Thoughts on Medieval Knowing

This essay was part of a 2026 NAPS Conference Book Review Panel devoted to Things Unseen: Essays on Evidence, Knowledge, and the Late Ancient World by Ellen Muehlberger. Read the full forum here. 

In the lead up to this conference, a very good friend at a similar career stage as me, texted to ask me about the new registration tiers for the North American Patristics Society. Registrants are asked to categorize themselves as “established,” “junior/standard,” or “senior scholar.” Without hesitation, I assured my friend that we were both “established,” although it got me to thinking about when we might be obliged to claim “senior scholar” and swallow its higher registration fee. Certainly, there was no doubting that we are not “junior,” even if I wrestled for a bit at what “standard” means.

First, let me say I gladly took up the opportunity to participate in this panel, with thanks to Brad Storin for organizing and inviting me, because of my friendship with and admiration for Ellen. I think I can accurately say we were called up to the “big leagues” around the same time, to use a baseball metaphor, and while I have maintained a sustainable career, a valuable utility player perhaps, Ellen has been a consistent all-star. In our early days as “junior/standard” faculty, our friendship burgeoned first via our University of Michigan connection, my alma mater, her place of employment; second from our west Michigan overlap, my first locale of work, her place of growing up; third from our regular meetings of the Greater Michigan Early Christianity Society, hosted at Kalamazoo College by the indomitable Taylor Petry, an all-star in his own right; and fourth, via our service together as members of the NAPS board. All this to say, it has been a joy to call Ellen a friend and colleague.

I have titled my reflection on Ellen’s thoughtful and thought-provoking set of “lectures,” “Thoughts on Medieval Knowing,” because in some sense, at this moment in our lives, we are interpreters, producers, and disseminators of knowledge in our “middle age,” so to speak, both in terms of our laps riding the earth around the sun but also at this stage in our careers, although I think Ellen has a legitimate and field-tested claim to be counted as a “senior scholar.” But for the sake of argument, let us work with the idea that she and I are both medievalists, scholars in their middle age and middle career.

Reading the preface to Things Unseen, I was particularly struck by Ellen’s reflections on her early work: “My first two books are evidenced within an inch of their lives. In them, I was deeply committed to proof, to notes, to comprehensive references.” She goes on to write, “The weight of the evidence I dragged into those books served me well; it was proof I could legitimately say what I was saying and, to be direct, the books fulfilled their professional purpose, each one earning me a promotion” (p. xi). Her musings resonated with my own experience, especially as I think about my earlier works and my near obsessive dedication to producing robust notes with as many references as possible by scholars writing in the various languages we perceive to be authoritative in our scholarly community to support my arguments, to “prove” that I belonged on/in the field. But what was it about this compulsion toward comprehensiveness that now in my middle age seems less important, silly even?

This got me thinking about the subject I spent the good part of my early career thinking and writing about, Epiphanios, the infamous heresiologist from Cyprus. It would not be an exaggeration to say that his Panarion – meaning in Greek “medicine chest” – at least as he imagined it, was exhaustive, even if exhausting for the modern reader. He thought that his Panarion’s contents were all any Christian would need to know to distinguish correct Christian beliefs and practices from wrong ones. Although Epiphanios did not use footnotes, he certainly was committed to providing evidence for his arguments. One need only think of the massive chains of biblical quotations he forged to make his case for his beliefs and against those of heretics. In fact, he also quoted large chunks of material from writers he both admired and held up as paragons of orthodoxy, and those he reviled and rejected as heretics. The rhetorical effect is to overwhelm his readers through his performance of seeming erudition. This perhaps begs the question: do we, in our early age as scholars, have a bit of that Epiphanios streak in us, the urge to ponderously impress upon our readers and the other practitioners in our fields the depth of our knowledge? For many of us, the scholarship we produce and the knowledge we disseminate at the start of our careers, the first of which is usually the doctoral dissertation, read more Panarion-ish than we may like to admit. But Epiphanios, if we assume he was born around 315 CE, wrote his magnum opus when he was in his sixties, certainly not middle-aged by ancient standards, and in fact, like an old ball player, long past his prime, refusing to retire.

But a read through the book of the hour, a lecture series as Ellen imagines it, intentionally, perhaps even joyfully sheds the pretenses of comprehensiveness that is often so characteristic of our early work. Yes, there are footnotes, but they are generally sparing. There are quotations of ancient texts, but they are moderate in length, and the texts in their original language are relegated to the bottom. The bibliography is only fifteen pages; the meat of the book itself only 157! I am sure she could have added so many more if she wished, and I imagine she could have increased her manuscript’s word count by another 50,000 words. But she did not, and maybe she deliberately chose not to or cut as many.

