This article focuses on the case of Andreas Laskaratos (1811–1901), a famous satirical poet from the Ionian island of Cephalonia (Kefallinia) and a representative of the Heptanese School of Literature. Laskaratos was excommunicated from the Orthodox Church of Greece because of his criticism of the religious establishment. Apart from his other writings, a great number of his satirical poems present trenchant criticism of the Orthodox Church and its impact on people’s lives. Laskaratos was critical of superstition in the church and accused the clergy of taking advantage of its social status and people’s naivety. His vitriolic critique focused on the supposedly miraculous icons, religious rituals, symbols, and relics. This article demonstrates how Laskaratos’s satirical poetry expresses secularist ideas that probably could not be articulated otherwise within the context of the strict social control exercised by the Orthodox Church. Viewing satirical poetry as constructive social criticism, the main argument is that Laskaratos’s poetry builds on Enlightenment ideas and that he can be situated among the pioneer secularist freethinkers within the Greek Orthodox context.

October 2024: Alexandros Sakellariou holds a PhD from Panteion University in the field of Sociology of Religion. Currently, he is a Senior Researcher at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Department of Sociology. He has extensive experience working since 2011 as a researcher in European and national research projects and he has taught at the Hellenic Open University a class on Contemporary Sociological Approaches in European Societies (2016-2024). His main research interests include sociology of religion and non-religion, sociology of youth, political sociology, historical sociology, radicalisation, qualitative research methods, history and memory. He has over 70 publications in national and international journals, edited volumes, encyclopedias, and conference proceedings. He has published two books, Religion and Pandemic in Greek Society: Power Relations, Religious Populism and the Pending Secularisation (2020, in Greek) and Atheism in Greek Society: From Orthodox Religious Memory to the Atheist Religious Consciousness (2022, in Greek).

Is there a “basic” meaning to a text? Or is every text ambiguous from the start? Insofar as a foundational work may be considered to be multivalent in meaning, by what principles do interpreters assess its “literal” sense? How broadly do they construe its scope — and what are the conceptual and historical implications of such perspectives? From antiquity to modernity, far-reaching changes in approach to literality are not just efforts to “figure out” words. Aiming to formulate relationships between words and events, they are efforts to figure out the world.

June 2024: Prof. Jon Whitman is a medievalist whose work explores the interplay of intellectual and imaginative changes from antiquity to the modern period.  He received his B.A. (summa cum laude) from Columbia University; his B.Phil. from the University of Oxford; and his A.M. and Ph.D. from Harvard University.  Long affiliated with the English Department of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he is now emeritus, he directed for many years the University’s Center for Literary Studies.  His publications include Allegory: The Dynamics of an Ancient and Medieval Technique (co-published in 1987 by Oxford University Press and Harvard University Press) and two collaborative studies under his editorship: Interpretation and Allegory: Antiquity to the Modern Period (published in 2000 by Brill), and Romance and History: Imagining Time from the Medieval to the Early Modern Period (published in 2015 by Cambridge University Press).

Ancient and medieval rhetorical theorists gave much attention to discovering an author’s intent (voluntas) from the letter of a document (scriptum). By contrast, resolving ambiguity (ambiguitas) was supposedly easy. But in fact, ambiguity proves the more slippery problem because it functions somewhere between argumentation (a controversy to be disputed) and stylistic embellishment. Legal discourse often tried to impose limits on ambiguity, but at the same time ambiguitas could be quietly weaponized — in both law and poetry — to transform legal and even theological meaning. Where rhetorical theorists such as Cicero, Quintilian, Augustine, William of Champeaux (c. 1100), Geoffrey of Vinsauf (c. 1210), and Boncompagno da Signa (c. 1235), as well as legal theorists such as Henry de Bracton, try to pin down how ambiguity works, poets such as William Langland seem to revel in the slippages that it affords.

January 2024: Rita Copeland is Sheli Z. and Burton X. Rosenberg Chair in the Humanities and Professor of Classics, English, and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvnia.  Her publications include  Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1991); Criticism and Dissent in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1996); Pedagogy, Intellectuals and Dissent in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge 2001); Medieval Grammar and Rhetoric:  Language Arts and Literary Theory, AD 300-1475 (with I. Sluiter; Oxford, 2009); The Cambridge Companion to Allegory (with P. Struck; 2010), The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature, 800-1558 (2016), and most recently, Emotion and the History of Rhetoric in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 2021).  She was a co-founder of the journal New Medieval Literatures.  She is General Editor (with the late Peter Mack) of the forthcoming Cambridge History of Rhetoric in five volumes.  She has been the recipient of NEH, ACLS, American Philosophical Society, and Guggenheim fellowships.  She is a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America.  She has been a visiting professor at Hebrew University, University of Iceland, and University of Oxford, and a visiting fellow at the Warburg Institute, London.

