Historians of all periods face this dilemma: how can we engage the past without being in the past? Attending to the somatic and aesthetic responses that we ourselves have to materials from the past, and elaborating those responses in new forms, might allow us to create new modes of experiencing and engaging past worlds in an intellectually rigorous and yet creative manner. This practice can lay open to us the experience we have of simultaneous temporalities, of worlds tenuously coexisting — perfect, but impossible. The appearance of an unexpected late antiquity might be, in this way, much like a forest making its way through a forest.An interesting literary thought experiment. The essay doesn't deal directly with ancient Judaism, but the approach would certainly be applicable to it.
This is the first of five essays scheduled for Marginalia's new Late Antiquity and the New Humanities Forum. HT Ancient Jew Review Twitter.