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"reception history"
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Recipes for Thought
For a significant part of the early modern period, England was the most active site of recipe publication in Europe and the only country in which recipes were explicitly addressed to housewives.Recipes for Thoughtanalyzes, for the first time, the full range of English manuscript and printed recipe collections produced over the course of two centuries.
Recipes reveal much more than the history of puddings and pies: they expose the unexpectedly therapeutic, literate, and experimental culture of the English kitchen. Wendy Wall explores ways that recipe writing-like poetry and artisanal culture-wrestled with the physical and metaphysical puzzles at the center of both traditional humanistic and emerging \"scientific\" cultures. Drawing on the works of Shakespeare, Spenser, Jonson, and others to interpret a reputedly \"unlearned\" form of literature, she demonstrates that people from across the social spectrum concocted poetic exercises of wit, experimented with unusual and sometimes edible forms of literacy, and tested theories of knowledge as they wrote about healing and baking. Recipe exchange, we discover, invited early modern housewives to contemplate the complex components of being a Renaissance \"maker\" and thus to reflect on lofty concepts such as figuration, natural philosophy, national identity, status, mortality, memory, epistemology, truth-telling, and matter itself. Kitchen work, recipes tell us, engaged vital creative and intellectual labors.
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What is Qohelet’s Problem?
This essay distinguishes various interpretations of Ecclesiastes using heuristic categories that effectively map their divergent readings on the basis of how they primarily construe the central problem posed by the book. We suggest that there are roughly five broad conceptual models used by readers to answer the question, “What is Qohelet’s problem?” namely: as an epistemological, theological/ethical, political/economic, existential, and/or ontological issue. This article provides examples of each approach from both recent scholarship and the history of reception, showing that each brings certain aspects of the text to light, even as they keep other parts of the book in the dark. While we therefore recognize the value of each approach to Ecclesiastes, we especially advocate for the ontological perspective because we find that it is often overlooked or underappreciated in contemporary scholarship and because we think that it is central to a full understanding of Ecclesiastes’ teachings. This perspective sees Qohelet’s key term הבל (
) as pointing to a fundamental instability or incoherence in the nature of reality itself. We support our advocacy for this approach through readings of key texts, an exploration of relevant themes in Ecclesiastes, and engagement with various receptions of the book in literature, art, music, and film. The aims of this article, therefore, are to provide a conceptual map of the interpretation and reception of Ecclesiastes. We also advocate for the need to understand the book as a response to various problems including ontological contradictions, which may not be prevalent among contemporary interpretations but nonetheless have precedents in the book’s reception history.
Journal Article
From the Virgin to the Harlot and Back: Intermedial Mouvance in 'Fortunatus' (1509-1600) Von der Jungfrau zur Dirne und zurück: Intermediale Mouvance im 'Fortunatus' (1509-1600)
In the 16th century, the prose novel 'Fortunatus' underwent an intermedial mouvance process across a number of illustrated print editions, in which base texts and woodcut illustrations responded to each other in a transformative manner. This attests to the novel's turbulent reception-history,
which is particularly evident in the episode of the Virgin of Fortune. The reuse of visual material from Georg Wickram's 'Ritter Galmy' moreover helps to support a didactic reading.
Journal Article
Revisiting Biblical Studies in Light of Reception Theory: Christian and Jewish Arabic Sources on Psalms 110 and 137
The purpose of the present paper is to revisit the interface between biblical studies, reception exegesis, and reception theory. In the first part of the paper, we discuss what we believe to be the most important lessons learned from recent scholarship on the relationship between these fields and highlight what we think is still an underestimated conclusion: if we assume that “meaning” is contextual rather than essential, the full(er) capacity of a biblical text is not discoverable until we have examined how it has appeared in various contexts. Related to this is the question of why and how texts survive and even thrive in new contexts and in what way later authors utilize the “capacity” of the biblical texts, because even if “meaning” is ultimately brought to texts by their readers, texts are in some senses agents as well. To exemplify these discussions and the connection between reception exegesis and biblical criticism, two short examples from the reception of Psalms 110 and 137 in medieval Christian Arabic and Judeo-Arabic sources are presented. In the first example, we recapitulate findings on how inner-biblical reception generates a complex web of potential interpretations but also how the ambivalence created in the process may be the greatest asset of that text. It is also an example of where interpretation may teach us about the life and thought of ancient and medieval communities and how they interacted with one another over the meaning of the biblical text. In contrast, the second example is more centered on the “capacity” of the text and in what sense communities exploit that potential for their larger purposes.
