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Ellen Muehlberger, "Things Unseen: Essays on Evidence, Knowledge, and the Late Ancient World" (U California Press, 2025)
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Sam
Hello, everybody.
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Marshall Po
This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast, or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts, and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form, and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Sam
Hello and welcome to New Books in Late Antiquity, presented by Ancient Jew Review. I'm Mike Motilla, and today we're talking with Ellen Muehlberger about Things, essays on evidence, knowledge, and the late Ancient world. How do we know what we know? That's a question that many history teachers ask. And what do you want to know? I mean, at least half the job of a history teacher is to convince people that they do want to know something. And the really great teachers, they can move from the will to know to ways of knowing, from what do you want to know? To how do we actually learn about that? They can give those desires for what we can't see, some shape, some examples, and some methods for pursuing that knowledge. But especially in ancient history, it's really easy to mistake projection for evidence, to try to empathize with a person from another time, and in doing so, to warp their world with our words. We might look at their living spaces or their worship spaces and imagine a life. We might learn new languages to try to hear them better. We can try to read what others have written, to try to see what kind of projections have warped the past as well. And Dr. Muehlberger does all that. But Muehlberger also knows that it was really easy in antiquity, too, to mistake wants for evidence, and that ancients, too, were anxious about that, desiring ignorance about the way what we want shapes what we know. And she asks how late ancient Christians actually conceptualized and viewed and evaluated and used that knowledge and that evidence. Paying more attention to how we learn, not just what we know, can help us notice how ancients learned as well. And Muehlberger examines late ancient public culture as what she calls a legible deposit of power and as a means through which that power comes to seem natural. So as Christianity makes it big, that is, it, you know, builds buildings and establishes rituals, it parades through streets, it anoints new heroes and new saints, it changes the landscapes of late ancient worlds, and it makes it seem like those buildings and parades and positions have kind of always been there, there, or at least they should have always been there. And part of the job of a historian is to notice how those public displays express a reality and how they project a reality, and how to notice, you know, how people now and then could actually tell the difference between, I don't know, expression and projection. Things Unseen is Mulberry's third book, and she's edited many others. It's a collection of essays that teach modern scholars not just what happened, but how to study and how to write about the late ancient world. It moves from church councils to comics, from Syriac to stealing, and all the while, the book asks those most basic questions. How do you know and what do you want to know? What desires are you projecting into your ignorance? And how does that unknowing actually drive your scholarship? So, Ellen, hi, thank you so much for being here. Can you introduce yourself? Who are you and how did you.
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Ellen Muehlberger
Come to my scholarship? Sure, sure, sure, sure. First, though, let me say thank you to Mike for inviting me on the podcast. You have a huge back catal and books about the late ancient world, really the ancient Mediterranean world. So I get. I'm excited to just join the group of people you've gotten to interview so far. My name's Ellen Muehlberger. I am a professor in the history department at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. And gosh, the second part of the question is, how did I start this book? You know, it's funny, when you look at people's CVs, sometimes you can see the little rumblings of something before they get started. And I was working on a book about the Christian anticipation of death. You know, 2016, 2017. That book came out in 2019. But in the couple of years leading up to it, when you're working on A book project like that, you are sometimes like sort of pruning off bits that don't fit or pruning off things that you're like, this isn't. I don't have enough time to deal with this thing in this book, but I'm going to deal with it in the next one or the next article. And I started doing things about evidence and how to understand what ancient people thought was enough proof of something in ways that just didn't fit in that death book. So there's, you know, there's an article about Arius, who's the famous heretic who dies by having, you know, explosive public diarrhea. I publish an article in Past and Present about him and how his body, sort of in quotation marks, proved that he was a heretic, even though people around him, including the Emperor Constantine, had accepted him back into the church. So that was like one moment of bodies can be evidence. Then at the same time, that same year, I publish an article about Simeon the stylite, the famous guy who stands on the top of a pillar and you know, he lives up there and people bring him his food and take away his detritus and the earliest saint's life about him uses his body as proof of various kinds of wonderments and amazements. And, you know, his. He gets examined, his body gets examined, almost autopsy, almost like an autopsy, except he's not dead. So he, he gets examined in a way that proves things about him. And again, the body is ending up being proof for him. So there were a couple of moments where I was like, bodies are proving things to Christians when they are lacking other kinds of evidence. And then I had that question in mind. How do you, how do you know something if you're an ancient person? You know it because a divine oracle has told you, or you know it because an important expert has told you, or you know it because there's evidence in front of you. But when there's not evidence, you can start to look around at the resources around you and think, what could be evidence of this? And I don't think it's. I'm not saying it's conscious like that, but I am saying that late ancient Christians had a process for making material evidence of things that were very hard to prove in any other way. So that question was with me. And then I started looking at things I was reading and realized, oh, gosh, there's a lot to be said. This book is four essays. It very easily could have been seven. Those two pieces, the Arius piece and the Simeon piece could have been in there. There's another piece I wrote about the Passion of Perpetua and Felicity that surely could have been an appendix to this book. It was just like, gosh, it doesn't fit. But they're all fellow travelers or companion.
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Sam
Yeah, yeah, we can link to those in the show notes, too, if people want to read them. They're all great essays. So I'm going to keep going on this train of thought, though. You write that public culture can be at once a legible deposit of power and also the means through which to naturalize that power. So public culture is a kind of like screen here. It lets power show up, but it also masks power. And at the same time, you write, we should understand that the inclination to apocalyptic patterns of knowing. So this desire to unveil or to tear down that screen, it drove this remarkable production of culture. So Christians, like, they build all this stuff, they write all this stuff so that, as you say, they could have something to show for their faith. The thing hoped for could be seen when it was eventually built, written or performed. And so your book is kind of riding this larger tide of scholarship about knowledge in antiquity. But for people who, I don't know, like, people who, like, aren't professional historians, they might think of knowledge as something that has been more or less constant kind of forever, and we're just kind of getting better and better at it. Like, doctors used to consult astrological charts while their patients urinated, and now we have MRIs, and the March of progress goes on. But a lot of our field is actually interested in how people knew what they knew. Can you give us some kind of background here, some stakes about this? What makes this question of ways of knowing such a helpful window into the minds and bodies and institutions of late antiquity?
