Books by Monika Amsler
The Babylonian Talmud and Late Antique Book Culture, 2023
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Knowledge Construction in Late Antiquity (open access), 2023
Social Studies of the sciences have long analyzed and exposed the constructed nature of knowledge... more Social Studies of the sciences have long analyzed and exposed the constructed nature of knowledge. Pioneering studies of knowledge production in laboratories (e.g., Latour/Woolgar 1979; Knorr-Cetina 1981) have identified factors that affect processes that lead to the generation of scientific data and their subsequent interpretation, such as money, training and curriculum, location and infrastructure, biography-based knowledge and talent, and chance. More recent theories of knowledge construction have further identified different forms of knowledge, such as tacit, intuitive, explicit, personal, and social knowledge. These theoretical frameworks and critical terms can help reveal and clarify the processes that led to ancient data gathering, information and knowledge production.
The contributors use late-antique hermeneutical associations as means to explore intuitive or even tacit knowledge; they appreciate mistakes as a platform to study the value of personal knowledge and its premises; they think about rows and tables, letter exchanges, and schools as platforms of distributed cognition; they consider walls as venues for social knowledge production; and rethink the value of social knowledge in scholarly genealogies—then and now.
https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783111010311/html#overview
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Late Ancient Recipe Literature by Monika Amsler
Female Bodies and Female Practitioners in the Medical Traditions of the Late Antique Mediterranean World, 2024
The Mishnah mentions en passant measures taken to treat the wound that
results from the circumcis... more The Mishnah mentions en passant measures taken to treat the wound that
results from the circumcision of an eight-day-old boy. The Babylonian Talmud appends a list of anomalies that can occur in newborn babies as well as eight treatments for those anomalies. A literary-critical analysis of the passage shows that five of these eight recipes seem to be genuine medical recipes that apply to newborns in general. Of these five, at least
one is more meaningfully understood in the context of medical recipes for small cattle. This raises the question of the relationship between veterinary and human medicine in late antiquity in general, and in the Talmud in particular. A preliminary investigation shows that a conscious conflation of therapies is unlikely because veterinary and human medicine were
kept strictly apart. Therefore, either the five recipes were excerpted from a veterinary treatise, or the recipe was written by someone who thought newborn cattle and babies were comparable in nature. In any event, the recipes concerning anomalies in newborn humans or, possibly, small cattle, are distinctive among late antique medical writings.
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Hebrew Studies 64, 2023
This paper investigates the much-discussed Babylonian incantation bowls inspired by approaches fr... more This paper investigates the much-discussed Babylonian incantation bowls inspired by approaches from thing theory, such as the concept of affordance, and from cognitive studies, such as the distributed cognition hypothesis. For once, the material aspects of the bowl amulets and how people may have perceived them are the center of the analysis, not the texts or the images that are inscribed in them. Thus, I discuss the different and versatile affordances (“options for action”) that the bowls offered people living in late antique Mesopotamia and what their physical presence may have meant in terms of the production of an emotional response (affect). The preparation process of an incantation bowl, including the choice of bowl, ink preparation, and the procuration of suitable texts, may be seen as a sign of affect and emotion on behalf of several household members. These practices are ultimately very comparable to physical caregiving, and production of a bowl amulet is thereby shown to be firmly grounded in late antique Babylonian household medicine.
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Asdiwal, 2022
The first part of this study dealt with the rational and logical premises behind the use of unint... more The first part of this study dealt with the rational and logical premises behind the use of unintelligible words, the so-called voces magicae, as a means to effect change in a broken system (physical or social), a practice that gained momentum in the imperial period. Part 1 concluded that following the longstanding use of words as cures in carmina, prayers, or hymns, words and letters were ascribed dynamis, potency, in the imperial period. As a result, letters were treated with the same methods with which people treated herbs, foods, and other materia medica in order to use their potency to effect change. Since much of ancient materia medica was part of people’s everyday regimen, the use of these ingredients for change-effecting purposes had to differ from their regular use to produce a different effect. In the same vein, voces, sometimes used alongside substantial ingredients, had to run counter to everyday speech and writing practices to effect substantial change. For such differentiation, obscure words were chosen ; unnatural strings of vowels or consonants were composed; words were written backwards or repeated multiple times; phrases were decontextualized; or idiosyncratic alphabets were used.
