Purifying Texts in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages

New session of the "Paris IAS Ideas" online talk series, with the participation of Yitzhak Hen (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel / Paris IAS Fellow).

Throughout Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages, a vast corpus of potentially dangerous texts was dismissed as unorthodox and unauthorised by Christian scholars and policy makers. These texts exposed their readers to unorthodox systems of thought and belief, and hence should have been eradicated. And yet, although these texts and the world-view they represented were repeatedly questioned, denounced and condemned, they were still read, copied and commented upon by a select group of Christian scholars, who clearly realised the implications of what they were doing. Given the fact that the attitude towards these texts remained negative and reproachful, their preservation and use seem even more intriguing. This study, which is an off-shoot of a larger project – "Forbidden Knowledge: The reception of Unorthodox Texts and Practices in the Early Medieval West" – explores some of the mechanism that allowed the preservation, copying, and reading of such texts in the late-antique and the early medieval West. The significance of this study is two-fold. First, it will offer an original and innovative analysis of a hitherto neglected phenomenon, and a platform for introducing new approaches to the transformation of knowledge in the early medieval West. Second, it will provide some thoughts on the limits of censorship in Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages.