Speaker: Professor Claire Wate
Title: "Renewing the Past: Apocryphal Narrative and the Quest for Mothers"
Date: April 26, 2024
Time: 12:00-1:30pm
Location: HG 1002
Faced with a sacred history that, like Jane Austen's much later secular history, had "hardly any women at all," late-antique and medieval Christian writers got to work repairing the lacunae in their shared past through the "invention" (both discovery and fabrication) of apocryphal narratives.
Professor Waters' talk examines the prominent role of mothers in Christian apocryphal narratives, including, of course, the Virgin Mary as well as other more shadowy biblical women--the bride of Canticles, the Queen of Sheba--or historical ones, like the Empress Helena, who create a kind of expanded genealogy for Christian believers. She considers how these mothers of invention helped to fuel and sustain a kind of reparative reading in the sense Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick outlined: one that aims "to unpack the local, contingent relations between any given piece of knowledge and its narrative/epistemological entailments for the seeker, knower, or teller"--a formulation that itself, notably, arose out of the question of the usefulness of seeking origins. This talk aims to understand not the (always dubious) historicity of such narratives or their status in relation to the canonical Bible, but what kinds of repair and, in turn, what kinds of presents and futures they enabled for their authors and audiences.
Lunch will be provided at the event. Please RSVP by emailing Professor Davis (radavis@uci.edu) no later than April 22nd.