The present article locates the most frequent methods applied to transform words into change- effecting ingredients amidst imperial period and late-antique education, school exercises, and ensuing forms of literary representation. It will then be argued that the phenomenon of the voces is conceptually linked not just to therapeutic practice but also to military strategies. Especially, the habit of depicting voces in formations will be linked to strategic charts found in military manuals.
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Asdiwal 16, 2021
This is the first of two papers attempting to trace the persuasive power of the imperial period/l... more This is the first of two papers attempting to trace the persuasive power of the imperial period/late ancient phenomenon voces magicae within the period’s intellectual frame of reference. This first paper will look at the logical premises more broadly ; the second paper will then contextualize the methods used to separate letters and words from their general usage, and whence these methods may have been transferred. Indeed, the present paper will argue that the voces are not magicae, but, rather, the result of attempts to differentiate letters and words from their habitual use in communication for the purpose of effecting change in non-material but also material systems. A similar distinction can be observed in medical recipes, which differentiate foodstuffs and actions from everyday usage to separate between diet and drug. Rather than magical, the paper argues, the voces were an expression of a change that resulted from the increased exchange of knowledge and investment in education since the Hellenistic period.
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Journal of Early Christian History, 2022
The article investigates possible practical and intellectual contexts of talmudic medical recipes... more The article investigates possible practical and intellectual contexts of talmudic medical recipes, and especially the ones that introduce therapies with a verb, such as “bring XY.” According to my count, there are 47 such recipes disseminated over the Talmud, and most of them likely stem from the same source, a treatise of simple remedies. These recipes often provide multiple therapies, a feature that has caused scholars to doubt their effectiveness. This ineffectiveness would, according to these scholars, already have been realised in late antiquity and therefore caused users to add another try. Contrary to these assumptions, I argue that alternative therapies fulfil a wide range of tasks, from offering therapies more suitable to the season or the patient, to accounting for an aesthetics of variegation.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/2222582X.2021.2001668
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Religion: Theory & Method by Monika Amsler
Zeitschrift für Religionskunde, 2022
The concept of religion as a universal phenomenon– and, based on it, the academic category–has be... more The concept of religion as a universal phenomenon– and, based on it, the academic category–has been cri- ticized in recent years for its underlying eurocentrism. Recent scholarship exposed how the establishment of the categories “world religions” (and the respective pa- radigm) was a product of colonialism and only served (and still serves) to maintain western, white hegemony. Although this postmodern criticism may seem a bit ex- cessive, even “fashionable” at times, it is neither entire- ly wrong nor should it be ignored. Nevertheless, talking about religions at school cannot be stopped. Rather, as others have argued, more attention should be paid to how religion is talked about (e.g., Bleisch, 2019; Frank, 2016; Gasser, 2019). Since neutral speech is hardly possible, however, this claim should not be made de- pendent on the judgment of teachers or on textbooks alone. Therefore, the article proposes to introduce a different, queer pedagogy for the study of religion in schools, at least at times. Queer pedagogy turns the subject into a queer time-space in which students do not primarily learn that others think differently, but in which they become aware of their own thought mecha- nisms in relation to political and public discourses.
Open access under: https://religionskunde.ch/images/Ausgaben_ZFRK/2022/ZFRK_10_2022_Amsler.pdf
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ASDIWAL 12, 2017
The Study of Religion faces continuous challenges regarding the comparative nature of the term «r... more The Study of Religion faces continuous challenges regarding the comparative nature of the term «religion». So far, no de nition has been offered that could account for its de ciencies. Moreover, for half a century now it was continuously argued that the term is inherently Christian (Protestant) and modern. Recent studies fur- ther claim that the use of «religion» as an analytical category should be abandoned.The present article asks how, in fact, «religion» could become a category and what role categorization came to play in the modern academy and in modern epistemology. It is demonstrated that the constant running in circles in the Study of Religion with regard to its own subject results from the lack of a true alternative to classical logic. Even though there is a growing body of evidence suggesting that classical logic has reached its limits as an epistemological auxiliary, postmodern logics do not differ substantially. This paper is a call for an active contribution of scholars of religion in the pan-academic quest for a true alternative to classical logic. In the Study of Religion a new logic should enable the concept of «transcendence without contrary» (Latour).To achieve this, a rst step might be to drop the idea that religion is a category and, instead, work with time- and space-bound concepts.
