Slow Fall of Babel
Languages and Identities in Late Antique Christianity
Slow Fall of Babel
Languages and Identities in Late Antique Christianity
This item is a print on demand title and will be dispatched in 1-3 weeks.
This eBook is available for download by customers in the UK and selected other countries.
Check if this eBook is available in your region
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9781108833462
Number of Pages: 400
Published: 09/12/2021
Width: 15.7 cm
Height: 23.5 cm
This is the story of the transformation of the ways in which the increasingly Christianized elites of the late antique Mediterranean experienced and conceptualized linguistic differences. The metaphor of Babel stands for the magnificent edifice of classical culture that was about to reach the sky, but remained self-sufficient and self-contained in its virtual monolingualism – the paradigm within which even Latin was occasionally considered just a dialect of Greek. The gradual erosion of this vision is the slow fall of Babel that took place in the hearts and minds of a good number of early Christian writers and intellectuals who represented various languages and literary traditions. This step-by-step process included the discovery and internalization of the existence of multiple other languages in the world, as well as subsequent attempts to incorporate their speakers meaningfully into the holistic and distinctly Christian picture of the universe.