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Ellen Muehlberger
It's a way to approach a different culture without assuming that culture is trying and failing to be us. So we have the scientific method. We try to do things like develop vaccines or develop, you know, new ways of having a cell phone or new methods for delivering energy. There's kind of a trial and error process. And we think, oh, gosh, now we have X and it works, and it works better than the thing before. So there's a sense of progress. Looking at past cultures or even contemporary cultures that are different than ours with that slide of progress or that sort of lens of progress can really start to make you think, oh, they should be us, and they're just not being us. And perhaps willfully not being us. And it's just not. It's not a helpful way to look at antiquity. It causes you to judge it very quickly. And you're going to think that a lot of things are not interesting or useful when actually they are. If you approach it differently and think people in other cultures or time periods live in different worlds than what we do because of the way that they've been raised and what they've been taught is salient and what they've been taught to value, all of a sudden, any place is interesting. Any time can be interesting. Even if what you have in terms of documents for that time are like, you know, the tax records of 40 years, those tax records. Records can be very interesting if you think these are registers of a world that I don't understand because I don't have that set of experiences. So if you're a person who's interested in this ways of knowing kind of body of scholarship for antiquity, I've got like a starter pack for you. So you're going to look Mooly Beatus and Mike Chin did a edited volume that has a lot of essays. I think it's called Late Ancient Knowing. There's. Oh, gosh. Andrew Rigsby did a great monograph about Roman ways of measurement. I'm not gonna remember the titles of any of these things. I'm just mentioning the authors. So look at Andrew Rigsby's book. It's got Mosaic in the title. There's a book by Darren what Did the Romans Know? There's a recent edited volume, a pretty big edited volume that I think Matt Crawford might have been the editor for, that's about early Christian theology as a way of knowing. So it takes sort of a historical theology content and approaches it with the ways of knowing. Like, these people live in a different world. You know, they. They find, for example, the discussion of the natures of Christ to be a salient, scientific and physical issue that's right at the forefront of what they need to do to be pious and to be faithful. That's not, you know, like if just taking American Christianity for a moment, like, I. I don't imagine walking into any American Christian of any sort, any denomination, church, and finding people in the pews arguing about the natures of Christ. I just don't, you know, but the deposits that we have from late ancient Christianity suggest that was a really salient issue, at least for writers and thinkers. So ways of knowing allows you to look at other times and cultures and start to maybe step in and say, oh, well, what did they think was important? How did they think the world worked? What do they think of causality and agency? And, you know, it's a little tricky because at some point you have to rely on your own experiences, but you can get pretty far down the road of what happens when you live in a world where you think, you know, angels can penetrate the body and help guide you in your decisions. What's the next step after that? How would you act in that world? These are questions that open up to you if you don't assume that everybody has the same baseline experience. We're all human. We're all alike. It is, I think, a little bit contrary to some political projects that rely on the idea we are all human, we're all alike, we're all having the same experience. So it does take a slightly different baseline premise, but it is really productive to think about different cultures that way because it gets you out of having to judge them for being scientifically wrong or being not as advanced as us or that sort of thing.
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Sam
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so, like, one. I don't know, one way that you can miss is to, you know, think like, they're just like us, and. And you. You're kind of. You're projecting that world onto. Onto theirs. The other way is to say they're, like, so different. That kind of none of our words have anything to do with their reality. And. And. And so you're. You're really sensitive to, you know, kind of how Late Asian world is a helpful lineage in evidence is a helpful window into the late Asian world. But you're also really aware that. That our contemporary ways of writing make possible our contemporary ways of knowing. Like, the subtitle of this book is called Essays, but you're actually talking a lot about lectures and about writing with voice. And, you know, sometimes when academics do that, it's like, it's just like an insecurity about writing with fewer footnotes. Like, there's not a lot of footnotes in this book compared to your other work. Right. Like, but as I was reading this, like, it wasn't just a way of, like, being defensive.
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Marshall Po
You're.
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Sam
You're talking about the kind of genre that you're writing in to get us, as readers used to thinking about what evidence is actually good for and what kind of knowledge we can and can't get from different modes of writing. So, I mean, that's a long way of me saying, like, you think a lot about writing. Can you tell us about kind of how the style of your prose in this book is related to the content of the essays or lectures?
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Ellen Muehlberger
Yeah. In the preface, I talk a little bit about liking lecture books. And you probably, as readers, your readers will know that there is such a thing as a lecture book. People get invited to give lectures and then they write them up as sort of chapters in a book that are more loosely related. I've loved those books even before I knew why I loved them. And I think it's because they take bigger swings. Usually a lecture, you know, you're confronting an audience that you don't know, you haven't met before, they've come to hear you talk. Often you're presenting them with information that they know and then showing them how it's something that they don't know, or you're revealing a new interpretation of them. So you're doing something relatively big, but it has to be on ground or territory that they know. And that is a trick that is very hard to do. But that big swing, I think, enables people to have different responses to a lecture. You can leave a lecture and think, gosh, that was really fascinating. And what they said about, I don't know. Jerome tells me that I need to think differently about Augustine or about, you know, I don't know, Margaret Thatcher. Like, you can jump. You can take portable things from a lecture and jump out to different time periods. You can also argue back, like when a lecturer takes a big swing like that, and usually they do, people leave and they're like, oh, they're totally wrong about that. And often what will happen is they're totally wrong about that, and I need to prove it by writing a new essay. So lectures tend to generate more things because they're drawing with such broad strokes that they make it possible for other scholars to come in and fill in the details or argue with the details and come up with something new. So they're generative in that way and thus not quite so nitty gritty or not quite so nuanced as maybe a first monograph or a second monograph might be, because you're expecting the reader to encounter it in print and to see the footnotes and maybe go look at the books and a lecture. It all happens in the moment, and you work with the words that are coming out of someone's mouth and going into people's ears rather than things that they're seeing on a page and able to investigate for themselves.
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Sam
Yeah, that's great. Thank you. Okay, so let's get into the content of the book a little bit. The first essay is called Impossible Women, and it's about the rhetorical training that young men get to get themselves ready for public life where they're going to be giving lots of public speeches. And I think you say like 30 something percent of them are speeches given in the voices of women. And, and like, one way to think about the impossibility of these women would be to, I don't know, go down the, like, familiar critiques about empathy. And that's not really where you go. But let me try to tell readers about, like, some of these roads not taken just to, like, set up what you're actually doing. So one is that, you know, empathy sounds nice, but we can never really feel somebody else's reality. Okay. And another is that while empathy sounds nice, it's actually no guarantee of niceness. Like, the first step to manipulating someone is to know how they feel. And so there's a version of this, I'd say, that could have gone down that road. And then there's the, I don't know, more kind of right coded critiques that empathy erodes that tough but needed sense of boundary that makes society possible. And that's also not really where you're going. But when you look at the kind of practice of play acting and rhetorical education, it could be a kind of empathy exam, but you see something else going on. Maybe. Before we get to what you actually see going on, can you tell us about these exercises, though? Like, you know, what are these exercises? Who's doing them? Where do they do them? Why were they doing them? And then we'll get into, you know, your real point here, but set it up for us.
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Ellen Muehlberger
So in a remarkably broad way, across the ancient Mediterranean, people who learned to write and to speak, which was thought of as a balanced skill with writing. You compose things, but you also were able to deliver speeches learned by practicing a set of 10 to 12 exercises. And I say remarkably broad because they were relatively consistent across big, huge geographic expanses. You know, we have handbooks that people are using in what's now France, and we have handbooks that people are using in what's now, like Syria, Iraq, Iran even. And they're similar. They're very similar. So they're asking students, usually, you know, students between 10 and 14 years of age, asking them to do things like, well, you tell a story. So there's an exercise in narrative, and you tell a story and it has a certain development and a climax and then a denouement, what we would call those things that's part of telling a story. Or you could do an invective, you know, you could write an argument against someone attacking them. And their ideas. And there's sort of a pattern to doing that. And these patterns or these exercises you would not do just by yourself, but you do them in a classroom of students who are studying with the same teacher. You try it out, and your teacher and often your fellow classmates would respond to you and give you feedback about how close you got to doing the job that the template asks you to do or the exercise asks you to do. In the case of speech and character, you take on the voice of a specific character in a specific context. And in first person, you talk about what that experience is like and what the projections are for what the person will. Will be doing. So they usually set up something odd. You know, they would be things like, what does the soldier say when he realizes he's fallen in love with the person he's just killed? Thinking it was a soldier, but it was actually a woman, you know, dressed up in a man's armor or a famous one. One that I use in the book is, what would the eunuch say? Having fallen in love with someone. And when you look at that, you think, okay, this culture thought that those things were impossible. A eunuch can't possibly fall in love. And then you realize, oh, what they mean is, the eunuch can't possibly, forgive me, participate in penetrative sex with this person. And that's what our word that we keep translating as love means for them. So once you realize or once you see that exercises like this are built on the idea of opposition, you're challenging a student to describe something almost impossible. You can take it apart and realize, oh, these are the assumptions that make these two things, a eunuch and falling in love, somehow impossible. We, you know, you and I would be like, yeah, everybody falls in love. Whatever. This is how it happens, because we assume that love is a feeling and a commitment and a promise and a set of actions, not a physical capability that you have or don't have.
