Dr Phil Booth: List of publications

At some point in the seventh century, an artist in Egypt sat down to decorate a Sahidic Coptic manuscript containing books of the Old Testament. At the conclusion to the Book of Job, on the blank half page beneath, and under the bold Coptic title ‘Job the Just’ (written in the same hand as the preceding text), this artist decided to depict the eponymous hero alongside his three daughters – Hemera, Kasia, and Amalthaias. The subsequent sketches, all frontal and standing in a row, are striking. On the left Job himself, tall and nimbate, appears with a short, circular beard, and with curled hair protruding beneath an ornate diadem topped with a cross; he wears a paludamentum fastened at his shoulder with a brooch, a knee-length belted tunic beneath a cuirass, and short boots; and he bears in his right hand a staff or sceptre, and in his left a globe. To the right, the three daughters all wear full-length tunics with ornate girdles, all have earrings, and the two older, central, women have their hair in a snood; the other wears a crown.

This article explores a series of doctrinal disputations held in early Islamic Egypt, and known through the Hodegos of Anastasius of Sinai (fl. c. 670–c. 700). Using the text's prosopographical and contextual cues, it argues that these disputations occurred in the 680s, in the aftermath of Constantinople's Sixth Ecumenical Council (680/1), the decisions of which had thrown the Chalcedonian Christians of the caliphate into conflict and schism. In 686, it is argued, Anastasius had confronted the famed Edessene and Severan Athanasius bar Gūmōyē before the Marwānid prince ‘Abd al-'Azīz at Fusṭāṭ, and there been defeated. That defeat is indicative of the new-found position of the Egyptian Severan Church, which now flourished under Marwānid patronage.

This article concerns a seminal moment in the history of eastern Christianity: the creation of the Severan episcopate in Egypt (from A.D. 575), and with it the radical bifurcation, for the first time, of the ancient Egyptian church. Updating the classic account of Jean Maspero in the light of more recent publications, it first examines the rapid decline of the Severan episcopate in the period after the Alexandrian patriarch Theodosius’ exile (536), and the intense competition to replace him in the period between his death (566) and the consecration of Peter (575). Exploiting a wide range of evidence related to a new episcopate then created under Peter and his successor Damian, this article then examines the presence of certain Severan bishops in rural monasteries, and the creation of an unprecedented office, the patriarchal vicarate, in the context of the competition created through the creation of a raft of rival sees. Understanding these processes, it is argued, is crucial to appreciating the explosion of evidence which accompanies the patriarchate of Damian.

In 1979 Averil Cameron published in Past and Present a brilliant and seminal article under the title ‘Images of Authority: Elites and Icons in Late Sixth-Century Byzantium’. Cameron argued that during and, in particular, after the reign of the emperor Justinian (527-565), and in a context of growing economic and geopolitical crisis within the eastern Roman empire, the political culture of Constantinople underwent a profound, but vital, transformation. In this transformation, the traditional classical trappings of imperial power were de-emphasised, and emperors instead shrouded themselves in the veil of holiness, Christianising imperial rituals and rhetoric, and lending their active patronage to a range of religious phenomena then occurring across the eastern empire: in particular, the expansion of church building, of Marian devotion, and of the cult of icons. For Cameron, these phenomena then served as a focus for the emergence of new civic identities, to a process of ‘cultural integration’ to which emperors made a decisive contribution. Although this process was in itself unable to prevent the subsequent Islamic conquest of the Roman Near East, it nevertheless lent the subsequent state centred on Constantinople the ‘strength and will’ to weather the storm of subsequent centuries.

This book focuses on the attempts of three ascetics—John Moschus, Sophronius of Jerusalem, and Maximus Confessor—to determine the Church’s power and place during a period of profound crisis, as the eastern Roman empire suffered serious reversals in the face of Persian and then Islamic expansion. By asserting visions which reconciled long-standing intellectual tensions between asceticism and Church, these authors established the framework for their subsequent emergence as Constantinople's most vociferous religious critics, their alliance with the Roman popes, and their radical rejection of imperial interference in matters of the faith. Situated within the broader religious currents of the fourth to seventh centuries, this book throws new light on the nature not only of the holy man in late antiquity, but also of the Byzantine Orthodoxy that would emerge in the Middle Ages, and which is still central to the churches of Greece and Eastern Europe.

This volume focuses on the strategies through which secular and ecclesiastical authorities throughout the early medieval world shaped and exploited Christian culture in their own interests, and the simultaneous attempts of rivals and ...