Poetry, Religion, and the Past: Syriac Poems on Saint and Martyrs in Late Antiquity

FAIN: FEL-273148-21

Jeffrey Thomas Wickes
St. Louis University (St. Louis, MO 63103-2097)

Research and writing leading to a book analyzing a set of 120 Christian Syriac poems on saints and martyrs, written in the 4th-6th centuries CE, that demonstrate the writing and performance of poetry as a religious practice.

This book explores the relationship between poetry and religion as refracted in a set of 120 poems on saints and martyrs. These poems were written in Syriac, a dialect of Aramaic, between the fourth and sixth centuries C.E., in late antique Rome and Persia. Underlying the particular study are a set of basic questions about poetry, religion, and the past. In what ways are these 120 poems religious? How has the writing and performance of poetry acted as a religious practice? What concepts of religion emerge when we view poetic production in terms of religious practice? How are these questions weighted when the poems and the religious practices around which they developed come from a past culture, one radically different from the contemporary context in which we ask them? Taking Syriac poetry itself as its subject, this is the first study to integrate these questions into a broader account of eastern Christian literature as a distinctive phenomenon.