Journal Article
The doctrine of providence in South African theologies: Historical formation
Providence can be described as God’s ongoing and enduring relationship to creation, through which God preserves, guides and governs all that exists. Accordingly, it is one of the most personal doctrines through which Christians affirm that God not only remains present and involved in God’s creation but also in our own lives. In this article, I examine the doctrine of providence in the South African theological landscape prior to 1994. To start with (first section), I briefly look at the way in which some of the most influential doctrines of providence have been developed throughout history. Thereafter (second section), I then turn specifically to the South African context and the reception of the doctrine of providence in South African theologies prior to 1994.Intradisciplinary and/or interdisciplinary implicationsThe Reformed theology of the Cape colony of the late 1600s and onwards, as well as the later belief of the ‘Volk’ as a category with supernatural meaning through the doctrine of providence that developed in the 1900s, is examined in the third section, as well as different South African responses to these notions. In the conclusion, I turn to the importance and relevance of providence for doing theology in present-day South Africa.
Journal Article
What is Reception Study? A Proposal for Terminological Definitions Based on Christina Hoegen-Rohls’ Article
A response to the article by Christina Hoegen-Rohls.
Journal Article
THE UNCANNY AFTERLIVES OF AUGUSTUS: READING ACROSS SUETONIUS’ LIVES OF THE CAESARS
This article examines the appearances of Augustus in Suetonius’ Lives of the Caesars outside Augustus' own Life. It shows how Suetonius contrasts the positive image of Augustus drawn in the Life of Augustus with the distortion of this image by Augustus’ successors, depicted in the later Lives. In their reception, he is still presented as an ideal to follow, yet as a role model for cruelty (Tiberius), adultery and military failure (Caligula), or lyre-playing (Nero)—roles which Suetonius’ real Augustus never or only marginally assumed. Thus in a series of close and intratextual readings, this article invites a more general reassessment of Suetonius’ work: it suggests that the Lives of the Caesars draw a more critical image of the Principate than has often been said, that they are more consciously part of an image-making process and, above all, that they should more commonly be understood as one whole work, rather than read individually and in isolation.
Journal Article
Ecce Homo: John 19:5, a Portrait of Jesus and a Tangle of Stories
In the context of the Bible, reception history is about the inter-play of text and context. It is also about the capacity of stories to continue to be told, the practice of ongoing interpretation and about creativity and meaning making, often in ways that challenge the text/context divide. In exploring this challenge, I ask how a roughly drawn picture of Jesus as Ecce Homo from John’s trial scene (John 19:5), a piece of devotional art from 1940s Europe, might demonstrate the capacity of texts—John 19:5 and others—to act across a range of (loosely connected) contexts. How might diverse narratives—artistic, historical, ideological, biographical—engage with thought on reception theory and trouble the distinction between text and context, so as to demonstrate the surprising expansiveness of texts and textuality? When viewed via this picture, the words on the pages of canonical text are revealed to be dynamic, travelling through the cultural and devotional history of varying locations, times and epochs. These words are in a state of flux, continually being re-written, embellished upon and otherwise shaped and changed. Following their trails in connection with this picture of Jesus, I explore the complex qualities of story and textuality. These qualities have parallel implications for John’s Gospel, as an ongoing and increasingly tangled story of Empire, irony and ambivalence, a story that continues to play out in multiple, messy and often conflicting ways. Ultimately, to gather a number of narratives and to bind them within the frames of this picture becomes a way of demonstrating the slipperiness and even arbitrariness of historical reception. It elucidates the competing interests of context, scholarship and tradition, not to mention the ever-widening scope of possibilities for biblical textuality.
Journal Article
Obscuring New Testament Slavery: A Study of the Translation History of Δοῦλος
Translations of the New Testament have historically rendered the word δοῦλος as servant instead of slave, even if δοῦλος is not an ambiguous term. In more recent translations, δοῦλος is increasingly, but still not consistently, translated as slave. The effect of these translations has been to obscure slavery in early Christianity and to overlook the political and colonial legacy of the Bible in legitimising (colonial) slavery. This article provides an overview of translations in English, German, Dutch, Danish, and Norwegian from the Middle Ages to contemporary Bible editions. It shows that the way δοῦλος is translated extends beyond philological analyses of the Greek term or historical reconstructions of slavery in early Christianity, but ties in with the political discourses of slavery, for instance debates about colonial slavery and abolition. In the article, we argue that translating δοῦλος as slave could encourage a much-needed discussion about NT slavery and its legacy.
Journal Article