I ARRIVED IN WASHINGTON late on Thursday evening. Even though the conference technically begins only today, there was lots to do on Friday. In the morning and early afternoon I went to a seminar on "How to Study the Dead Sea Scrolls: An International Working Group on Methods and Scrolls Scholarship," chaired by Maxine Grossman of the University of Maryland. She's editing a book on this topic and a number of contributors attended. I'm doing a chapter on "counterfactual history" and you can get a general idea of what it's about from this conference paper from a couple of years ago.

In the evening I went to a session of the Philadelphia Seminar on Christian Origins in which David Brakke of Indiana University gave the following very interesting paper:

In his recent book, _Demons and the Making of the Monk: Spiritual Combat in Early Christianity_ (Harvard University Press 2006), Brakke considers the creation of Egyptian monastic identity alongside the development of demonology. Using recent theoretical discussions of race and gender to explore the Othering of these demonic forces, Brakke's insights fit well into our theme for this year.

The title for his presentation is "Shifting Strategies: Monks, Demons, and Historians."

There are two recommended reading items:

1. "The Lady Appears: Materializations of 'Woman' in Early Monastic Literature." Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 33 (2003): 387-402. Reprinted in The Cultural Turn in Late Ancient Studies: Asceticism, Gender, and Historiography, 25-39. Ed. Dale B. Martin and Patricia Cox Miller. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005.

2. "Ethiopian Demons: Male Sexuality, the Black-Skinned Other, and the Monastic Self." Journal of the History of Sexuality 10 (2001): 501-35. A briefer and less theoretically explicit version is chapter 7 of Brakke's Demons and the Making of the Monk (Harvard University Press, 2006).