We have just published a new supplement: To Believe or Not to Believe?, edited by Benjamin M.J. De Vos

We have just published a new supplement:

To Believe or Not to Believe?
Strategies of Truth(fulness) and Reading Hermeneutics in Premodern Christian Narrative
Benjamin M.J. De Vos
Ancient Narrative Supplementum 35

Late antique and early medieval Christian narratives are deeply concerned with truth: how it is communicated, embodied, authenticated, and believed. Yet truth in these texts is multilayered and can even be at times ambiguous. Riddles, secondhand eyewitness testimony and hearsay evidence, paradoxographical descriptions and extraordinary miracles, literary stylization, and even narrative ambiguity all become part of complex strategies through which Christian authors reflected on believability and epistemic authority, and shaped religious meaning.

This volume offers a wide-ranging and interdisciplinary exploration of truth and truthfulness in Christian narrative traditions from Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages. Bringing together approaches from literary criticism, narratology, rhetoric, philosophy, gender studies, and cognitive theory, the contributions investigate how Christian texts guided readers toward belief, in the full complexity of this concept, while simultaneously foregrounding the constructed nature of narrative itself.

The essays examine an extensive corpus of material, including the apocryphal Acts of the apostles, the Pseudo-Clementine literature, martyrdom narratives, miracle traditions, epic poetry, and later receptions in Arabic, Armenian, Ethiopic, Greek, Latin, and Slavonic traditions. Particular attention is paid to authentication strategies, reader immersion, eyewitness discourse,  paradoxography, intertextuality, and the relationship between fictionality and verisimilitude. Several chapters further explore how female protagonists and gendered discourse became privileged sites for negotiating moral, philosophical, and religious truths.

By situating Christian storytelling within broader ancient literary, philosophical, and religious frameworks, this volume demonstrates how premodern Christian narratives did not merely aim to transmit truth but actively produced and negotiated truth(fulness) through sophisticated literary and rhetorical practices.

Please visit the Archives of the Ancient Narrative website for the free files of the Frontmatter, the Introduction, Contributors, and Indices, or follow this link: https://ancientnarrative.com/issue/archive.

The PDF ebook for private individuals is available on the website of Barkhuis Publishing.

The hardcover print volume can be purchased from Barkhuis Publishing, Casemate Publishers, and Amazon.com.

Institutional buyers have their own channels to buy the printed book and the pdf ebook.