AJR is happy to host publish remarks delivered as part of a review panel for Dr. Meredith J. C. Warren’s recent publication, Food and Transformation in Ancient Mediterranean Literature. This panel, organized by SBL’s “Religious Experience in Antiquity” section, met in San Diego at the 2019 annual meeting.
SBL 2019 Review Panel | Food and Transformation
by Frederick S. Tappenden and Catherine Playoust
One of the most common aspects of human experience is the encounter with food. Its consumption is routine and necessary for our survival. The experience of eating engages the wholeness of our embodied selves, not just our taste, smell, and sight, but also the biology of our digestion and nourishment.
SBL 2019 Review Panel | Much Depends on Dinner
Meredith Warren’s new monograph invites us to revisit some well-read ancient texts with new questions about particular narrative details—specifically, to ask: what is happening when characters in these texts ingest food from another realm? What new affinities, ontologies, and knowledges are produced by the process of “eating divine food” (signified by a sort-of neologism: hierophagy)?
SBL 2019 Review Panel | Food and Pharmaka
In her new book, Food and Transformation in Ancient Mediterranean Literature, Meredith Warren identifies a literary genre that she calls “hierophagy” and notes that this genre concerns “a category of narrative level transformative eating.”
Food for Thought: Eating and Drinking with Meredith J. C. Warren
Dr. Meredith Warren has produced a fascinating and delectable study of food and the transformative effects of eating in a wide range of ancient texts. Her study gives us much to ruminate over and digest.
Seeing or Tasting? Human’s Perception of the Heavenly World in Hellenistic Jewish Writings
Taste is more than a physical sense of perception. Since antiquity, food as well as its taste can be used as a metaphor in order to express evaluations and aesthetic judgments.
Food and Transformation in Ancient Mediterranean Literature
When Alice takes her tumble down the rabbit hole, she lands in a liminal hallway, lined with doors she can’t open or fit through. She is trapped between the real world and the world of Wonderland.