Ancient World Seminar: Simon Goldhill (Cambridge), “Strange Dogs: 'Joseph and Aseneth"

Abstract

This paper will look at a rarely read Greek text, a short novella about the Biblical figures of Joseph and his wife Aseneth.It will consider three central questions. First how can we tell a history of religious conversion and how does this text fit into such a history? Second, what does this text let us understand about the way texts circulate and are disseminated in antiquity, and can we develop a model different from the standard model of stemmata transmission? Third, how does this text let us understand something about the perils of modern reception of religious texts?

About the speaker

Simon Goldhill , FBA, is Professor of Greek at the University of Cambridge, where he has directed the Centre for Research in Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities for the last seven years. He has published widely on all aspects of Greek literature and is a regular broadcaster on British radio and television. His books have won international prizes in the areas of the study of Greek, the study of history and the study of Victorian Literature.