PRISON PROJECT LECTURE - NAOMI REISS: CHRISTIANITY AND THE (LITERARY) PRISON RECORD

This lecture takes as its theme a fascinating and problematic body of evidence of imprisonment in Greco-Roman antiquity: the literary record of early Christianity. It will focus especially on those documents purportedly written by imprisoned Christ-believers during the first three centuries AD, including the letters of the apostle Paul and the diary of the martyr Perpetua. These documents, if genuine, represent something highly unusual in antiquity: extended and literarily sophisticated texts authored by incarcerated people. This lecture asks: how did these texts come to be written, and why? It suggests that the answer to both questions is found in the strong social bonds of Christian communities which placed a high value on imprisonment and were diligent in supporting their incarcerated members, but which also implicated those members in complex community obligations and power dynamics. Imprisonment was recognised as an experience which conferred spiritual authority on the sufferer, authority which could be variously deployed, appropriated or challenged. The imprisoned author, writing across the carceral boundary, emerges as a powerful and contested figure in this formative period of early Christianity.

Following the lecture, there will be a discussionled by Dominik Stachowiak, Gennadius Library Constantine and George Macricostas Fellow at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens and PhD candidate at the Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań.

To attend the lecture online, please register here.