This excellent book contributes to an ever-widening conversation scholars of the ancient world are having about form, and how the customs of genre can both shape thought and link traditions that have long seemed distinct. Lieber focuses on late ancient liturgical poetry, joining others such as Georgia Frank, Susan Ashbrook Harvey, and Ophir Münz-Manor to consider the making of culture at the level of performance. Ritually enacted poems of Jewish, Christian, and Samaritan communities, as they elaborate on stories and characters from scripture, have a common theatrical foundation. With careful theoretical exposition and skillful close reading, Lieber shows that liturgical works are constituted by the aesthetic standards of performance culture. The book is a model for those attempting to trace that elusive shape we label “religion” in late antiquity.
In six chapters, Lieber approaches the phenomenon of liturgical poetry from multiple vectors. The first chapter offers a cultural history of the theater, then details the pervasiveness of theatricality in Jewish and Christian poetry, especially the kind that dramatizes well-known scenes and characters from scripture. As Lieber explains, poets can compress or expand famous stories, but they can also invent new material or step outside the framework of narrative to use scriptural allusions or flavors in the creation of different kinds of non-narrative poems, like the “elliptical” style of composition. The second chapter is closely linked to the first, but it looks specifically at the people involved in performance: actors and speakers, on the one hand, audiences and hearers, on the other. Late ancient liturgical poetry hews to the expectations for speakers’ skills and audiences’ reception known from other performative contexts; where it stands apart is in its redistribution of the roles of speaker and audience. In most cases of liturgical poetry, Lieber writes, “[t]he congregation ceases to be an audience and participates in the performance” (160), while the new audience is in fact the divine, presumed to hear what the congregation performs.
Chapters three and four, at the heart of the book, deal with the liturgical poets’ use of the ubiquitous ancient writing forms of ekphrasis (vivid narrative evocation of a visual tableau) and ethopoeia (the ventriloquization of a character, or speech-in-character). Lieber first argues in a historical manner for the importance of these forms in the creation of liturgical poetry (whether the forms were learned in a classroom or simply picked up along the way by astute participants in theatrical culture). But then she performs close readings of a striking variety of poems, showing the same point: that poets in search of verisimilitude drew on ekphrasis and ethopoeia to create an experience of presence for their audiences. For ekphrasis alone, she dissects eight texts (173-95): a hymn on the nativity of Jesus by Ephrem the Syrian (fourth century); the Aramaic Yom Kippur poem titled Az Be’en Kol (also fourth century); a poem describing the encounter at Sinai by the Samaritan Amram Dare (third or fourth century) alongside his son Marq’s depiction of a Torah scroll; a depiction of Moses challenging the sea in Jewish Palestinian Aramaic (fourth to seventh centuries); a catalog of nature by the Jewish poet Eleazar ha-Qallir (sixth century); a poem on the hemorrhaging woman who touches Jesus’s garment by the Syriac writer Jacob of Serug (sixth century); and finally, a Greek poem on the leper Jesus heals by Romanos the Melodist (sixth century). To cross centuries like this is already remarkable, but to cross linguistic boundaries of this sort takes rare skill, and Lieber is one of very few scholars who have it. Space prevents me from running the same kind of list for Lieber’s discussion of ethopoeia or the other chapters, where she offers a similarly rangy catalog of comparative close reading, so you will have to trust me: it is impressive. Readers should not skip any part of the book, but jumping right to one of these rapid-fire close reading sections will give you a sense of the deep erudition Lieber invests in the project.
The sense of embodiment that ekphrasis and ethopoeia create is bolstered by the deployment of performing bodies in space, and the last two main chapters focus on the material conditions of liturgical performance. In chapter five, Lieber uses her knowledge of sacred architecture to reconstruct the experience of hearing poetry in churches and synagogues, with special attention to acoustics, projection, and diction. The sixth chapter does the same for actors’ use of their bodies: posture, pointing, gesture, and stance are all examined for how they can be discovered in late ancient liturgical poetry. A short epilogue summarizes the work of the book and traces some implications into modern performative contexts.