Jon Whitman, in his opening contribution to the collections of essays Interpretation and Allegory: Antiquity to the Modern Period, poses questions about interpretive communities’ assessment of the “literal sense” of canonical texts, about the criteria for downplaying parts of these texts in the process of allegorization, about the influence of enhanced allegorization on changes in the interpretive communities, and the continuities of idiom and orientation behind such changes. This essay discusses the answers that can be derived from the Muslim tradition, and, in particular, from the system of Muslim legal hermeneutics known as uṣūl al-fiqh, to these questions, and explores how these questions can illuminate interdisciplinary understanding of the functions of the literal sense in contrasting intellectual traditions.

January 2024: Robert Gleave is Professor of Arabic Studies in the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter. From January 2023 until January 2026 he is British Academy/Wolfson Professor with the research project “The Foundations of Modern Shi’ism: The End of Akhbārism and the Beginnings of Uṣūlism.” His research focuses on Islamic legal theory and practice, particularly legal hermeneutics, and the history of Shi’ite legal thought and institutions. He has directed a number of international research projects exploring these issues. His most recent research projects (concluded in 2022), were Law, Authority and Learning in Imami Shi’ite Islam, funded by the European Research Council, and Islamic Law on the Edge, in collaboration with Dr Adday Hernandez-Lopez of Complutense University, Madrid, examining neglected and marginalized areas of Islamic legal studies.

The reputation of Abraham Ibn Ezra (1089 or 1092/93–1164 or 1167) as a key proponent of the peshat (“plain sense”) of Scripture has been questioned due to his tendency (1) to adjust his exegesis to conform with rabbinic halakhic (religious-legal) traditions and (2) his philosophical readings, especially in the Psalms. Drawing upon evidence from his own Sefardic intellectual heritage and by analogy with the complexities of the Christian conception of the “literal sensew” brought to light in recent scholarship, this study aims to clarify the broader definition of peshat conceived by Ibn Ezra that incorporated interpretive considerations beyond the simplest philological construal of the biblical text.

January 2024: Mordechai Z. Cohen is Professor of Bible and Associate Dean at the Bernard Revel Graduate School of Jewish Studies and Director of the Chinese-Jewish Conversation at Yeshiva University in New York. His research focuses on Jewish Bible interpretation in its Muslim and Christian cultural contexts, as well as a comparison with traditional interpretation of Chinese classical texts. Among his publications are Three Approaches to Biblical Metaphor (Brill Academic Publishers 2003; 2nd edition 2008), Opening the Gates of Interpretation (Brill Academic Publishers 2011), The Rule of Peshat (University of Pennsylvania Press 2020), and Rashi, Biblical Interpretation, and Latin Learning (Cambridge University Press 2021).

The Book of Job, like other ancient Near Eastern and biblical texts, makes relatively frequent use of gestures in its discourse. The interpretation of these gestures is often moot. Is a particular gesture physical, which is to say literal, or (also) symbolic, which is to say figurative? How is a gesture’s meaning in a particular context to be divined? Job’s placing his hand over his mouth, for example, is almost universally understood to reflect his self-censure, his silencing of himself. Comparing other instances of this gesture, in Job and elsewhere, leads to a very different nuance of meaning. Silencing oneself is not self-censure but rather an indication of a desire to listen or hear more. This and other gestures in Job will be discussed with attention to the criteria by which meaning, in such instances, is (or is not) determined.

January 2024: Edward L. Greenstein is professor emeritus of Bible at Bar-Ilan University. He has held professorships at the Jewish Theological Seminary and Tel Aviv University and has taught at the Columbia University Graduate School, Yale, Princeton, the Hebrew University, and elsewhere. Recipient of the EMET Prize ("Israel’s Nobel") in the field of Humanities-Biblical Studies, Greenstein has authored and edited numerous works, most prominently Job: A New Translation  (Yale University Press, 2019). He is currently writing commentaries on Job, Lamentations, and Ruth, as well as other books.