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Sam
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's. That's really helpful. So you argue that. That what happens in these speeches, like, what they actually learn is. Is not about the eunuch or not about that soldier, but it's about what you call a resilient ignorance. This is a great term. I hope we all start talking about resilient ignorances. But what.
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Ellen Muehlberger
What does that.
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Sam
What does that mean?
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Ellen Muehlberger
So before we attribute it to me, we should talk about Charles Mills, who talks about racial ignorance and the construction of racial ignorance, which is a way that dominant cultures, white cultures, can live amongst and be in contact with all sorts of other cultures and still remain ignorant of the ways that racism constitutes the white experience, but also oppresses everybody else around them. You know, so it's, it's visible in American culture recently. Oh, gosh, I didn't know. Right. Like American history is very clearly built on race relations. And not knowing, for example, that black Americans might have had a slightly different time than white Americans is the kind of ignorance you can only develop if you're white. And you have had this structure of ignorance and not knowing be a part of what you're doing. So this chapter was informed by me reading that book and thinking about how is it possible that late ancient writers, particularly I work on early Christianity. So, you know, early Christianity, its archive, its sort of set of texts I'm simplifying here, but probably you could say, you know, if you go to like an early Christian studies conference, they're going to be talking about the same, maybe at a generous number of 30 or 40 writers, all of whom are men. And that set of texts constitutes the literary basis for understanding early Christianity. Those texts are remarkably patriarchal, remarkably dismissive of women as agents, remarkably just, well, ignorant of women as people and as people who are participating in Christianity, who are pious, who are not just creating the culture, but maintaining that culture. And my thought was, how do people, how do these writers live in the world that they live in, where they're encountering women all the time? That, you know, wives, sisters, daughters enslaved, people that they own, women on the street, you know, women that they know who are politicians? How do you encounter that many people and still not think of women as a category of person? And there must be some. It can't just be plain ignorance. It can't be like real ignorance. It has to be some constructed method for maintaining the idea that these are not people. Because once you realize these are people, then you have both emotional and political liability to them. If they're not people, then you don't.
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Sam
Yeah, yeah. And so how does this, like, practice of speech making go into that, that sense of, you know, how does it build up the resilience when you return.
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Ellen Muehlberger
To the context in which these boys would practice speaking as a woman? So the central example that I start the chapter with is there's a question posed to a boy that says, what would the prostitute say once she came to her senses, meaning, decided not to be a prostitute anymore? And, you know, a boy of 12 or 13 would compose a first person speech where he speaks as that person, and he would show it to his teacher and he might show it to his classmates, most of whom, probably all of whom are boys, and they would decide that he had done a good job, he really had represented this woman. The point of the chapter is that that woman as a character persists in the minds of the boys who learn to speak as her and generally in the culture. I investigate two other places where she shows up as a character, and she's definitely a continuing character. She has been built on this thing that people have learned to speak as. You know, I think Darth Vader perhaps fills this role. Like most Americans, you can say Darth Vader even if they're not Star wars people, even if they haven't seen the movie. If you, Luke, I am your fault. You can do that joke and most people will get it because he is such a persistent character. James Earl Jones voice, but also the lack of a face, but then a face that's a persistent character. This woman, the prostitute who comes to her senses persists across the culture. And I think, to answer your question, once you think I have spoken as this woman, I know what she's like. Let's say you encounter a woman in the street, it's very easy then to be like, oh, well, when she says something that's smart, she's just faking. Or when she speaks in a way that incurs some kind of liability for me to act with respect or to act in a way that suggests that she has needs and, you know, political desires. Well, that's just, that's not actually how women are. I know how women are. You know, I've been a woman and also all of my classmates and my teacher confirmed that that's how women are. And I mean, this is, this is not my invention. This is how stereotype works, right? Like, stereotypes exist to allow people to think, oh, well, that one instance of the stereotyped class that I'm talking about, I encountered that person and they seemed a little different, but actually we know that X. These people are all like this, you know, women are like this in American culture right now. Foreigners are like, you know, that's how stereotype works.
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Sam
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, like the, the scene that gets presented there. I mean, it's, it's, it's just, it's really clarifying that, like you've got, you know, room of 10 to 14 year olds who, you know, probably don't know a whole lot about any prostitutes. And. But, but it's like a really high pressure environment for them. Like, you know, like, I don't know, like, I remember being 10 or 12 like, and like you really want your teacher's approval and you really want your classmates approval. And so what gets said and done in that classroom is what's real. And everything else is like a kind of like a reflection of what's happening in that room. And so they're spending all this time talking, you know, in the voices of these characters. And all of a sudden those voices, like, start to be the real thing. And the, you know, people who happen to live outside the walls, you know, they're, they're like material that you can put back inside the classroom, but until it's in the classroom, it's not actually real. And like that, that, that, the way that like, I don't know, like the ignorance gets fortified by the classroom. I don't know, I just found like, very clarifying and helpful.
- [26:34]
Ellen Muehlberger
And probably your teacher wasn't threatening to beat you or embarrass you or kick you out if you got something wrong. Right. So those classrooms, you think they're, they're not just single sex, they're also single class. Right. These are elite boys who are going to encounter a cohort of other elite boys as men when they do anything as men. And I think, you know, you can look at any situation where a dominant class of people in whatever category they're in play, acts as the not dominant class. That is a moment when the dominant class is teaching itself again, a structure of resilience against developing any new knowledge about the non dominant class. So, you know, and this is not my idea, this is Saidiya Hartman's idea. She's gotten popular amongst lady and ship people for her essay Venus in Two Acts, which introduced the coinage of critical fabulation. But her first book before that Scenes of Subjection, is all about the United States and white people's constant presentation of minstrel shows and constant requirement of play acting where white Americans play acted as if they were enslaved black Americans and thus taught white culture how to quote, really know what enslaved people were like. So when you read that Scenes of Subjection book, it's in the notes of the essay. But I was reading that and thinking this is a really, really smart point. She's also the person who makes the point that empathy, if you're thinking empathy, like taking on the first person voice of an oppressed class as a dominant class, that's not empathy at all. That's actually just further use of that group of people.
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Sam
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's great. Okay, let's move on though. The second essay is, it's about evidence and the Question is kind of how can you tell somebody is really a Christian? And you know, like when the objective analysis is something as elusive as faith, like it's, it's obviously pretty hard to judge. And one way is to look at spaces like does a person go to church or what's their home? Like, you know, Constantine is a good emperor, not because we can, you know, look right into his soul and see faith, but because like, you know, he builds and he funds a bunch of churches. And later, you know, Christians, they'll pass laws about this, you know, if you're part of a heretical group, like it might make it hard to pass property from parent to child or something along those lines. And others have done really good work on kind of relationships of Christianity to bodies in space. Like a monk in a cell becomes a cell dwelling monk, that kind of thing. A mountain where monastery is just like mountain becomes a sync to keep monastery, that kind of thing. But buildings, they're rhetoric in stone and they're markers of wealth and power, but you're really interested in them, as you call them epistemological, sorry, epistemological repositories. So walls don't make a Christian. But I don't know, like, what kind of things did make you a Christian? Like, how does somebody know if you're a Christian? And what does that have to do with space?
