Description

"The Afterlife of the Pseudepigrapha in Byzantium: Stories of Adaptation and Transformation of a Genre"

Emmanouela Grypeou is a scholar of Eastern Christianity in Late Antiquity and Early Middle Ages. In her research and publications to date she has dealt with a broad spectrum of topics. In her doctoral dissertation, she studied the complex of the relations between ethical behaviour and biblical interpretation on the example of Gnosticism in the context of early Church history and Ancient Judaism, as well as the broader historical context of Late Antiquity. Emmanouela particularly investigated religiously defined perceptions of the body, sexuality and gender and in particular, questions of how the body can represent a symbolic system according to certain theological beliefs and how sexuality can be manipulated as a means of religious expression. Another focus of her research lies on the relations of Eastern Christianity with Early Islam and with rabbinic Judaism respectively. She has investigated the cultural, religious and social processes in the Eastern Provinces of the Roman Empire that might have influenced the emergence and spread of Islam. Furthermore, she has examined the relationship between rabbinic and Christian exegetical writings of Late Antiquity in the eastern Roman Empire and Mesopotamia. In this context, she focused on the biblical text as a shared context by which a possible relationship between individuals and communities and their writings can be elucidated. More recently, she studied the development of apocalypticism and eschatology in the early post-Islamic Christian literature as a specific discourse that allowed for the transmission and circulation of popular religious beliefs and traditions among Eastern Christian communities and also shaped early perceptions of to Islam.