This essay explores the convergence of new emphases on the literal-historical sense in biblical exegesis, the burgeoning of interreligious polemic, and aspects of the commonality of Jewish and Christian cultural experiences early in the 12^th century. It probes instructive similarity and difference in the Song of Songs commentaries of Rashi (Solomon ben Isaac of Troyes, 1040–1105) and Honorius Augustodunensis (d. after 1140), particularly in the Song’s praise of the Shulamite in 6:10–7:11. Their commentaries signal the importance of contemporary interreligious debate, of Christian hopes to convert the Jews, and of expectations for the ultimate salvation of exiled Israel at the end time. Most impressively, they reflect a shared landscape characterized by growing awareness of the other and the need to situate the other on one’s own map of the world.

January 2024: Jeremy Cohen is professor emeritus in the Department of Jewish History at Tel Aviv University, where he held the Spiegel Family Foundation Chair for European Jewish History. He has authored seven books, edited or co-edited another eight, and published some fifty articles – on the multifaceted interactions of Jews and Christians from antiquity until early modern times: interreligious polemics, biblical exegesis, historiography, martyrology, and more. These works include The Friars and the Jews (1982), Essential Papers on Judaism and Christianity in Conflict (1991), From Witness to Witchcraft (1996), Living Letters of the Law (1999), Sanctifying the Name of God (2004), Christ Killers (2007), and The Salvation of Israel (2022)

Combining textual analysis, cultural contextualization, and the history of ideas, this essay excavates the complex “literal sense” of Emma Lazarus’s iconic sonnet, “The New Colossus.”  Beginning with the deliberate misreading of the statue’s intended and acknowledged signification and noting the poem’s network of contrarieties, the essay dwells on the contrast between the “wretched refuse” on Ward’s Island and decadent Gilded Age exhibition where the poem was first read; it goes on to argue that the poem disables the connection between progress and poverty, reinvigorates the rhetoric of asylum, points to the Hebraic roots of American history, and reimagines American modernity as a benign merging of contrarieties.

January 2024: Michael P. Kramer is Professor Emeritus in the Department of English Literature and Linguistics at Bar-Ilan University.  He has authored and edited numerous works on Jewish and American literature.  His most recent book is an annotated translation of S.Y. Agnon’s And the Crooked Shall be Made Straight.

The rise of autofiction in the 2010s can be partially explained by the genre’s reflection of the contemporary work ethic, specifically its demand to use personal life as part of people’s work. Readers can recognize their tendency to use life for work in the way autofiction writers utilize their experience to write. This paper argues that Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be? (2010), one of the primary examples of contemporary autofiction, deals with the idea of using life for work in the context of increased expectation of employers to do so. At first, social engagement and writing are presented as competing for the protagonist’s attention. Then through the development of her friendship with the painter Margaux and tape-recording their conversation, life turns into a resource for writing. Sheila hopes that the new relationship with a friend, mediated and preserved through recordings, will save her writing project. It is not just that life is an inspiration for writing, but that it actively contributes to work by providing a text that will be part of the novel we are reading. Then as the novel progresses, problems with this new arrangement come up, and we are asked to question the viability of subordinating personal relationships to work. By its end, a temporary truce between work and life is presented, one that may be satisfying to readers but does not subvert the contemporary work ethic.

August 2023: David Hadar teaches English literature at Beit Berl College and Kaye College, Israel. His work has appeared in journals such as Narrative and Studies in American Jewish Literature. His book Affiliated Identities in Jewish American Literature was published in 2020.

Saul Bellow’s “Gothic Ontology: The Victim and More Die of Heartbreak” examines the different types of Gothic employed by Saul Bellow in The Victim (1947) and More Die of Heartbreak (1987). The article argues that in The Victim Gothic doubling becomes erased by an idea of hospitality which challenges the status of the Gothic ‘other’. This is contrasted with More Die of Heartbreak where the Gothic is used in order to critically read the psychological and emotional damage caused by a materialist culture. The article explores Bellow’s complex engagement with the Gothic and examines how he employs the Gothic to raise questions about ontology and materialism.

August 2023: Andrew Smith is Professor of Nineteenth-Century English Literature at the University of Sheffield where he co-directs the Centre for the History of the Gothic. He is the author or editor of over 20 published books including Gothic Fiction and the Writing of Trauma, 1914-1934: The Ghosts of World War One (2022), Gothic Death 1740-1914: A Literary History (2016), The Ghost Story 1840-1920: A Cultural History (2010), Gothic Literature (2007, revised 2013), Victorian Demons (2004) and Gothic Radicalism (2000). He is currently writing a book on Dickens and the Gothic for Cambridge University Press. With Professor Ben Fisher he co-edits the series “Gothic Literary Studies” and “Gothic Authors: Critical Revisions” for the University of Wales Press. With Professor William Hughes he co-edits the “Gothic Companions” series for Edinburgh University Press.  He is a past president of the International Gothic Association.