Episode Summary:

Ellen Muehlberger, "Things Unseen: Essays on Evidence, Knowledge, and the Late Ancient World"
New Books Network, November 10, 2025
Host: Mike Motilla
Guest: Ellen Muehlberger

Episode Overview

This episode explores Ellen Muehlberger’s new book, "Things Unseen: Essays on Evidence, Knowledge, and the Late Ancient World" (UC Press, 2025), a collection of essays examining how knowledge, evidence, and ignorance were constructed, perceived, and used in Late Antiquity, with a primary focus on Christianity. The discussion covers methodological reflections, cultural projections, the function of wonder, and the politics of evidence—from rhetorical education and church councils, to the famous Fayum portraits, connecting these inquiries with broader questions about the nature of historical study and writing.

Main Themes and Purpose

• Ways of Knowing in Late Antiquity: How did ancient Christians determine what counted as evidence and knowledge, especially when much of what they pursued was "unseen"? How did their desires and methods of knowing shape the evidence they produced and their cultural memory?
• The Construction, Use, and Power of Ignorance: How both ancient people and modern historians grapple with projection, empathy, and ignorance—sometimes as tools of power and social control.
• The Historian’s Task: Muehlberger's work challenges readers to attend not just to ancient data, but to methodological questions: How do we know? What do we want to know? What does our ignorance reveal?

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Origins of "Things Unseen" and Its Intellectual Trajectory

• Muehlberger explains the genesis of the book through previous work on Christian anticipation of death. Essays pruned from earlier projects—like those on Arius (whose body was seen as proof of heresy) and Simeon the Stylite—revealed a larger question: How did late ancient Christians make and recognize evidence, especially when empirical proof was lacking? (03:57)
• Quote: “How do you know something if you're an ancient person? You know it because a divine oracle has told you, or ... because there’s evidence in front of you. But when there’s not evidence, you can start to look around ... what could be evidence of this?” – Ellen Muehlberger (06:52)

2. Methods and Ways of Knowing—Resisting Modern Projection

• Muehlberger resists viewing the past as proto-modern: “Looking at past cultures ... with that lens of progress can really start to make you think, oh, they should be us, and they're just not.” (08:37)
• Instead, she advocates approaching past cultures on their own terms—citing works like "Late Ancient Knowing," and noting the importance of discovering what people found salient or meaningful, even (and especially) when it defies modern categories.
• Quote: "Ways of knowing allows you to look at other times and cultures and 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?" – Ellen Muehlberger (11:10)

3. Writing Style and Genre – The Lecture as Method

• The book adopts the form of the 'lecture book,' a genre embracing big ideas, bold claims, and audience engagement over exhaustive footnoting: “Lectures tend to generate more things ... people leave and they're like, oh, they're totally wrong about that. And ... I need to prove it by writing a new essay.” (13:47)

Deep Dives into Essays

I. "Impossible Women" – Rhetoric, Empathy, and Resilient Ignorance

• Content: Examines ancient rhetorical education, where boys (aged 10–14) were trained to give speeches in the voices of others, often women or marginalized figures (17:22).
• Insight: Muehlberger introduces the concept of “resilient ignorance” (after Charles Mills’ work on racial ignorance) to explain how dominant classes perpetuate stereotypes—they learn to "know" women only as constructed classroom characters, ignoring real women around them (20:29–23:08).
• Quote: “These are the assumptions that make these two things, a eunuch and falling in love, somehow impossible.” – Ellen Muehlberger (19:06)
• Memorable Analogy: "I think Darth Vader perhaps fills this role... most Americans ... can do 'Luke, I am your father.' ... the prostitute who comes to her senses persists across the culture.” (23:08)

II. "Spaces and Evidence: Buildings as Knowledge"

• Content: How did Christians judge faith in others, given the intangible nature of belief? Focus on physical evidence—spaces, rituals, and property—to suss out “real” Christians (29:37).
• Case Study: Bishops like Shenoute physically invaded homes seeking evidence of religious deviation—treating private houses as “epistemological repositories,” extensions of the body (31:57).
• Quote: "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." – Ellen Muehlberger (33:24)
• Surveillance Culture: Story from John of Ephesus, where crowds break into homes seeking material signs of heresy, culminating in a flipping portrait of Jesus/Apollo as “the wall outs him.” (36:36)

III. "Councils and the Creation of the 'Superfather'"

• Content: Re-examines church councils—especially the Second Council of Constantinople—not simply as doctrinal events, but as staged performances of consensus and authority (39:09–41:41).
• Superfathers: Examines how certain figures (Athanasius, Basil, Augustine, etc.) become collective icons whose attributions and words are harmonized, even when evidence is forged or contradictory. The council culture demands coherence; "superfathers" are authors “on steroids” whose words bend history around them (43:59–50:20).
• Quote: "Superfathers are a kind of author, then father on steroids that does more than either of those categories." – Ellen Muehlberger (52:20)
• Watchmen Analogy: Drawing from the comic "Watchmen," Muehlberger likens this to Dr. Manhattan, whose superhuman status distorts time, space, and logic—a metaphor for how the Church interpolated authority backwards and forwards, making legendary fathers superhumanly consistent (50:20).