As an aside, we recognize in our own engagement with earlier scholarship that there was a time when a book with these qualities, minimal footnotes, moderate length, many musings, could and did earn a scholar promotion and acceptance in the field of play. In Ellen’s work, there is also a discernible tone, a prose style that I will step out on a ledge and call conversational, casual even: the rhetorical questions, the parenthetical asides, the liberal use of the first- and second-person voice, the occasional pop-culture references. One of the great pleasures of being in our field of study for some length of time is I can often hear my friend’s voices while I read their books. I can definitely hear Ellen in Things Unseen, an Ellen who writes with the confidence and cultivation of a veteran scholar. From these observations, some questions come to mind. What makes such a work like this possible, let alone publishable? Could this book exist without Ellen’s earlier work? Do we as readers receive it differently, since it was produced by an “established” scholar? Was this book a “thing unseen”? Was this Ellen lurking in the shadows of her earlier, evidenced-to-near-death books, or is this truly the work of a medieval Ellen?

In her lecture on “Impossible Women,” she dedicates a section to the Life of St Mary of Egypt, and she frames one of the narrators who appears in the text, the monk Zosimus, as one who, “after arriving at middle age, started to seek out newer, more extreme modes of pious discipline for himself,” but disappointed at what he had not found, wondered, “is there a man to be found in the desert who has surpassed me?” (p. 40). Zosimus faced a mid-ascetic life crisis. After Ellen arrived at “middle age,” did she experience something like this? Did our friend seek out more extreme modes of intellectual practice for herself, perhaps having reached a point of satisfaction for what she had already accomplished, or maybe even boredom? In my own middle age, I have found the earlier rituals of the professional to have become somewhat less exciting, the conference paper less urgent, less interesting, less useful, and so Brad’s invitation to participate in this forum offered something different, something more “extreme,” or at least more fun. Have I become an academic Zosimus, looking for the next discipline, the next more potent hit of intellectual inspiration?

As I reflected on her lecture about the “Foundations of knowledge,” I found myself thinking about how we participate in and thus demonstrate our own signs of initiation, not into the Christian religion or church, but into a profession. Thus, conference papers, monographs, articles, chapters, invited lectures, all neatly chronicled in each stage of our life’s curriculum, function as the outward signs of our conversions, but what happens when the thrill of this cursus honorum diminishes a bit? For someone in Ellen’s position, she has played the role of “catechizer,” training her graduate students in the ways of the academy, and she has also been a “preacher,” with keynote and invited academic homilies. Perhaps this is the way of the middle-aged. In other words, she has exhibited all the signs of one who possesses and disseminates our fields’ knowledge, but what “extreme practices” remain? For Ellen, perhaps her editorship of our field’s flagship journal or this book. And what next?

Ellen relates an amusing anecdote about the irascible monk Shenoute, how he had broken into the home of a former governor in search of incriminating heretical or idolatrous possessions. I imagined for a moment, what if I snuck into Ellen’s house? What would I find? Without a doubt, many, many books. But I also thought about a “rule” in my own household, imposed on me by my spouse: any new book acquired necessitated one book must be removed, to maintain a kind of “bibliquilibrium” in an already cluttered home (my workaround has been to take the removed book to my university office). What if Ellen had to follow a similar decree? What would she remove each time she gained a new book? I wondered would the choice of what to remove be a reflection of what she at this point in her career found to be less useful? Would she keep only those books which “spark joy”?

At the heart of all this is what she talks about throughout her book, “knowledge,” its construction, its testing and refinement, its dissemination. Sometimes in our line of work, we are lucky enough to have chosen a thinker, a writer whose output we can map on a chronological line. We can talk about an early or young Athanasius or Augustine versus a middle-aged or mid-career, or late one, or a pre- versus post-conversion Marius Victorinus. Sometimes we lack the evidence necessary for such precision, and we might just have the one text written by a late ancient author, perhaps in bits and pieces and fragments that we try to put back together again. But we can do the former with Ellen. We have in our hands or on our screens the earlier Ellen and now the established scholar. I wonder, what late-stage Ellen will sound like? What will she write? Or, how will someone write the life of saint Ellen? Who will collect and curate her apophthegmata? Will some early career scholar in the future write the book on Ellen, and if so, will they discern the early, middle, and late versions of her? Are they the same? Does each think about “knowledge” and its dissemination differently? It is too early to know what emerita Ellen will be like, so for now, let us enjoy being in the presence of and reading the writings of medieval Ellen.

Young Richard Kim is Associate Professor and Head of Classics and Mediterranean Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago. He is a scholar of the ancient and medieval Mediterranean world, and his current book project is Cyprus and the Historiography of Late Antiquity.