Full Description
This Element provides a historical overview of the sources and key scholarship related to literate workers in early Christianity. It argues that literate workers were indispensable for the creation, production, maintenance, interpretation, and preservation of ancient Christian thought, theology, and literature. This Element centres the embodiment and lived experience of literate workers-as much as is able to be retrieved from our extant Christian sources. Who were they? What did they look like? What was their relationship with named authors? What kinds of aspirations and career trajectories did they have? The aim of this project is to help researchers reconfigure their perspectives on ancient works, that such documents not only represent the genius of named authors but also of (enslaved) literate workers as well.
Contents
Introduction; 1. Embodied Persons: The Bodies, Status, Gender, and Age of Literate Workers; 2. The Mechanics of Use: The Materials, Education, and Practicalities of Ancient Literate Workers; 3. Multipurpose Persons: Literate Workers as Translators, Interpreters, Emissaries, and Informants; 4. Prosthetic Sons and Disabled Fathers: Disability, Augmentation, and the Christian Secretary; 5. The Works of Us: Prolific Dictation and the Mirage of the Great Commentator; 6. Pathway to the Episcopate: Secretarial Work as a Precursor to an Office; 7. Invisibility, Critical Fabulation, and Recovering Literate Workers in Early Christian History; Bibliography.