IV. "Fayum Portraits: Wonder, Evidence, and Exoticism"

• Content: Critiques the modern fetish over Fayum mummy portraits—their “unmediated” realism, their starring role on covers and posters—and the persistent modern habit of extracting them from context to evoke wonder (53:23–54:51).
• Insight: These artworks are not portraits as we conceive of them, but funerary panels in Roman Egypt; modern museum display and scholarship strip away their original context, manufacturing an experience of wonder based on absence of context (61:04).
• Quote: "Wonder...is a generative emotion. It makes you want to know more...But it is also a thing that people are trying to produce. That's what I mean when I say it's predictable." – Ellen Muehlberger (65:10)
• Historiographical Critique: Muehlberger skewers the essentializing of Fayum portraits as ‘Greek sophistication and Egyptian earthiness,’ demanding that we recognize their true late antique Egyptian origins (57:58).

Overarching Reflections: Knowledge, Ignorance, and the Ethics of Doing History

• The book and interview repeatedly return to the historian’s predicament: How do we avoid the trap of projecting our own knowledge categories onto the past, or of mistaking our ignorance for some kind of authenticity?
• Muehlberger expresses a deepened humility after completing the book: "I feel less confident about my ability to say things, honestly … 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." (67:28–68:16)
• The pursuit is not to banish wonder, but to move from one sort of wonder (rooted in lack of knowledge) to another, richer wonder born of contextual discovery.

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On projection and knowledge:
  "It's a way to approach a different culture without assuming that culture is trying and failing to be us." – Ellen Muehlberger (08:38)
• On staged ignorance:
  "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." – Ellen Muehlberger (26:33)
• On the purpose of the essays:
  "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." – Ellen Muehlberger (69:05)
• On writing & reading widely:
  "Never apologize for reading something that's not in your field. Go read. Do whatever." – Ellen Muehlberger (52:41)
• On wonder and context:
  “Wonder... only survives a lack of expert information... The Fayum portraits as a class have been stripped of all that other information... in part so they can produce wonder in us.” (62:30)

Further Reading & Recommendations

• Works referenced for “ways of knowing”:
  • "Late Ancient Knowing" (Edited by Moulie Vidas & Mike Chin)
  • Andrew Rigsby (on Roman ways of measurement)
  • “What Did the Romans Know?” (by Daryn Lehoux)
  • Edited volume (possibly Matt Crawford): early Christian theology as a way of knowing

Closing: Hopes for Readers and Upcoming Work

• Takeaways: Muehlberger hopes readers experience pleasure (69:05), feel emboldened to mix evidence from multiple times and places, and keep the book’s accessibility (it’s short, open access, and affordable) in mind.
• Upcoming Projects:
  • A set of “glimpses” essays on Constantius II, inspired by biographical vignettes;
  • A co-authored book (with Robin Whelan) on the Henotikon era’s efforts at Christian consensus-building.

Key Timestamps

• 07:16 Ways of knowing and evidence in Late Antiquity (Muehlberger)
• 13:47 Genre/style: Lecture books and big swings
• 17:22 Rhetorical exercises and "impossible women"
• 23:08 "Resilient ignorance" and classroom knowledge
• 29:37 Evidence, faith, and the epistemology of space
• 36:36 Surveillance, evidence, and the appetite for inner lives
• 39:09 Church councils as social/cultural phenomena
• 43:59 The “Superfather” and textual authority
• 50:20 Watchmen analogy for superhuman authority
• 53:23 Fayum portraits, wonder, and modern projections
• 62:30 Wonder, context, and the ethics of spectacle
• 67:28 The historian's humility and anxiety about knowledge
• 69:05 Hopes for the book and its readers
• 70:36 Upcoming projects

This detailed summary captures the central questions, memorable anecdotes, and methodological insights from Ellen Muehlberger’s conversation on "Things Unseen," inviting listeners and future readers to reconsider what counts as evidence, to interrogate their own knowledge, and to cultivate both skepticism and wonder in the encounter with the ancient past.