Guest Speaker: ” Signs of Aporrheta: Alternatives to Narrative Thinking in Late Antique Theurgy”, Renaud Gagné (University of Cambridge)
Kaplan Hall 348Abstract: Innumerable types of graphic marks populated the visual environment of Mediterranean cities in the later Roman empire. Different sign systems competed over every imaginable surface, from walls to papyrus, lead or gems, objects to clothes and bodies, for attention, recognition, and power. That vast repertoire of signs interacted with viewers in a thousand different ways, over and above literacy. Intelligibility was often the exception. A whole constellation of practices and discourses foregrounded the realm of the unintelligible, the aporrheton, and offered the audiences of the later Roman East competing modes for apprehending what is hidden within signs. Anchored in...