On Religion and Memory

Babette Hellemans (External Editor) Babette Hellemans earned her PhD at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and Utrecht University. She is currently Assistant Professor in History at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands. Hellemans has published on historiographical and intellectual themes such as the anthropology of eschatology in Western medieval culture, including modern theories of temporality, semantics, and images. She is the author of La Bible Moralisée: une oeuvre à part entière. Temporalité, sémiotique et création au XIIIe siècle (Brepols 2010). At present she is completing a monograph, Peter Abelard (1079–1142) and the Varieties of the Self: An Intellectual Biography.Willemien Otten (External Editor) Willemien Otten was Professor of the History of Christianity at Utrecht University from 1997. Since 2007 she has been Professor of the Theology and the History of Christianity at the University of Chicago. She has published on Western medieval and early Christian theology, including the continuity of (Neo) Platonic themes. Among her books are The Anthropology of Johannes Scottus Eriugena (Brill 1991) andFrom Paradise to Paradigm: A Study of Twelfth-Century Humanism (Brill 2004). With Karla Pollmannshe is the co-editor of The Oxford Guide to the Historical Reception of Augustine(forthcoming 2013). Her current project involves a comparison between Johannes Scottus Eriugena and Ralph Waldo Emerson on the role of nature and the self.Burcht Pranger (External Editor) Burcht Pranger is Professor Emeritus in the History of Christianity at the University of Amsterdam. He has published extensively on medieval monasticism, in particular Anselm of Canterbury and Bernard of Clairvaux. Among his books are Bernard of Clairvaux and the Shape of Monastic Thought (Brill 1994) and The Artifi ciality of Christianity: Essays on the Poetics of Monasticism (Stanford 2003). In 2010 he published his Eternity's Ennui: Temporality, Perseverance and Voice in Augustine and Western Literature (Brill).

This creatively eclectic volume launches a bold experiment in exploring what it might mean to take Augustine's aporetic and non-linear understanding of time and eternity seriously. The questions posed are simultaneously historiographical and literary, on the one hand, and philosophical and theological, on the other. In exploring the relation between religion and pastness, the authors shuttle backward and forward in time, traverse theological and religious differences, and consider works of music and painting alongside those of literature and philosophy. At their best, the essays are fresh, insightful, moving--and challenging.---—Virginia Burrus, Drew University "At once precise and polyphonic, On Religion and Memory takes both terms in a wonderfully wide range of senses. Language, music, and art; meditation and monasticism; memory and oblivion; time's contraction and its extension are interconnected and played off one another. This provocative anthology deserves to be read widely in philosophy, theology, religious studies, literary studies—indeed, across the humanities—to create and continue conversations about the curious structures and experiences of memory."---—Karmen MacKendrick, Le Moyne College