‘Modernism’ and the Ethiopian Orthodox Sunday School Movement: Indigenous Movements and their International Connections

This article traces the history of twentieth-century Ethiopian Orthodox student movements formed in response to modernity, especially the influential Maḫbärä Qəddusan, ‘Association of Saints’, established in 1991 when Ethiopia's Communist regime fell. It explores parallels in Egyptian and Indian miaphysite Churches; balances the prevailing narrative of explosive Pentecostal growth which has obscured the influence of such movements; provides insight into networks that have stimulated renewal and responses to contemporary challenges through strong engagement with traditional literary and intellectual heritage; and explores training and publications promoting contemporary reflection on this heritage, the revival of important religious practices and the targeting of influential ecclesiastical and public positions.

Miscellaneous Mastery: Reading Clement of Alexandria

The aim of this learned and enterprising book is to elucidate the structure and intention of Clement's Stromateis by comparing it with pagan texts from the first and second centuries of our era which belong, as we might now say, to the same genre. This term, which is chaperoned by quotation marks on p. 15, has proved itself heuristically indispensable, but has no closer equivalent in ancient Greek than genos, which is as likely to denote the style or metre of a work as its place in a critical taxonomy. Strict conventions governed versification and the composition of speeches for given occasions, but it is we who have all but invented the epyllion and coined our own names for the novel, the autobiography and the didactic poem. While Heath proposes on p. 138 to render Stromateis as ‘layout’, ‘miscellany’ is the term that is now most commonly applied to this and other ancient texts whose amorphous character seems to resist taxonomy. As Heath observes, however (p. 24), there are all too many specimens of Greek and Latin writing which are in some sense miscellaneous: she might have quoted the thesis of her namesake, Malcolm Heath, that abrupt transitions, divagations and surprises were not aberrations from the classical norm, but calculated devices to heighten the pleasure or whet the interest of the reader, both in poetry and in prose. The culture of ubiquitous imitation was also a culture of unceasing improvisation, and both practices are amply illustrated in Heath's comparison of the Stromateis with four books from the second century to which it bears an obvious resemblance: the Natural history of Pliny the Elder, the Convivial questions of Plutarch, the Attic nights of Aulus Gellius and the Deipnosophistae of Athenaeus.

Remembering St Brictius: Conspiracy, Violence and Liturgical Time in the Danish Massacre of 1002

This article builds upon recent scholarship on the role of church ‘reform’ and the cult of saints in English royal politics around the turn of the second millennium, arguing that the infamous ‘St Brice's Day massacre’ of 13 November 1002 may have been planned for that date in part because of the associations of the cult of Brice/Brictius. After outlining this hypothesis, the article explores the broader implications of the emergence of a universal martyrological calendar for historical writing and political action, and for the exercise and communication of violence in particular.