Monday, 4th December 2006
Prof Claudine Dauphin (CNRS - University of Nice and University of Wales, Lampeter)
SEX AND LADDERS IN THE MONASTIC DESERTS OF LATE ANTIQUE EGYPT AND PALESTINE
'Imagine two ladders: one leading up to heaven, and the other down to Hades, and then imagine yourself standing on earth between the two ladders' (Dorotheus of Gaza, Mystic Treatises 245).
Tracing in this lecture the ascetic struggle against the demons (embodied by snakes, horned vipers, hyenas, chacals and ... lurid women personifying earthly and sinful desires) in the monastic deserts of Egypt and Palestine between the 3rd and 7th centuries AD, will lead Claudine Dauphin to investigate the links between food and sex, against the background of the monks' ultimate goal: to wear out the body and dominate the temptations of the senses (apatheia), attain mental impassibility (hesychia), and, reaching the top of the 'divine ladder', commune mystically with God.
Claudine Dauphin is Chargé de Recherche of the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique at the Centre d'études Préhistoire, Antiquité, Moyen Âge, CNRS-University of Nice and Honorary Professor in Archaeology and Theology of the University of Wales, Lampeter. An MA and PhD of the University of Edinburgh, she holds a Doctorat d'Etat ès-Lettres of Paris-I University (Sorbonne), the highest academic distinction in France. A former Lady Davis Fellow at the Hebrew University, Research Scholar at the Ecole Biblique in Jerusalem, Research archaeologist at the Israel Department of Antiquities and Museums, and Research Fellow of Somerville College, Oxford, she has also taught at Trinity College, Dublin. Since 1975, she has directed major Byzantine excavations in Israel, the ecclesiastical farm of Shelomi, the Church at Nahariya and the pilgrim episcopal basilica of Dor, as well as detailed surveys on the Golan Heights of Roman and Byzantine settlements within their landscapes. Her many publications include a major book on the demography and socio-economics of Byzantine Palestine: La Palestine: Peuplement et Populations. Her interest in diet and its repercussions on population renewal and growth, morbidity and mortality in Late Antiquity has led her to focus on a specific 'population', the monks of the Egyptian and Palestinian deserts.
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