Maria E. Doerfler - Böcker

Late antiquity was a perilous time for children, who were often the first victims of economic crisis, war, and disease. They had a one in three chance of dying before their first birthday, with as many as half dying before age ten. Christian writers accordingly sought to speak to the experience of bereavement and to provide cultural scripts for parents who had lost a child. These late ancient writers turned to characters like Eve and Sarah, Job and Jephthah as models for grieving and for confronting or submitting to the divine.  Jephthah's Daughter, Sarah’s Son traces the stories these writers crafted and the ways in which they shaped the lived experience of familial bereavement in ancient Christianity. A compelling social history that conveys the emotional lives of people in the late ancient world, Jephthah's Daughter, Sarah's Son is a powerful portrait of mourning that extends beyond antiquity to the present day.

In late antiquity as in the present age, death left its mark on the lives of families, communities, and societies. Syriac funerary hymns provide important insights into the social, emotional, funerary ritual histories of early Christian communities. Maria Doerfler here explores this body of largely ignored literature that has been attributed to Ephrem the Syrian. Different parts of the collection focus on individuals from a variety of social and ecclesiastical backgrounds: women and children, clergy and ascetics, as well as those who fell victim to natural disasters. The hymns provide insights not only into Syriac Christian ideas about death and the afterlife, but also into their existence, beliefs, and practices more broadly. Through engagement with different theoretical lenses, Doerfler uses instances of personal and communal crisis to elucidate historical and philosophical patterns among late antique Christians, addressing, inter alia, their responses to pandemics, understanding of wealth, and forging communal bonds that transcended death.