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Ellen Muehlberger
Christian bishops themselves had a very specific answer to this question because in the middle of the 4th century, they started developing courses for people to join the church. So we have catechetical lectures, that's the fancy term for these sermons or these sets of lesson plans that you would give to a new group of people who wanted to join your church, often in preparation for the Easter holiday. Sometimes they were three years long, like a three year long course before you could join a church, or you know, a year long before you could join a church. And I say join a church, meaning you could be initiated through baptism. Because we know from sermons as preachers talk that they're looking out at the audience and they're like, oh, some of you have never been here before. So people are listening to sermons without necessarily going through the initiation process of becoming Christian. So there is a real answer, which is if you're baptized and you've gone through this process of initiation, then you should be Christian. But we also have lots and lots of late ancient authors, including Augustine, who features prominently in this chapter, wondering about the Christian ness of the people around them who have ostensibly done this ritual, but maybe don't have the moral approach to the life that the bishop wants or might still have some allegiance to previous ways of being pious or previous rituals that they don't even understand clash with Christianity. So when you look at late ancient Christian literature, there's a lot of anxiety and doubt about the commitment or correctness of the people around them on the part of bishops.
- [31:07]
Sam
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, you know, people are. They're kind of looking out and they're trying to see, you know, what makes you a good Christian. And there's classes, but, like, you know, often, you know, when it comes to what does somebody know? Like, that's. It's just. It's too elusive. And so they're often turning to spaces like, you know, and it's tempting to think that, like, you know, when. When you can't tell, then you're ignorant of the thing, but you're showing us that it's not actually, like, blank. It's not like, I look at you and I don't know what you believe, and so I think nothing. It's like, I look at you and I don't know what you believe. And so I guess. And it's like a really powerful. Like that guess is a really powerful force that someone is gonna have to work against. But, like, space becomes the way that you really investigate that projection. So can you tell us about kind of space and knowledge?
- [31:57]
Ellen Muehlberger
So they guessed, but they guessed pessimistically, meaning bishops looked around and thought about who was Christian around them. And often they had doubts, like I said, or anxiety that people were not Christian enough. And that's a really hard thing to come to evidence about. Like, if someone has done the right rituals, done the initiation, or even expressed interest in that, how do you think, huh? How could I really understand what their situation is? And that's how we get to people like Shnuda of Atrepa, a very famous monastic leader and also preacher in Egypt, doing things like breaking into somebody's house not once, but twice in his village to try to suss out whether the guy had secret non Christian sort of ritual implements in his house. And very famously saying for himself this. There's a famous phrase, there is no crime for those who have Christ. Michael Gaddis used it as a title of his book about Christian violence. Schnoota says that about himself because he thinks he's justified in breaking into somebody else's private space and doing things like, you know, going all the way into kind of the secret closet near the bedroom or by a bedroom, the secret bedroom at the middle of the house to find things about this person to prove what Shina really knows in his heart is true about him. And that. That is that kind of violence being justified by a Christian leader with his own Christian ideas, like thinking this is the Christian thing to do, got me interested in how do we even get to the point of needing to break into a house? And it became clear that there were several parts of Christian culture that were coming together that made that sort of idea or justification possible. First, Christians thought there is evidence in a body of what a person's like. So the Arius article that I mentioned earlier, or, you know, Lactantius writing about emperors and being like, huh, when you were a good emperor, you died well, and when you were a bad emperor, you died of a terrible disease. You know, like thinking of the body as a thing that could show out what was really true about a person. And then the step that you mentioned where Christians begin to think of bodies as houses or buildings as being equivalent to human bodies. And this really became apparent to me. I was reading Katie Kleinkopf has a book coming out about this. But it was while I was reading her dissertation about ascetics and their dwellings becoming body places. Not just bodies or places, but a single word, body places, that I thought, oh, yeah, this is. Christians are starting to think of buildings as possible repositories of information. In the same way that, like, the viscera of a person shows you how they are the viscera of a house. What's in a house can show you something about that person's property. And then I realized in the laws about Christianity and sort of laws trying to enforce one kind of Christianity, the most acted upon thing is not necessarily a person, but their property. So their ability to transfer property or their ability to hold property. So property is standing in for a person as a vulnerable part of a person in emerging Roman law about Christianity. So I thought, you know, there is something about getting inside somebody's house that seems to tell you something. I mean, have you been. I, you know, we have people over for dinner and, you know, they stay in the dining room, but nobody ever really asks to go upstairs to the bedroom. And if you do, it's a little like, huh, do I really want to let you see. Have I prepared my bedroom for you to see it? Like, there might be a mess up there or whatever. Like, we do have private spaces in our houses that even now you could think this reveals something about me. If somebody could see it and I have my public space that presents what I want them to see. Christian Leaders thought of private houses in this kind of suspicious way and use them to prove what they knew already. So they had the knowledge and then they found the evidence in the house. Because you can't find the evidence in a human. Right. You can't disembowel them. I mean, you could, but they didn't. You can't disembowel them, and you can't go back to the initiation ritual they did because they did it. It's done. It should mean something and it kind of doesn't.
- [35:55]
Sam
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I mean, this, this point really came home to me when you tell the story of that John Hephysis tells, that gets it like the beginning of like a kind of surveillance culture. Maybe. I don't know if it's the beginning, but it's a, it's showing a real kind of surveillance idea where like, Christians, they're not just learning to tell on each other, but, but it's, it's like without the boys talking about the prostitutes, like they're learning to see. Speak for other people, like to, to say, like, I know better. I know. I know you better than you know yourself. And, and like John tells the story of Christians breaking into a neighbor's house and they find this, this portrait with Jesus on the front, but on the back is a picture of Apollo. Um, and maybe you can like, give us some of the details of the story. But like, what, what does a story like that reveal about kind of how Christians are. Are looking for evidence of faith?
- [36:37]
Ellen Muehlberger
That story is wild because it's the crowd that keeps asking, where are these secret people hiding? So, you know, the leaders, both the bishop and the leader invol or, you know, the government official involved, kind of don't want to know these things. But the crowd keeps demanding that they look for evidence that people are being deviant in some way. And so, you know, one house is invaded and they find evidence of somebody having done a non Christian ritual. There's a couple of old dying people there, and they give the name of somebody else. So they proceed to the next house. And this happens a couple of times. And we end. The climax of the story ends in this man's house where he has a picture of Jesus on the wall. But the picture keeps flipping itself over to show that Apollo's on the backside. So literally the wall outs him as not being an actual Christian, but, you know, being a follower of some other God. And it's always the crowd that is driving that movement. The, the text specifies the crowd wasn't Interested in any gold or any money. They just wanted to know whether this guy was Christian. And so more than valuables or riches, they want to get inside your house to find out something about you that's so very odd. Like, I'm sitting in my house right now. All of these things sure got here because I put them here. They don't reveal anything about me. They don't.
