Public lecture by Dr. Theofili Kampianaki (University of Birmingham), sponsored by the The Michael and Elaine Serling Institute for Jewish Studies and Modern Israel at Michigan State University.
No Jewish works, except the biblical texts, were used by Christians on such a
large scale as the Judean Antiquities and Judean War of the Jewish-Roman historian
Flavius Josephus (37-100 CE). His works (narrating the events from the biblical
Creation to the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE) became central to the
construction of Christian thought and identity across the Greek-speaking East
and the Latin-speaking West in the Middle Ages. Dr. Kampianaki will explore
the reasons why and the ways through which a notable Jewish author, such as
Josephus, entered the Christian sphere, while his Jewish origins were still being
acknowledged. It will further investigate how Josephus was perceived particularly in the Medieval Greek literary tradition and how his works played a key role in the formation of genres recording history of the Church or of the Byzantine state. Theofili Kampianaki is a Research Fellow at the School of History and Cultures in the University of Birmingham in the UK. She holds a Master’s and a Doctorate in Medieval Greek and Latin Languages from the University of Oxford. She is currently revising her doctoral thesis, which examined the twelfth-century chronicle of John Zonaras, a best-seller of the Greek-speaking world in medieval times, for submission
to Oxford University Press. She is particularly interested in the reception of classical authors in medieval literature, having published articles on the adaptation of Plutarch by Medieval Greek chroniclers and the reception of the historian Flavius Josephus in Medieval Greek and Latin literature. In the course of her studies, she has received scholarships from Wolfson College Oxford, the Alexander Onassis Foundation and the A.G. Leventis Foundation.