Mark Letteney

Mark Letteney

Paul Mellon/Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Pre-Doctoral Rome Prize
September 10, 2018–July 26, 2019
Profession
PhD Candidate, Department of Religion, Princeton University
Project title
Christianizing Knowledge: A New Order of Books in the Theodosian Age
Project description

My dissertation approaches Christianization from a new angle: not the Christianization of people, but of structures of knowledge. In it, I trace changes to documentary practice and readerly expectations across technical literature from the late fourth through the middle of the fifth century CE. I explore late antique scholarly productions ranging from Christian theological tractates and conciliar acta to Roman juristic writings and authoritative legal compendia, military handbooks, grammatical treatises, and the Palestinian Talmud in order to explore the ways that imperial Christianity inflected the production of truth even in domains that do no constructive theological work. Bishops, rabbis, and jurists in the Theodosian era produced definitive statements of sophisticated intellectual traditions with startlingly similar forms, and I argue that all are best understood as products of a considerably unified, and novel, book culture that arose in this peculiar Theodosian moment.