- [37:51]
Sam
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And yet it. It's just a. I mean, it's a real, like, way of knowing, right? Like, for. For them and I. And I mean, so much of the book is trying to help us understand, like, yeah, you know, what. What did they think it revealed? Right? Because whether or not it revealed that, like, it does tell us something that they thought that it did. The third essay, it moves on to some of these church councils, and you're really looking at what must be the least studied of the Big Five. It's the Second Council of Constantinople. It takes place in 553. And again, you're really interested in evidence, both the evidence that we as scholars work with, but also evidence for late ancient Christians. And councils are, I think, a really good example of this because, like, even if I didn't have a teacher who taught early Christianity like this, like, a bunch of early Christian studies is basically pegged to councils. Like, it's. It's not the worst way to organize a class. You know, Nicaea, Constantinople, Ephesus, Chalcedon, Constantinople. And the reason why it's not a terrible way is because, like, these were, like, big, splashy events. Like, emperors funded them, bishops gathered at them, doctrines continued to divide and unite Christians. And, like. And yet just kind of telling the story of early Christianity. Like, that can be misleading. But so, like. But what. What do councils actually help us see? Can we. Can we start with that?
- [39:09]
Ellen Muehlberger
Well, I mean, they see. We see the spending of attention and money, and I don't necessarily mean just cash, but I mean, like, when Christians wanted to get together, they weren't there to start funding hospitals, or they weren't there to start thinking, gosh, you know, how should we all farm together? Or what could we eat that would make us all the same? They're thinking about ideas, and it shows you, you know, both cultural energy and a set of decisions or a way of making decisions. It reveals how Christians are involved with Roman imperial government and thinking of Roman officials as arbiters and granters of authority. To Christianity, that is a. That's a direction that Christianity didn't necessarily have to go, but it definitely did. And Post Constantine, really having the emperor on your side was a real factor for most Christians, to the point where, you know, you get out to Justinian and he just decides, this is what orthodoxy is. He writes that treatise, you know, writes a couple treatises, but writes the final treatise. And that really shuts down a lot of conversation amongst regular Christians and I mean, you know, bishops, presbyters, but also even regular Christians. So I think councils reveal strategic decisions made by the tradition that could have gone in other ways. I think they're also. Councils are having a moment right now in part because of the work of translators. So translated texts for historians is putting out one after another volume of these councils. And honestly, they become easier to teach because you can get students to read these long documents that otherwise just aren't accessible to them. And they become, you know, I was teaching the second council in a class, in a survey class, and like, people get very excited once they realize what's happening and that they're reading a transcript that represents. I wouldn't say it's a transcript that actually records, but I would say a transcript that represents a back and forth amongst ancient people. They get fired up. So councils are eminently teachable, not just for the reasons you mentioned, like, they, they come to decisions that are identifiable and Christians argue over, but because you're seeing real people interact, represented in real time. And it's a lot more teachable than say, like a treatise on the Holy Spirit. No offense to treatises on the Holy Spirit. I teach those too. Yeah, councils are great. And, you know, they also involve more than one type of person. They involve people from across geographic expanses. So often at councils, you're. You're hearing from different parts of the empire. It's. They're, they're a boundless resource, I think.
- [41:42]
Sam
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I think sometimes people are a little too hard on councils. And just the fact that these translations are coming out more and more like, you know, like, you're right that they're not transcriptions exactly, but like, you can almost get a sense of, like, tone of, like, different people. There's like a bureaucratic guy and then there's like a big ideas guy and there's people arguing with each other, but you just get a sense of the range of people involved in these processes. And I don't know, I've been finding it very fascinating.
- [42:14]
Ellen Muehlberger
And yeah, like you say they're not transcripts, but not all of your listeners are American. But I just used us examples. Like, you could take something like the West Wing and House of Cards and show somebody both of those series, and they would know something about American political culture, even though those are not real transcripts of things that have happened. Right. So I think the council question of whether these are real transcripts, of course they're not. They are preserved and represented transcripts. But they show you something about what people thought was important to write down and important to convey to future generations of readers.
- [42:47]
Sam
Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. Okay. I think it's really good setup for this question about the Super Father, which is what this essay is really about. So by the 5th century, we have some real heroes of the faith emerging. Athanasius and Basil and John, Chris, Dom Augustine. And these guys are kind of like, they're. They're so important that they might as well be Scripture, by which I mean, their statements kind of need to harmonize to create a coherent picture. Like, you want to know what Augustine says? And, you know, the historian might say that, you know, well, he says this thing in this place, and this thing in this place and this thing in this place. But that's really not how he's getting read, especially at a council like that, when they. When they, you know, when a name gets attached, gets attached to an idea, there's got to be, like, a thing that that name actually represents. And so, you know, this is also how you get, you know, like, if, you know, Evagorus gets condemned, but you really like the letter to Melania. Like, then you put Basil's name on the letter, and all of a sudden you've got an orthodox text. You get lots of things like that. And this happens a lot with Athanasius. There's lots of, like, Pseudo Athanasius texts now, but these are texts that kind of circulated under his name that he didn't write. But you described kind of all these guys as superfathers. So what is a superfather and what's exciting about this?
- [44:00]
Ellen Muehlberger
Well, I'm playing a little bit with a development in scholarship that's happened over the last, like, three decades where people have started to talk about a Church of the Fathers. You know, the field Patristics is named after the Fathers. And often people will talk about the early Christian Fathers. But scholars, especially, like Thomas Grauman, have pointed out in early Christian culture, early Christians themselves started talking about the Fathers as a collective source of authority. And, you know, they would often, you know, turn to, like, athanasius is probably the original Father in this sense, but more often they would tag it with that collective. The Fathers have said. And so there's already a move to thinking there's a canon, right? There's a. There's a development canon, not of biblical texts, but of writers, of later Christian writers who are trustworthy and who are assumed to cohere in terms of their values and standards with each other, which you and I know you can't take. Any canon, any canon, as decided, is probably not going to cohere with itself in all the ways that its readers hope it will or expect it to. So readers sometimes will engage in interpretive moves that help that coherence shape or come into shape. So the Fathers, once that tradition of kind of giving collective authority to the writers of the past and hoping to cohere with them got established. There was a set of conditions that said if this person is a father, then what they've said is both true and works with everyone else that is a father. And that's a tense, full of potential energy situation, because not every set of words that a human being says is going to cohere with everything else that somebody says. The culture of the Fathers created not just those conditions, but also a precipitating instance which is like you say, Athanasius has a lot of words attributed to him that are not his. And circulating within the 4th and 5th, or, excuse me, the 5th and 6th centuries were texts attributed to Athanasius but not coherent with his ideas. And there's a key one that got that Cyril, important one of these fathers had read and started citing as if it belonged to Athanasius. But the content of what he was citing did not cohere with Athanasius ideals or Cyril's, really. And that moment where you have a father citing a father with a piece of content that is not coherent with the Father's ideals. He can't be wrong, but also he can't be citing this thing. That's wrong. So, yeah, what ends up happening is that the Council, the Second Council of Constantinople, a lot of it is about squaring that circle and making it that Cyril was not wrong. Cyril was never citing something that wasn't from Athanasius. Instead, everybody else around him was wrong. And in scholarship, that gets taken up. You know, lots of people will write like Susan Bustle, Patrick, Patrick Gray, write these articles about how lamentable ideas around forgery, dismissal of authenticity were around the council. But it's like, it's not actually lamentable. It's just a process working itself out so that we have Cyril no longer a man, but actually just a set of texts being coherent with himself while Also doing a very human thing, namely picking up a text, assuming that it's correctly attributed to Athanasius, and then going with it.