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Fan Fiction and Ancient Writing Culture by Monika Amsler
Transformative Works and Cultures, 2019
The Babylonian Talmud provides a series of stories about a certain Ḥanina ben Dosa, the last of t... more The Babylonian Talmud provides a series of stories about a certain Ḥanina ben Dosa, the last of the so-called men of deed according to the Mishna. This Ḥanina ben Dosa appears only sparsely in the earlier Palestinian rabbinic works. It seems therefore that the later, more elaborate, and more numerous stories about this character in the Babylonian Talmud represent a case of fan fiction. Using the distinction between canon and fanon, as is common in fan fiction communities, I reconstruct the conventions applied by the canon (Mishna and Tosefta) to the character Ḥanina ben Dosa, as well as the expanded conventions accepted by the fannish community (or interpretive community) represented by the Babylonian Talmud. The fanon used in a story cycle will be tested against an isolated Ḥanina ben Dosa story in a different Talmudic tractate as well as against an extra-Talmudic story. The applied conventions with regard to Ḥanina ben Dosa as adopted in an historiola of an incantation on an Aramaic amulet bowl from Mesopotamia will eventually appear to be the same as those of the Talmud (https://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/1647).
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Transformative Works and Cultures, 2019
Fan fiction in antiquity suffers from a lack of certainty regarding what is canon: is what is now... more Fan fiction in antiquity suffers from a lack of certainty regarding what is canon: is what is now considered fan fiction really fan fiction, or is it another contemporary version of the canon? The concept of fan fiction thus ought to be combined with the idea of transmedia storytelling, building on snowball-effect stories. This approach is used in an analysis of how the saints in late antiquity became a characteristic of Christianity. This era used fan fiction–like texts describing saints' life stories; shrines and dedicated basilicas, which allowed distinct communities to gather and celebrate; pilgrimages, which combined adventure and biographical identification with the beloved saint; and pictures, relics, and pilgrim tokens. The Christian world in late antiquity has characteristics reminiscent of the universes created by transmedia storytelling, the aim of which is complete immersion in content (https://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/1645/2259).
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Rabbinica by Monika Amsler
NTT Journal for Theology and the Study of Religion, 2024
This review article focuses predominantly on the way intertextuality is addressed in the volume: ... more This review article focuses predominantly on the way intertextuality is addressed in the volume: The Literature of the Sages: A Re-visioning (ed. Christine Hayes). A significant and informative portion of the work is dedicated to intertextuality, including a comprehensive history of the respective scholarship in the study of rabbinic texts. Indeed, rabbinic texts are full of intertextuality in terms of parallels, implicit or explicit referentiality, quotes, allusions, or simply shared vocabulary. The review will point out that although A Re-visioning does a fine job in summarizing and reviewing prior scholarship (esp. Hayes) and in gesturing at new directions (Gray), the contributions lack consideration of the physical aspects of texts, which enabled, shaped, and perhaps prevented intertextuality on an intellectual and a material-related level.
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Knowledge Construction in Late Antiquity (open access), 2023
This paper explores possible factors responsible for knowledge pre-sented as numerical ... more This paper explores possible factors responsible for knowledge pre-sented as numerical maxims found in the Babylonian Talmud. Written in a late Hebrew, the maxims follow the pattern “X ‘things’ do/are...” and have previous-ly been analyzed in the context of mnemotechnical strategies and pedagogy. Yet the sheer number of these maxims — 54 sayings alone on “threes” — appears to contradict at least a straightforward connection with pedagogy. Indeed, the circumstances that produce a certain stock of knowledge are not necessarily identical with its future use. To trace the maxim’s possible origins, Ausonius’s “poetic itch,” according to himself responsible for his Riddle of the Number Three, will serve as a starting point for an investigation into social and intellec-tual factors involved in the construction of this condensed form of knowledge: poetic contests, numerology, and the concept and place of pastimes in late-antique society. The paper will thereby show that incentives for accumulating knowledge were as multi-faceted as occasions to implement knowledge.
open access link: https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783111010311-008/html
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Papers by Monika Amsler
Ancient Jew Review, 2019
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Book Reviews by Monika Amsler
Ancient West and East 21: 328-330, 2022
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Zeitschrift für Religionswissenschaft, 2019
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Bedenbender, A. (ed.), Judäo-Christentum. Die gemeinsame Wurzel von rabbinischem Judentum und frü... more Bedenbender, A. (ed.), Judäo-Christentum. Die gemeinsame Wurzel von rabbinischem Judentum und früher Kirche, in: Judaica 71/2 (2015).