It is probably churlish to say that such an inventive book could have gone further, but I admit that I did wish for it. From the acknowledgements we learn that Lieber embarked on the project in 2012, and the individual chapters of this book often draw from the articles and essays she has produced in the intervening decade. It is clear that over this decade of work, Lieber landed on the theoretical framework voiced in the introduction: namely, that the common culture of performance links all the texts under study in the book to each other and equally to the broader body of late ancient theater and oratory. That is to say, there is no hard line to be found between theaters and synagogues, or theaters and churches, despite the protests of late ancient religious leaders about performance and its perils (in fact, those protests probably evidence the blurriness of the categories, which leaders are actively trying to create with their rhetoric). That is the strongest, most radical intervention of the book, and it is very well-sourced.
Yet other, probably earlier, conceptualizations of the relationship between theatrical culture and liturgical culture persist in the book, peeking through at various moments. There are times when Lieber speaks of “absorption” of the theatrical into “the religious sphere” (238). Or, places where she explains that “[h]ymnody offered religious institutions the potential to use the tools and techniques of entertainment to counter–program other forms of entertainment” (323, emphases mine). Such phrasings belie a model in which religious communities are distinct from and normally uninflected by the culture in which they exist, such that religious leaders have to choose to “adopt” or “absorb” or use the “tools” of other realms.
At times, the two models appear side-by-side in the book, such as where Lieber says in the space of a few sentences both something like: “Liturgical poetry may have been one mechanism by which rabbis appropriated elements of popular culture in order to bring Jews, enthusiastically, to the synagogue,” and, just three lines later, “We need not imagine that such decisions were even undertaken consciously but, rather, reflected the embeddedness of religious leaders in the same culture and norms as their congregants” (50). On that same page, the explanatory metaphor offered in a footnote makes her reliance on the earlier theoretical model crystal clear: Lieber elaborates that “the ‘cup’ of entertainment’ was filled with ‘kosher’ wine” (50 n. 73). Tools, cups, counter-programming—all give the impression that religious culture precedes theatrical culture, from which it can selectively harvest at will, and that impression stands opposite the eventual argument of the book.
It is clear that, through the course of her long study, Lieber has landed on a perspective that sees first in liturgical poetry and theater the “deep structural commonalities of the type often obscured by the overt differences—chronological, linguistic, contextual, and confessional—that often serve to compartmentalize these compositions” (17, cf. 390-91). It is an important perspective about this topic in its own right, but seeing this way also clears aside some of the baggage that comes with the “adoption” model. First, the adoption model ultimately arises from a claim that late ancient Christians made about their tradition, namely, that it was separate and distinct from the culture they inhabited. Historically, though, there is no uninflected, “original” Christianity—or Judaism, or Samaritan tradition, for that matter—whose leaders could opt into or out of the basic forms of that culture. The parts of the book that are most explicit about the common culture of performance call into question the scholarly habit of imagining late ancient religious communities bounded by bright lines.
What is more, the label “late antiquity” on a piece of scholarship often signals not the time period under consideration, as it might straightforwardly seem, but the work’s use of a certain set of evidence from that period. Scholars researching “late antiquity” frequently prioritize the evidence surviving in Greek and Latin, and turn to texts in languages like Syriac or Aramaic only as peripheral exempla (if they read them at all). When Lieber is clearest about her perspective, when she leaves aside talk of adoption or borrowing, she also makes clear that there was no standard fund from which theatrical elements could be adopted or borrowed. Instead, the representations of theatricality are distributed across all late ancient performative literature; and, consequently, Lieber’s insistence on the commonality of the standards of performance expressed across linguistic groups and religious traditions undercuts the usual priority applied to late ancient evidence. Scholars could just as profitably study ekphrasis in Qallir and Jacob of Serug as we could by looking at the entry on ekphrasis in Libanius’s Progymnasmata; we could just as profitably understand the role of the impassioned speaker by studying Yannai’s Yom Kippur hymns as we could by reading Quintilian’s advice about how to speak.
These theoretical advancements are surely present in the book, and my discussion of them here is not meant to detract from the work. If anything, it represents my wish that Lieber did more to make them consistently present through all the revised pieces of the book under review. With her deft attention to Jewish, Samaritan, and Christian poetry, Lieber’s work opens the door to entire new dossiers of evidence for late ancient performance. Regular readers of Lieber’s work will hear the call, but it could have been stated more explicitly, more loudly, for the audience at the back of the house to hear.