- [47:20]
Sam
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, one of the things you say is you talk about. Like, others have pointed out that one of the most distinctive things about Christian literature is just how much of it is forged. But how does this concept of the superfather help us understand, like, all this forged literature?
- [47:36]
Ellen Muehlberger
All right, we have to talk about what forged means. And forged, you know, in. In contemporary criticism, forged means written by somebody who intends to deceive someone else by putting their name on, or putting their name on something that they didn't write, or putting someone else's name on something that they did write. And that whole concept of the name has to match who's writing, or the voice of the text has to match the name of the person who composes it. It's not useful in early Christian culture. It's just not useful. Like, I will say that. And at the same time, the culture of the fathers that I was talking about really, really depends on these are the words of Athanasius. We know him as an individual person. So there's two things going on at the same time. But Christians were entirely comfortable doing things like writing a vision of Paul in the 4th century and, you know, circulating this vision as if it came first person from Paul, even though obviously it does not. Or, you know, and this is a controversial claim. I've. I've gotten some feedback about this claim, but I do think I'm right. Writing a diary of Perpetua 200 years after she supposedly was martyred, in part to piously experience what it was like to be her, but not have it actually be a real diary from a real one. So, you know, my own doctoral advisor, David Brackey, has pointed out in a couple of different places that, you know, more of the New Testament is, by these standards, quote, forged, then isn't because most of the New Testament texts are based by people who don't match the name that we've put with them. Right. So it's normal in early Christianity to have this kind of authorial relationship with the text. It doesn't have to be the person who writes in the voice of the text is the composer. Like, that just doesn't. That's not even an expectation. And so I think getting rid of that presumption helps you understand that early Christians aren't forging things. They're not fabricating, they're not plagiarizing. They're producing texts. And part of the job of a text is to be evidence for something. So they're producing evidence. If that evidence happens to come with a name attached to it, that helps it be the evidence you need it to be, then that's what happens.
- [49:40]
Sam
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, you know, I don't want to be, like, too precious about this super idea, but I think it really helps get at the. Just like the writing in this book, you could have done a kind of psychoanalytic thing about how the past becomes a quilting point or the present becomes a quilting point for the past or something like that. But you give us something a little more vivid, like you pull this image from a comic and. And I. I don't know. I. I really like the HBO show. I don't know. I don't know if that's a controversial take or not, but I thought it was good. Like, from Watchmen, right? Like, can you tell us how you got from Watchmen to Late Antiquity? And like. Like, why. Why that move?
- [50:21]
Ellen Muehlberger
How I got there is Watchmen is sitting in my living room. Like, I. I live in a house that has a lot of. My partner teaches comics in the English department at University of Michigan. We have a lot of comics. We read a lot of comics. So it's what I was reading. And that, I think that is the thing is this book. There is a set of books that I was reading at the same time that I was writing it that had nothing to do with late antiquity. So Ali Smith, I was right. She's amazing. She can make anything happen. You're reading an Ali Smith novel, and you're like, what is happening to me? I'm 30 pages in, and I'm in a totally different world. My genre expectations have been blown away, and I didn't even realize it. I was reading Bram Stoker, who wrote, obviously, Dracula, but also wrote a book about imposters. And that started me thinking about, like, how do you get away with impostering? Some. I don't know what the verb is, pretending to be somebody else. How do you. How do you get away with that? But I was reading Watchmen when I was thinking about all of this, and then I came to that famous scene. And, you know, people will have seen just the panel of the comic, Even if they've never read Watchmen, you will see the panel of a sort of light green man sitting on a moonscape. If you've seen that panel, you've seen the moment where Dr. Manhattan has his. Like, oh, gosh, now I'm stuck in this state Superheroes are like humans, except they have several characteristics that make them super. They don't follow the laws of physics, or they're able to do things that we're not able to do, or they jump time in a way that we can't. And super fathers are the same. They're like a father. Cyril is. Is a father in that way of the Patrick Gray, Thomas Grauman Fathers culture of the fathers. But he's also super in that past. His death, long after his death. His words need to be preserved in such a way that they start to bend decisions around them and even work backwards in time to make him always orthodox. Not capital O, but small O in a way that doesn't actually. These are things that are not possible with a regular human being. He has to be something other than a human being, something more. And he wasn't. You know, I'm not saying he's, you know, he does become Saint Cyril, but it's not like I'm saying something about sainthood. Saints are not the same. Superfathers are a kind of author, then father on steroids that does more than either of those categories.
- [52:32]
Sam
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a. It's a great. I mean, I. I hope we start getting panels on. On super fathers. Like, it's, It's. It's a. It's just a really helpful.
- [52:41]
Ellen Muehlberger
Whether it's panels on super fathers or it's panels about what people are reading, that doesn't have anything to do with their scholarship. Just go read other stuff and watch how people deal with, you know, I mean, going back to the ways of knowing. Cultures are different. Yes. We deal with very similar problems and very similar issues. We. We confront environmental conditions, cultural conditions that are parallel. At the very least, if they're not the same, they're parallel. And it's interesting to watch other scholars and other writers, thinkers, poets, whatever, deal with those problems and express them because it will give you ideas about how to think about your own topics. So go read. Whatever. Never apologize for reading something that's not in your field. Go read. Do whatever.
- [53:23]
Sam
Yeah, yeah, yeah, Definitely. Okay. The last essay in the book is about the Fayum portraits. And I mean, these have to be the most used images on, like, book covers, classics departments, postcards for late antiquity, or at least they're up there. People can probably picture them, but they're these kind of realistic paintings on wood panels. There's one of a small boy. There's one of a woman with these. These big gold earrings and a necklace, and there's Just tell me if I'm wrong, but there's kind of nothing like them in terms of the immediacy that they provide viewers from this time. I remember I saw some at the Met, and I should have known better, but it did feel like I was looking at a photo or this feeling that her presence was kind of still there. You quote John Berger saying that the image makes no appeal. It asks for nothing and yet declares themselves alive. But that aliveness, like that immediacy, it's the effect of artists. And so you're right, a fighting portrait is a kind of affective machine which generates predictable responses from the viewers. It was created to enthrall. And so, again, you're interested in that gap between our evidence and their evidence. What's it like to see these portraits when we're used to seeing lots of photographs compared to when they were painted and in Egypt? So, like, I've been calling them portraits, but what were they in Egypt? And maybe what do we miss by calling them portraits?
- [54:52]
Ellen Muehlberger
I mean, they are portraits, you know, but they're not. So in antiquity, these are painted faces that appear on a mummy. So you have like an entire and not just a mummy, like you're looking at a person, a corpse wrapped in bandages, but like sort of a. More of a cocoon. What you might think of as the cocoon outside of that, holds that wrapped and embalmed body. And in the 19th century, after a long period of taking things from mummies that we wanted, Europeans and North American archaeologists, you know, early on, people took mummy powder as a medicines. Then later they took mummy powder as a pigment to make a certain kind of color to paint with. In the 19th century, people started taking the faces off of these things. And in the chapter I argued, that's in the context of the development of photography and photography as a way of capturing something about a person. American studies scholars have pointed out that photography as a technology is deeply involved in race and the construction of whiteness, the construction of ideas of genealogy, and even sort of racialization of humans. So you see that working out in early scholarship around these pieces. So some of the early excavators are using them to do things like prove the nature of the Coptic race. And I put that in heavy scare quotes. I know that our podcast is not visual, but you can see the scare quotes or you can hear them, or proving the nature of other kinds of races in antiquity, they become something extractable from a much larger object. At a moment when North American and European culture is obsessed with what a face can show you about a person or what a face can make evidence of for a person. So, yes, they're portraits in part because they're. Surely they became important parts of that ancient object by looking like a portrait. They're not painted as portraits in antiquity because portraiture is a kind of. As a genre of art that really we think of as early modern, you know, and the implications of it as an early modern genre don't apply necessarily to antiquity.