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Books by Monika Amsler
The contributors use late-antique hermeneutical associations as means to explore intuitive or even tacit knowledge; they appreciate mistakes as a platform to study the value of personal knowledge and its premises; they think about rows and tables, letter exchanges, and schools as platforms of distributed cognition; they consider walls as venues for social knowledge production; and rethink the value of social knowledge in scholarly genealogies—then and now.
https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783111010311/html#overview
Late Ancient Recipe Literature by Monika Amsler
results from the circumcision of an eight-day-old boy. The Babylonian Talmud appends a list of anomalies that can occur in newborn babies as well as eight treatments for those anomalies. A literary-critical analysis of the passage shows that five of these eight recipes seem to be genuine medical recipes that apply to newborns in general. Of these five, at least
one is more meaningfully understood in the context of medical recipes for small cattle. This raises the question of the relationship between veterinary and human medicine in late antiquity in general, and in the Talmud in particular. A preliminary investigation shows that a conscious conflation of therapies is unlikely because veterinary and human medicine were
kept strictly apart. Therefore, either the five recipes were excerpted from a veterinary treatise, or the recipe was written by someone who thought newborn cattle and babies were comparable in nature. In any event, the recipes concerning anomalies in newborn humans or, possibly, small cattle, are distinctive among late antique medical writings.
The present article locates the most frequent methods applied to transform words into change- effecting ingredients amidst imperial period and late-antique education, school exercises, and ensuing forms of literary representation. It will then be argued that the phenomenon of the voces is conceptually linked not just to therapeutic practice but also to military strategies. Especially, the habit of depicting voces in formations will be linked to strategic charts found in military manuals.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/2222582X.2021.2001668
Religion: Theory & Method by Monika Amsler
Open access under: https://religionskunde.ch/images/Ausgaben_ZFRK/2022/ZFRK_10_2022_Amsler.pdf
Fan Fiction and Ancient Writing Culture by Monika Amsler
Rabbinica by Monika Amsler
open access link: https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783111010311-008/html
Papers by Monika Amsler
Book Reviews by Monika Amsler
The contributors use late-antique hermeneutical associations as means to explore intuitive or even tacit knowledge; they appreciate mistakes as a platform to study the value of personal knowledge and its premises; they think about rows and tables, letter exchanges, and schools as platforms of distributed cognition; they consider walls as venues for social knowledge production; and rethink the value of social knowledge in scholarly genealogies—then and now.
https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783111010311/html#overview
results from the circumcision of an eight-day-old boy. The Babylonian Talmud appends a list of anomalies that can occur in newborn babies as well as eight treatments for those anomalies. A literary-critical analysis of the passage shows that five of these eight recipes seem to be genuine medical recipes that apply to newborns in general. Of these five, at least
one is more meaningfully understood in the context of medical recipes for small cattle. This raises the question of the relationship between veterinary and human medicine in late antiquity in general, and in the Talmud in particular. A preliminary investigation shows that a conscious conflation of therapies is unlikely because veterinary and human medicine were
kept strictly apart. Therefore, either the five recipes were excerpted from a veterinary treatise, or the recipe was written by someone who thought newborn cattle and babies were comparable in nature. In any event, the recipes concerning anomalies in newborn humans or, possibly, small cattle, are distinctive among late antique medical writings.
The present article locates the most frequent methods applied to transform words into change- effecting ingredients amidst imperial period and late-antique education, school exercises, and ensuing forms of literary representation. It will then be argued that the phenomenon of the voces is conceptually linked not just to therapeutic practice but also to military strategies. Especially, the habit of depicting voces in formations will be linked to strategic charts found in military manuals.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/2222582X.2021.2001668
Open access under: https://religionskunde.ch/images/Ausgaben_ZFRK/2022/ZFRK_10_2022_Amsler.pdf
open access link: https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783111010311-008/html