After Augustine

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After Augustine.

A Survey of His Reception from 430 to 2000

This international and interdisciplinary five-year project is made possible by a major research-grant from the Leverhulme Trust.

• Principal Investigator and Director of the Project: Professor Karla Pollmann (St Andrews).
• Principal Collaborator: Professor Willemien Otten (Chicago).

Apart from the two postdoctoral fellows, three doctoral students will also be based in St Andrews. Moreover, contributions from a wider field of scholars in various disciplines are envisaged.

Augustine (354-430) is the most influential ecclesiastical writer in the Latin West. In many significant ways he established what were to become the principal outlines and foundations of Western theology. Moreover, his impact can also be observed in secular areas such as political theory, philosophy of history, psychology, semiotics, epistemology, social ethics, anthropology, and the literary imagination. The history of Augustinian reception has still to be written. In order to map this area and provide relevant material in an accessible way, this project, hosted in St Andrews, will attempt to collect data from as wide a disciplinary spectrum as possible, covering the time from his death up to the end of the 20th century. The material will be disseminated both in a structured website and in print. Additionally, selected strands of reception will be evaluated in separate publications, based on some of the material collected.

While scholars have studied closely Augustinian reception as regards the Scholastic tradition and the Reformation, other areas of influence, such as early Christian poetry or Racine’s tragedies, have been neglected. In particular the 17th to the 20th centuries are heavily under-researched. Investigations mostly concentrate on a certain period, as in Å. Bergvall’s excellent Augustinian Perspectives in the Renaissance (2001), or they select highlights in the history of thought, as in B. Stock’s book (whose title incidentally coincides with the abbreviated heading of this project) After Augustine: the Meditative Reader and the Text (2001). There exist several collections of articles on the reception of ecclesiastical writers, including Augustine, edited, e.g., by L. Grane (1993, 1998), I. Backus (1997) and G.B. Matthews (1999), and two chapters in E. Stump and N. Kretzmann (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Augustine (2001).

No attempt has ever been made to pursue Augustinian reception as a continuum across all affected disciplines. The project does not intend to concentrate solely on what is often called ‘Augustinism’ or ‘Augustinianism’ in a narrow dogmatic sense; instead, the term ‘reception’ is chosen to indicate a much wider spectrum. The tradition of Augustine’s iconography will not be included, nor the history of the manuscript transmission of his works (a separate project in Vienna), or the history of the religious orders that follow the so-called ‘Rule of St Augustine’ (a separate project in Würzburg). The treacherous area of Pseudo-Augustinian writing will be omitted, as this would have to be a separate project.

It is impossible to confine such a project to one place or one scholar alone. It is hoped that each year one or two other scholars working in the field of Augustinian reception will be invited to come to St Andrews as Visiting Fellows for two weeks and present research results directly relevant to the project in seminars and lectures. With the same purpose, a conference will be organized in St Andrews in due course.

Anticipated Outcomes

A. The production of four survey volumes with alphabetically arranged entries that examine writers and thinkers, theological questions, and perennial social-ethical issues. Each entry will present the relevant instances and modes of reception (selectivity, manipulation etc.) with reference to primary and secondary sources.

B. In a structured website, the ongoing collection of data will be made accessible to a wider public from the very start of the project. Up to final publication, input from other scholars will be possible via this medium, exploiting its flexible nature.

C. Some of the collected material will be evaluated in order to highlight characteristic patterns of Augustinian reception. This will result in the publication of monographs or articles by several participants of the project.

The significance of the project lies in its impact on a broad spectrum of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. Its novelty lies in its unusually wide scope, its interdisciplinary nature, its emphasis on the training and development of younger scholars in a dedicated research environment, and in the combination of historical rigour and the consequent use of various media of dissemination.