The Implications of Reading Brian Stock - Colloquium Program, Toronto, 15.03.19 (original) (raw)

Textual Communities, Textual Selves: Essays in Dialogue with Brian Stock (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies Press, 2023)

2023

This volume assembles a collection of studies investigating ways that textual practices in the classical and medieval periods generated collective and individual expressions of identity. Engaging in dialogue with Brian Stock’s contributions to the history of literacy, the essays initiate new conversations about models of interpretation, habits of reading, textual communities, and forms of self-writing. The first group of essays, featuring Seth Lerer, Paul Saenger, and Sarah Spence, not only reflects upon the influence of Stock’s Augustine the Reader, but also examines Augustine’s innovative handling of texts within the literary culture of Late Antiquity. The following group, authored by John Magee, Constant J. Mews, and Marcia L. Colish, responds to The Implications of Literacy by examining ways that the reinterpretation of inherited texts can generate philosophical schools, social reformists, and textual communities. Subsequent contributions by Willemien Otten and Sarah Powrie investigate textual expressions of created nature and thereby build upon the work of Myth and Science in the Twelfth Century. The last three essays by Gur Zak, Jane Tylus, and Catherine Conybeare explore Augustine’s enduring influence beyond the medieval period, as evidenced in the writings of Giovanni Conversini, Catherine of Sienna, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. In so doing, these authors advance the frameworks of After Augustine and Listening for the Text. Personal tributes by Aviad Kleinberg and Natalie Zemon Davis bookend the volume, with each author recollecting fragments of conversations that have shaped a decades-long friendship with the honoree.

Review of Brian Stock's "The Integrated Self: Augustine, the Bible, and Ancient Thought"

Ceræ Journal , 2017

In his latest work, The Integrated Self, Brian Stock continues his long-running project of reading Augustine. In this text, Stock -one of the leading scholars on the subjects of spiritual contemplation and reading in history -sets his focus on the notion of the self. Augustine has traditionally been the point of reference in which scholars

Book Review: Augustine's Inner Dialogue: The Philosophical Soliloquy in Late Antiquity. By Brian Stock

Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 2011

A significant motive for the recent interest in Augustine's early writings appears to be the belief that those books are the product of a youthful and optimistic philosophical seeker, more open than the old bishop whose polemical writings taught Westerners to be pessimistic about their agency and sexuality. Brian Stock's recent investigation of the relationship between Augustine's thinking about the self and his use of the soliloquy both undermines and remains indebted to that common perspective.

Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Henry of Ghent, and John Duns Scotus: On the Theology of the Father's Intellectual Generation of the Word

There are two general routes that Augustine suggests in De Trinitate, XV, 14-16, 23-25, for a psychological account of the Father’s intellectual generation of the Word. Thomas Aquinas and Henry of Ghent, in their own ways, follow the first route; John Duns Scotus follows the second. Aquinas, Henry, and Scotus’s psychological accounts entail different theological opinions. For example, Aquinas (but neither Henry nor Scotus) thinks that the Father needs the Word to know the divine essence. If we compare the theological views entailed by their psychologies we find a trajectory from Aquinas, through Henry, and ending with Scotus. This theological trajectory falsifies a judgment that every Augustinian psychology of the divine persons amounts to a pre-Nicene functional Trinitarianism. This study makes clear how one’s awareness of the theological views entailed by these psychologies enables one to assess more thoroughly psychological accounts of the identity and distinction of the divine persons.