The Introduction presents how the traditional story of medieval ‘affective piety’ is more complicated than we have tended to allow in the historiography. I summarise this historiography, showing how it has neglected the possibility of affectivity before Anselm and in the eleventh-century male Benedictine context. I argue that by looking at Fécamp as a wellspring of eleventh-century monastic affective piety, we can better understand what its uses were, as well as its reception, in its earliest identified medieval context. I assert that attention to emotional devotion in the Benedictine context deepens our understanding of Benedictine monasticism itself, bringing into focus both the spiritual lives of monastic individuals and the interior dimensions of eleventh-century monastic reform. Emotional reform emerges as an important aspect of my picture of the period, alongside the practices of exterior, regular, or institutional reform already detailed by other scholars.

Biblically, we Jews identify God with Truth and Truth with Justice. But we also identify Justice in its highest form (tzedakah) with generosity or grace (hesed) and grace in turn with the beauty that finds its source and highest peak in God.

The conclusion brings together the various threads of this study and discusses the manifold roles that ethnic stereotypes play in the context of the Pauline corpus. Informed by the reception-historical sections in the preceding chapters, it explores the complicated and problematic history of interpretation of these moments in the Pauline letter archive and their impact on more recent NT scholarship. It concludes with reflections on possible ways to respond to these texts in the twenty-first century.

Niketas Stethatos’s composed the Life of Symeon the New Theologian and edited all of Symeon’s literary works. The result is mixed: an erotically charged corpus and a purified body. The Life of Symeon offers a strange portrait of the erotics of devotion, this time devotion to a saint. At the climax of the text, Symeon is put on trial for excessive devotion to an icon of his spiritual father. Through a complex series of analogies, Niketas reveals the queer erotics of icon devotion, a central feature of medieval Orthodox religious practice. He also connects his own discipleship to with acts of authorship and his own authority to write and edit. The succession of monastic teachers and the transmission of monastic teaching becomes a form of queer replication or generation.

The Byzantine abbot, Symeon the New Theologian (949–1022) described the monk’s union with God through images of marriage, embrace, penetration, and insemination. In illustrated the consummation of a wedding where both Christ and the monk are male, Symeon describes activities that were strictly forbidden and severely punished in the homosocial environment of the monastery. Symeon warns his audience to understand him “always spiritually” and not be “wretchedly defiled.” Yet it is not sufficient to say, “It is just a metaphor.” Like all metaphors, these homoerotic images point to things in the monks’ real world. Symeon employed same-sex desires and same-sex sexuality to structure the experience of the love of God, defining a mysticism in distinctly queer terms.

Dodona is among the best-known Greek oracles, with thousands of lead lamellae relating the questions asked to Zeus. But understanding how they were used, relying on epigraphy, with the literary tradition and its usual stereotypes about oracles, proves impossible. Literary sources emphasise the ambiguity of questions and answers, while the engraved questions, ignored by the literary tradition, are obviously formulated to be answered by ‘yes’ or ‘no’. From this basis, this essay explores when these questions (and the answers that we do not possess) were written and used in some ritual way(s). This could have been at the beginning or the end of the consultation, or somewhere in between. We do not know if the texts transpose the question asked orally verbatim, nor if all the consultants were following a strict procedure. Most of the questions are too short to be understood by the officials, and the consultation was partly if not fully oral. Some detours about quasi-identical questions, abecedaries and lot oracles clarify this picture, but this enquiry highlights our ignorance about the procedure and warns against simplistic interpretations drawn from incomplete documentation.

The ninth-century Chronicle of George the Monk reveals the history of Byzantine attitudes toward male homoeroticism. George’s retelling of the emasculation of two sixth-century bishops accused of pederasty triggers a long rant against men who have sex with men and the confusion of gender categories caused by eunuchs. George draws on patristic sources and biblical interpretation of the fate of Sodom, revealing the overlapping and contradictory elements of his opprobrium against men who have sex with men. George’s quotation of earlier historians, sermons on the letters of Paul by John Chrysostom, and a diatribe against eunuchs by Cyril of Alexandria offers a genealogy of Byzantine homophobia, charting the history of civil and ecclesiastical laws that shifted from an honor culture that impugned men who were penetrated to a legal rhetoric that punished penetrators, that is, from shaming bottoms to criminalizing tops. George was himself a monk, suggesting that monks also desired the eradication of same-sex desires and the punishment of the men who experienced them.

This chapter demonstrates that John’s emotional reform priorities were not solely acted upon within the walls of the monastic community at Fécamp, but also coloured his interactions with the secular world. As the abbot of the most prominent abbey in Normandy, John regularly interacted with lay lords and dukes of Normandy and Holy Roman Empresses, among others. Using charters, letters, and chronicles, this chapter shows how John’s particular brand of piety was not restricted only to the contemplative moments he had inside the monastery, but also motivated John’s wider responsibilities as a politically, socially, and economically involved abbot. This chapter thus argues against the historiographical narrative that abbots were either spiritual recluses who resented their worldly activities or political players who relished their worldly power. Instead, this chapter shows that an abbot’s worldly activity could be part and parcel with his spiritual goals, aiming to erode our modern notion that worldly activity could not also be spiritual behaviour in medieval Europe.

Against recent alternative interpretations, this chapter argues that Col 3:11 utilizes and hence confirms a derogatory stereotype of the Scythians. It proposes a fresh reading that argues that the point of Col 3:11 is not that there are no longer any social distinctions, but that there are no moral distinctions: the author argues that everyone, including even the notoriously barbaric Scythian, is capable and hence called upon to adhere to the moral standard that is advocated in the letter.

This chapter critically surveys the many twentieth and twenty-first-century attempts to absolve the author of Titus 1:12 (“Cretans are always liars, vicious brutes, lazy gluttons”) of the charge of ethnic stereotyping. It further demonstrates that for much of the history of interpretation this derogatory, sweeping generalization of the Cretans did not raise any qualms, but rather served to support and legitimize ethnic stereotyping of this and other ethnic groups.

This essay draws conclusions from a quantitative analysis of the thousands of lead tablets from Dodona published by Dakaris, Vokotopoulou and Christidis in 2013. It argues that the use of lead tablets in the divination process grew rapidly in the fifth century due to the increased availability of lead in particular from Attika. The tablets would have been left in visible locations after use before being cleared away to be ready for reuse after a period of time. This practice of displaying low-value metal objects is compared to the modern phenomena of coin-trees and love-locks. The use of tablets appears to decline rapidly through the fourth century, with few inscriptions dating to the period after 300 BCE. A number of explanations are offered: the monumentalization of the sanctuary in the third century making the practice of leaving tablets on display less acceptable; the changing role of the sanctuary leading to a change in clientele and consultation practice; and the need for lead for the construction of the large stone buildings resulting in the melting down of lead tablets, with more recent tablets being disproportionately affected.