associate Professor and Chair

Department of English, CUNY John Jay College of Criminal Justice

Jay Gates co-edited, with Nicole Marafioti, Capital and Corporal Punishment in Anglo-Saxon England (Boydell, 2014). He has published on Anglo-Saxon law and legal culture, Old English homilies, and pre- and post-Conquest historiography. He teaches hagiographical texts particularly in relation to legal culture.

Eric A. Ivison

Professor and Chairperson

Department of History, CUNY College of Staten Island

Ph.D. Program in History, CUNY Graduate Center

Eric A. Ivison is Professor of History at the College of Staten Island CUNY and the History Ph.D. Program at the CUNY Graduate Center. Dr. Ivison’s research and publications focus on Byzantine hisotry and archaeology, with specialization in the urban history and archaeology of Byzantine Anatolia. Byzantine hagiographic texts and saintly cults form part of Dr. Ivison’s research area, and he has taught western medieval and Byzantine hagiography at the undergraduate and graduate levels at CUNY.

 

PANELISTS’ ABSTRACTS

Jennifer Brown

Professor

Department of English

Marymount Manhattan College

 

Medieval Saintly Women in the Literature Classroom

This paper will look specifically at how I use texts by medieval holy women in my literature surveys of the Middle Ages, or in surveys of Women’s Literature generally. I will focus primarily on Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe (neither who is actually a “saint”) as their texts are included in virtually all anthologies these days, and explain how I engage students with these texts who may have no religious background, and to see the texts among a broader landscape of theological writings in the late Middle Ages and in a continuum of women writers, both religious and lay.

 

Dina Boero

Assistant Professor

Department of History

The College of New Jersey

 

Sensing the Saints:

Using Material Artifacts to Explore Religious Experience in the Byzantine Empire

A primary goal of my upper-division course on Byzantine history is to introduce students to the use of non-textual sources to address historical questions. For undergraduates without training in ancient languages and who are primarily exposed in previous history courses to American and modern European history, material artifacts offer an immediacy that Byzantine literature often does not. In addition, because students majoring in history are primarily trained in the use of written sources, focus on material artifacts develops their ability to work with a broad base of primary sources. A second goal of my course is to provide students the opportunity to work with unpublished or archival material in a local collection. This lays the foundation for students to make use of such resources in their senior capstone project. Also, since half of the students majoring in history at The College of New Jersey carry a double major in education, this introduces New Jersey’s future teachers to select cultural institutions in the state.

To achieve these goals, the course’s research project asks that students produce a six- to eight-page catalog entry on an unpublished object or archival document in the Princeton University Art Museum or the Visual Resources Collection in Princeton University’s Department of Art and Archaeology plus two additional primary sources of their choosing. Several objects are directly associated with saints’ cults or, more broadly, religious experience. Objects include pilgrimage tokens and flasks, pendants depicting saints, icons, reliquaries, and censors and light fixtures for liturgical spaces. In their examination of these objects, students frequently focus on the sensory elements of religious practice: sight, smell, touch, taste, and sound. This presentation describes this multi-step research project and addresses select positive outcomes and challenges of the project.

 

Charles Kuper

Visiting Assistant Professor
Department of Classics
Haverford College & Bryn Mawr College

 

Reading the Saints in a Classics Department

In this talk, I shall focus primarily on my course “Remembering the Saints: Reading Pilgrimage and Tourism in Late Antiquity,” paying special attention to some strategies for teaching these remarkable texts to students, especially students of classics. Because I have also taught hagiography in three language courses (seminar on Byzantine Greek, intermediate Latin course, and independent study of Syriac), I shall also comment on teaching these texts in the original languages and point to desiderata for future classroom readings.

 

Nicole Lopez-Jantzen

Assistant Professor of History

Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY

 

New Approaches to Hagiographic Texts: Teaching Gender and Sanctity

This presentation will examine approaches to making hagiography accessible to students in lower-level undergraduate courses, including survey courses such as Western Civilization I and the History of Women. I will discuss the pedagogical benefits of having students read hagiographic texts aloud in class. Reading aloud helps students to gain a better understanding of the text itself, enables students to ask questions of difficult material as they come up in class, and facilitates discussion of the ways that hagiographic texts were experienced in late antiquity and the Middle Ages. Additionally, it will highlight the use of modern media, in particular the graphic novel Perpetua’s Journey, along with the original text of the Passio, to get students engaged and analyze questions about gender and sanctity.

 

John F. Shean

Professor

LaGuardia Community College, CUNY

 

Teaching the Saints: Using Early Martyr Accounts in the Classroom

One of the challenges in teaching the history of early Christianity is helping students to understand the nature of the early Christian movement and the reasons why it came into conflict with the larger pagan society of which it was a part. Among the many specific questions raised by this historical issue are: what was the social basis of the Christian community and what kinds of people were attracted to it? Why were the Christians singled-out by their pagan neighbors and what specific objections did pagan people have towards the Christian faith? How consistent was the Roman government in seeking out Christian adherents? What, in turn, was the attitude of the Christians towards the Roman state and its rituals? Was it possible for individual Christians to avoid martyrdom and, if so, why were some Christians willing to undergo this ordeal? What was the role of martyrdom in the early church and how important were martyrs to the emerging cult of the saints? This talk is a discussion of the ways in which the acts of the martyrs, in conjunction with other texts, can be used to illustrate these issues. Starting with a discussion of the exchange between Pliny the Younger and the emperor Trajan, (Epistulae X.96), which is useful for the light it sheds on imperial policy towards Christians and details the recommended legal process to be used by Roman jurists when dealing with persons accused of being Christian, the talk will then proceed to a discussion of two of the more famous martyr accounts, those of St. Polycarp, and the Passion of Sts. Perpetua and Felicitas and their Companions. The martyrdom of St. Polycarp is among the oldest surviving martyr accounts and subsequently was used as a model text for later stories. As such, it follows a script which, among other features, clearly shows Roman judges following the interrogation procedure established by Pliny in addition to noting the awkward position occupied by reluctant Roman officials when forced to act in the face of a virulent, popular anti-Christian pogrom. The story of Perpetua, Felicitas and their companions is a very engaging account as it speaks to traditional Roman ideas about class, gender, filial piety, and social hierarchy. The actual text is a composite of different eyewitness reports of the events recounted, including the personal narrative and visions of Perpetua herself, thus making it one of the earliest texts from antiquity where a woman speaks with her own voice. The story is also rich in details describing the actual trials and rituals of death endured by the martyrs and underscores the power of faith which enabled Christian martyrs to triumph over adversity and establish a new standard of heroism.

 

Laura Smoller

Professor

Department of History

University of Rochester

 

Teaching with the Saints in the Medieval History Survey

This talk discusses the way I use a paring of excerpts from Henry of Le Mans with Thomas de Cantimpré’s Life of Christina the Astonishing to lead the students towards a Grundmann-type analysis of the broader effects of the Gregorian Reform. I will talk about how I do this in both live and online versions of the class.