This book moves beyond the debate on wisdom literature, ongoing in Biblical Studies, demonstrating the productivity of wisdom as a literary category. Featuring work by scholars of Egyptology, Classics, Biblical and Near Eastern Studies, it offers fresh perspectives on what makes a text wisdom.
This book moves beyond the debate on wisdom literature, ongoing in biblical studies, to demonstrate the productivity of wisdom as a literary category. Featuring work by scholars of Egyptology, Classics, biblical and Near Eastern studies, it offers fresh perspectives on what makes a text wisdom.
This interdisciplinary volume widens the scope of the investigation into wisdom literature, chronologically, geographically, and methodologically. Readers are given insights into how the label wisdom contributes to our understanding of diverse literary forms across time periods and cultural contexts. In the volumes introduction, the editors consider wisdom as a discourse, shifting the focus from the debate on whether wisdom literature is a genre to the properties of the texts, namely exploring what makes a text wisdom. This offers a methodological backdrop against which the diverse approaches of the single authors productively coexist, showing how different methodologies can be integrated to reframe our conceptions of ancient literary genres. The chapters in this volume examine texts that are the products of different ancient cultures, with several of them bridging diverse cultural, social, and chronological contexts. By sampling how different methodologies interact both within individual interpretative efforts and in wider attempts to understand cross-cultural literary phenomena, this volume also contributes new perspectives to the scholarship on ancient literary genres.
Wisdom Discourse in the Ancient World will interest both students and scholars of the ancient Near East, Egyptology, classical studies, biblical studies, and theology and religious studies, particularly those working on wisdom literature in antiquity. It will also appeal to readers with an interest in comparative approaches and genre studies more broadly.
1. Introduction: wisdom literatures and the discourse of wisdom, Sara
De Martin and Anna Lucia Furlan;
2. Reframing wisdom through liminality in
Akkadian literature, Ivo Ricardo dos Santos Martins;
3. Discourses on ethics
and ethics of discourse in Ancient Egyptian wisdom literature, Ilaria
Cariddi;
4. Battlefields as teaching spaces: seeing the divine, conversing
and fighting in the Iliad and Mahbhrata, David Hodgkinson;
5. Configuring
moral authority in archaic Greek poetry, Sara De Martin;
6. What of wisdom in
the scrolls? Assessing the expansion of the wisdom literature category from
the Hebrew Bible to the Dead Sea Scrolls, Charles P. Comerford;
7. Wisdom and
a wisdom discourse: the classical-biblical dialectic in Aristobulus and
Philo, Anna Lucia Furlan;
8. A wisdom tale: fable, the Life of Aesop, and the
narrative use of wisdom genres, Ioannis M. Konstantakos;
9. (Un)exemplary
teaching in Boethius De consolatione Philosophiae, Katherine Krauss;
10.
Arabic wisdom literature as a template for reframing wisdom literature,
Dimitri Gutas.
Sara De Martin received her PhD in Classics from Kings College London. She has held lectureships in Ancient Languages, Classics, and Greek Literature at King's College London and Regents Park College (Oxford). Her research focuses on archaic Greek elegy, gnomic literature, and Greek comedy.
Anna Lucia Furlan obtained her PhD in Classics at Kings College London. She is currently Honorary Research Fellow (cultrice della materia) in the Religious Studies Department of the Catholic University in Milan. At present, her research interests mainly include ancient mystery cults and their reception (particularly Orphism) and early Christian literature.
Daugiau apie elektronines knygas