- [57:03]
Sam
Right, yeah. Yeah. So there's like a time gap problem there. I think the other confusion that these cause are. I don't know what I think of as, like, the sixth great history problem, which is just that, like, people kind of can't get their heads around the idea that mummification continues into Roman times or that, like, anything done in Egypt during the Roman occupation, like, was. Was also Egyptian. And like. Like, you know, and it's because, like, you know, in sixth grade they learned that there's the, like, discrete societies, there's the Egyptians, and then the Greeks came and then the Romans came. And I. I don't know, you know, like, I don't want to be too hard on sixth grade curriculum. Like, we gotta divvy up the history somehow. And, you know, like, yes, we see these portraits the way they do because, you know, like, people wanted to see them as evidence for something. But I guess that that's really your point is, like, you know, what. What kind of things did people want to see these as? Like, can you give us a sense of, like, the. The claims that people were making about the. The. These portraits?
- [57:59]
Ellen Muehlberger
We can. I mean, we can dismiss the sixth grade.
- [58:01]
Sam
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [58:02]
Ellen Muehlberger
Sixth grade. History has to do a certain job, but scholars don't necessarily have to do that job. And a thing was happening while I was reading about these. That is often the basis for things that I write. Namely, I kept encountering the same trope in different pieces of scholarship. So multiple different people would say this. They would say these are the product of Greek, say, sophistication and Egyptian intensity. Or. And it was always that it was like Greek. Something good and something ethereal and beautiful and Egyptian oddness, obsession with death, earthiness. Like, it was very predictable that it was these two things. Sometimes it went in a trio. So it was like Greek sophistication, Roman ingenuity and Egyptian obsession with the dead or something like, you know. So I found that in. I. I can't remember the number, but it was close to 10 different places where people broke it down like that. And I thought, there is an answer here. And the answer is Egyptian people made these, right? Like Egyptian people who had been colonized by different. But people living in Egypt who are Egyptian people made these things. And no one could just come out and say that. And the most egregious examples did things like claim these late ancient Egyptian objects appear as examples of classical Greek portraiture. And I just thought, what, what is happening? Oftentimes I'll, I'll see that kind of like over and over again statement. I'll just think, what is happening? Why is everybody thinking this? And then my job becomes to unpack it and make that, make the presumptions clear. And the presumption is, well, you know, definitely Egyptian people couldn't do anything this artistic. And you hear the sarcasm in my voice as I say that. And definitely late ancient people couldn't do anything this artistic because, you know, they're not classic. And like both of those are very obviously wrong, belied by the very fact of the portraits themselves, which run, you know, like from 100 to 500, so a long late antiquity, but still that's about the, that's the best estimate of what date they were painted. So what we have is evidence of late ancient Egypt being an incredibly rich artistic place where people in villages are just doing these amazing paintings, extremely realistic, quote, modern looking paintings. And yet that, that. What's the word? That equation. Late ancient Egypt, extremely realistic and modern never gets through. It gets, oh, it's classical Greek or it was Roman ingenuity. And I'm like, I don't know. And these are Egyptian people, right?
- [60:28]
Sam
Yeah, yeah, like, like in, in late antiquity. Like it's just like it's. And yeah, you know, you end up closing this essay though, coming back to this idea of wonder. And I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the relationship between wonder and contextualization. Like so much of what we do as historians is try to contextualize and historicize and sometimes that can make us like kind of a buzzkill. But you also try to give some context to wonder. Like, I don't know. Can you tell us a little bit about wonder and contextualization?
- [61:04]
Ellen Muehlberger
I am a person who loves to wonder. I love to go to a museum and see exhibits of things that I don't know things about and have the emotional experience that the exhibitor or preparator is trying to get me to have. So I'm not disparaging that. But the presentation of the Bayoum portraits has often been denuded of anything about how they got to be the way that they are or how they came to be in museums and instead stood up almost like they're faces of people facing you. So the exhibition of them has been toward getting us as viewers to say, oh, wow, they're just like us. Oh, wow, these are. These are ancient people. I could reach out and touch that person. Or like, you know, the John Berger essay. They're. They're stepping forward to talk to. They're not moving. They're. They're flat 2D images. So that experience is partially, you know, it's. They're amazing pieces of art, but it's also because they are stripped of all of their context, namely, they were in the ground. They were often used as objects in pawn. They belonged to village Egypt. And we took them away from there and posed them in big, huge galleries that were, you know, dramatically lighted. When we take away context from something, it's possible to wonder at it. And there are, There are things in this world that we truly don't know anything about and cause wonder. You know, like. But if you take, like, I don't know, an astronomer out and you're like, wow, look at all the stars. And then they start naming them and they tell you how far away they are and what they're composed of.
- [62:30]
Sam
It's.
- [62:30]
Ellen Muehlberger
The wonder starts to go away. So wonder, it. It only survives a lack of expert information when there is that expert. You know, there are situations for which there's not that expert information, but when there is that expert information, wonder only survives in the absence of it. And the Fayum portraits as a class have been stripped of all that other information and contextualization of where that came from, in part so they can produce wonder in us. And that's why people put them on their book covers and on their. You know, the program that I am a core faculty member of uses it on our recruitment poster, like, so we're right in there using these faces to say we know something about late ancient individuals. And these faces don't reveal a thing about lineage individuals. They reveal something about us, truly.
- [63:17]
Sam
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I'm thinking about the. That I like, you know, sitting with an expert, like, the opposite of it is that, like, sometimes, you know, you're. You're amazed by the portrait. And then, you know, like a really good teacher, like, you, like, explains them, and it only becomes more magical. And I think, like, part of what I was taking in that chapter was to say, like, you know, our job as historians has to be, like, to move from one kind of wonder to a different Kind of wonder. Like, it doesn't have to be, like, just being a buzzkill. Maybe I'm overreading that. Or I.
- [63:55]
Ellen Muehlberger
No, I hear you.
- [63:55]
Sam
I hear you. Projecting that onto you. But maybe it's just like, the way you rewrote it made me be like, wow, these portraits are kind of even more amazing than I thought. And they're not just like me, but, gosh, I understand a little bit more about this world now. And like, huh. Like, I never would have thought that this world was like this.
- [64:13]
Ellen Muehlberger
You're totally right. I think. I think I'm generally suspicious of moments like. And maybe this is picking up other chapters too. I'm generally suspicious of, oh, wow, that's amazing. We can't know because often when that thing gets deployed, we do know, actually, you know, and I. I'll use a word like, when there's a mystique around something, it is usually a very constructed mystique. So I think you're right. Wonder can lead to greater wonder with knowledge or with expert knowledge, but sometimes it doesn't. And sometimes it's a sort of back off and wonder at the thing that you don't want to be responsible for or you don't want to be liable to or vulnerable by. So I think it goes in both directions. And I tend to be slightly suspicious of the, oh, gosh, we can't possibly. This is too complex. We can't possibly know.
