[Authors and titles listed at the end of the review]
The notion of late antiquity as a period of continuity and change has been repeated so frequently as to border on cliché. Yet this volume has identified a fascinating topic in the assumptions often made regarding different types of erasures and thus offers a valuable contribution to an era currently undergoing something of a renaissance. By taking a multidisciplinary perspective, it tackles the themes of absence and erasure and memory-making across an array of cultural contexts and materials in the period roughly between the third and seventh centuries CE. In so doing, it attempts to establish a degree of common ground between specialist fields that have been accustomed to defining erasure differently. The book is comprised of a collection of seven essays of varying lengths, along with an introduction by the editors Kay Boers, Becca Grose, Rebecca Usherwood, and Guy Walker, and followed by some concluding reflections from Mark Humphries. The volume’s stated premise is that erasures were key strategies by which people in late antiquity sought to shape their past and present. It also attempts to answer valuable questions of what, if anything, is unique about erasure in late antiquity, and about the agency, attribution and intentionality behind acts of removal, editing or preserving. Each of the chapters takes as its focus a specific body of evidence which the respective authors then use to explore the overarching topic in its broader context. The self-critical approach to each chapters stated hypotheses results in reproducing something of the organic workshop and panel discussions that had developed these ideas originally and also paves the way for further conversations in the future.
In the first essay, Kelly Holob looks at Christian martyr stories and their use of erasure to tackle the problem of the dehumanisation of criminals in Roman spectacle punishments. She argues that the violence inflicted on martyrs’ bodies, such as Blandina in The Martyrs of Lyons and Vienne, is transformed by their association with Christ and the resurrection compared to ordinary criminals. This also poses particularly interesting question regarding the ambiguities and tensions that Christian writers wrestled with, especially in the martyr-saint’s transformation into something more than human, not unlike the “stranger holy man” observed by Peter Brown’s discussion of Simeon Stylites.[1]
Miriam Hay examines the idea of elision as erasure in visual storytelling through the case of the figures of the three Hebrews and the Magi on early Christian sarcophagi. She makes the compelling argument that this erasure of the divide between Old and New Testaments served to present Christianity as simultaneously inheriting this ancient heritage and as its logical fulfilment. The detailed scenes from a selection of fourth-century sarcophagi are particularly valuable in helping to illustrate how Christians reconciled various aspects of their Roman and Jewish pasts.
The following four essays each tackle the often thorny topic of Christianization and erasure of paganism in differing ways but with the marked idea of erasure as a constant dialogue between negotiating past and present. Benjamin Kybett demonstrates the orator and poet Claudian’s attempts to resist the erasure of paganism and classical culture, particularly in contrast or conversation with his near-contemporary Prudentius. Anna M. Sitz places several inscriptions from Asia Minor into far longer transcultural tradition of destroying inscribed writing. She discusses the various merits of different types of official and unofficial “damnatio”, or “memory sanctions” in Harriet Flower’s preferred phraseology.[2] Sitz argues for her proposed term “grammatoclasm” as providing the advantage of being able to contextualise the different types of intentional removal of text compared with more practically motivated erasures (although she does admit that this intentionality is not always clear outside of the examples that she had chosen to focus on). Mali Skotheim’s paper considers the (re)use of spoliated funerary inscriptions from the Church of St Mary in Ephesus and the ways in which another late antique community engaged with its past. Returning to literary sources, Ryan Denson’s paper explores some of the ways in which Christian writers sought to erase or delegitimise people’s belief in ghosts. The limitations of this form of erasure, as evidenced by continuing depictions in medieval folklore, also indicate a point made by Kybett that, “erasure is well-equipped to cover its own tracks” (p.128), and ask the important question of how we are supposed to interpret absence or erasure that we do not even know is there?
This uncertainty is a theme in the last, but by no means least, essay in the collection in which Becca Grose approaches the idea of “un-attempted erasure” in the case of some fascinating funerary inscriptions from late antique Gaul. She argues, building on the work of previous scholars including Uberti, for the blank spaces in some of these inscriptions to be a form of “generative absence” (p.249) in which readers/audiences may have interacted with the preserved absences within the inscribed texts as a form of memory negotiation, especially in contrast to how we as modern audiences have a tendency to view them.
Overall, the essays within this tome offer a diverse yet complementary discussion to a timely topic, which Mark Humphries, in his concluding remarks, makes explicit by referring to three examples of more modern erasures and the debates they have provoked. The book is clearly laid out with very few typos and the colour illustrations, especially of the sarcophagi, also add to the accessibility of this open access volume for students and researchers alike, although there seems to have been a curious choice on the part of the publisher to only have some in colour while others are in black and white. It opens up plenty of avenues for further exploration within such a rich topic such as through the potential for some of the new interpretations and framings (e.g. those proposed by Sitz and Grose) to be applied to other media or selections of evidence to reconsidering all the different ways in which people in the past and present concern themselves with aspects of memory and transformation.
Authors and Titles
Introduction (Kay Boers, Becca Grose, Rebecca Usherwood, Guy Walker)
The Erasure of Humanity in Late Antique Christian Narratives of Punishment (Kelly Holob)
Elision as Erasure: The Three Hebrews and the Magi on Fourth-Century Christian Sarcophagi (Miriam A. Hay)
Contesting the Erasure of Paganism: Claudian and Christianization at the Court of Honorius (Benjamin Kybett)
Epigraphic Erasures beyond Damnatio Memoriae: Iconoclasm and “Grammatoclasm” in Late Antiquity (Anna M. Sitz)
Spolia and Epigraphical Erasure at the Church of Mary in Ephesus (Mali Skotheim)
Erasing the Ethereal: Christian Attempts at Delegitimizing Ghosts (Ryan Denson)
Conspicuous Absences in Late Antique Gallic Funerary Texts, VI-VII Centuries CE: Errors, Erasures, or Inscribing (Becca Grose)
Concluding Reflections: Erasures and Rewritings in Space and Time (Mark Humphries)
Notes
[1] Brown, P. (1971) “The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity”, The Journal of Roman Studies, Vol. 61, pp. 80-101.
[2] Flower, H. (2006) The Art of Forgetting: Disgrace and Oblivion in Roman Political Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.