- [65:00]
Sam
Right. And so let me ask you, like you write, when knowing depends on not knowing, wonder is a manufactured response and predictable. Can you tell us what predictable means there?
- [65:11]
Ellen Muehlberger
I think it means it's intended, right? Like, wonder is part of what people are trying to produce when they exhibit these portraits in the way that they have. So Harvard, I think, had an exhibit maybe two or three years ago. Gosh, I've lost all pandemic. It might have been 20, 22, so three years ago, where they did more contextualization of this, and yet still people had the reaction of, gosh, these are amazing. These show us a real individual. And I think as a culture, we are conditioned to expect historical sources to be amazing in that way. And I think then they are often used by historians, by preparators, by exhibitors, by curators to produce that kind of wonder. And wonder, I mean, it is a generative emotion. It's something that makes you want to know more. It makes you want to go back to. Makes you want to read a new book. Hopefully you'll read this book if you're wondering at it. But it is also A thing that people are trying to produce. That's what I mean when I say it's predictable.
- [66:08]
Sam
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so you're right. Maybe we can use this to kind of wrap up like, you're right. We tell ourselves that the paintings are universal, that they speak to us from nowhere. That because we have removed them. Sorry, that is because we've removed them from somewhere where they were anything but universal. There they were singular and embedded. And so I was reading that sentence and it just, like, brought me back to the boys in the speech with their lack of knowledge becomes an occasion for them to exert their own power. They kind of project their ideas and what must be the case. And often they're doing that to people who also don't know. But who will agree to you if you say that this is the same thing, right? Like, they're with their friends and they're saying the thing that they know is going to be going to sound right. And so, you know, like, that's how the game works. And I guess, like, this got me to this, like, kind of meta question of, like, well, how did writing a book like this kind of sensitize you to the. The dangers of any of us trying to do ancient history? That, like, any of us could be the boy, you know, learning to confidently give the speech to friends who they think are listening but are really just kind of reinforcing their own predispositions to what the world must be like. Like, how did you feel like you were, you know, working your way out of that trap? Or, like, are we as ancient histories? Like, we're not condemned to it, but how do you. How do you make sure you're getting out of that?
- [67:28]
Ellen Muehlberger
I don't know. It messed me up. I feel less confident about my ability to say things. Honestly. I, you know, I. I started this because I envied people who were doing these kinds of lectures because they were recognized as authorities, and that's how they got invited to give a lecture. And then you give, you know, the. The book afterwards, and you're able to just sort of speak off the cuff without footnoting it within an inch of your life. I feel more like I need to footnote things within an inch of my life now because of the kind of questions that I unfortunately pose to myself and to others about what evidence can stand for and what it can't stand for, what knowledge you can draw from an object or a person or a scene and what you can't draw. So I'm more careful now, even though I had started out thinking, oh, gosh, well, I'm going to write this, and it's going to make me feel like I can claim a bit more authority.
- [68:16]
Sam
Yeah, no, that's great. That's great. Thank you.
- [68:19]
Ellen Muehlberger
It's not so great. It feels terrible. I mean, it's great. You know, it's a good example. But, like, is. I. I wished for more confidence coming out of this book and the process of writing it. I. I guess choose your book topics carefully, people, because what you're writing will affect you. And this made me less confident in my. I mean, I still write, but, like, less confident in my ability to show people things that feel solid.
- [68:43]
Sam
Yeah, yeah. But by. That's great. I mean, I'm glad you feel that, too. I'm glad that, like, even you, like, feel. Feel that. That anxiety that I'm constantly feeling. Yeah, it's great that we share it, not the anxiety itself, you know, like, okay, you know, last couple. Like, what do you hope readers will take from a book like this?
- [69:05]
Ellen Muehlberger
First, I hope you take pleasure. Oh, my goodness. I hope that you enjoy reading it. It's small, it's short. You could do it in one sitting if you had a nice pot of tea or maybe a beer or scotch. But that's the point, is it's supposed to be pleasurable. It's supposed to be about things that you might already know, some of these things. It's not a book that's going to teach you a bunch of new information. It's going to give you a take, honestly. And the other thing is, I hope that it encourages you to mix and match evidence from different places, different time periods to allow yourself to be influenced by what you're reading, even if it seems really, really far removed from your area of expertise. Because I think intellectual ferment is good across, you know, types of literature, across eras of literature, across, you know, not even just literature, but, you know, go paint, go do some welding, and then see what that changes for you as a writer. I also hope that people, what they take away from it is their own cash. I meant specifically to have a relatively cheap book. It's open access, right? Like, so it's meant to be open access. But the book itself is also far cheaper than anything else. Sometimes you publish an academic monograph and it's like $100 or $150, and you're like, who could possibly read this? So I'm hoping people will read it because it's short, accessible and free.
- [70:27]
Sam
Yeah, I mean, short, free, and like, you know, Beautifully clearly written. It's hard to ask for more, so thank you for that. But last question, what are you working on next?
- [70:36]
Ellen Muehlberger
Ooh, I have two projects going on. I've got one. I'm doing a kind of project about Constantius ii, who is the child of Constantine, inspired by Craig Brown, who's a British journalist who did a book about the Princess Margaret and her. It's called 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret. And part of the problem with her is that, of course, she's the satellite to a much more famous sister. Right. It's very hard to know someone when she's the sister of the Queen. And it's also very hard to know anything about Constantius II because he's the son of Constantine and he's constantly compared to his father. Many historians of his time didn't like him. So there's a lot of sort of disparaging, oh, gosh, he's, you know, he's a flibberty gibbet. He. He does things with Arians, he doesn't, you know, so there's similar parallel problems. And I have either a set of essays or a book about Constantius II that's in this Glimpses format, so we'll see what happens there. And then the second thing, I'm working with a Roman historian, Robin Whelan, who might be actually familiar to people on the podcast. He wrote a book about Vandal Africa, Christians in Vandal Africa. He's got a new book coming out about Christians who are middle managers or essentially imperial officials in the bureaucracy. I think that's coming out with Cambridge soon. Robin approached me and literally the approach was far better than this, but it was essentially, do you want to write a henoticon book? And I was like, oh, yes, of course. Because both he and I do small ball things, like we pay attention to, not peripheral, but things that are less salient. We both write books that incorporate lots of sources rather than focusing on one source. And we've discovered that the time period between the Council of Chalcedon in 451 and Justinian's treatise out in the 519, 517 area, there's a lot of conversation and attempted consensus building happening amongst Christians that, because of that hard stop with Justinian, doesn't get a whole lot of attention. And we were fascinated by it because it's Christians trying to come to some sort of safe landing of political and theological consensus without necessarily having the kind of divisiveness that happens at Chalcedon. So they're living in the aftermath of that, trying to figure out how to all get along but still having theological positions, having political positions where they disagree. It's a really sort of hefty cultural ferment moment that I think disappears in between the two high points. High points of Chalcedon and then Justinian.
- [73:03]
Sam
Oh, that sounds great. Good fun. Yeah, I'm really looking forward to both of them. Well, Ellen, thank you so much. It was a real pleasure to talk, and the book is great.
- [73:12]
Ellen Muehlberger
Oh, thank you for reading so closely. And thank you for having me. I really appreciated talking to you, Sam.