"Generative Authority" | FWF Start Award 2024

Starting on September 1st, Maria is the second researcher to join the GenAut team. She will be working on the Syriac side of the project. Welcome aboard, Maria!

Trained in art history and theology at the Universities of York, Oxford, Salzburg, and VU Amsterdam, Maria is interested in the textual, material, and visual cultures of premodern Syriac Christian communities. Her research broadly focuses on the materiality of texts and writing across media, and on their social, and particularly liturgical, value.

Maria’s doctoral thesis at VU Amsterdam examined the “textual memorials” produced at two Syriac monasteries—the Monastery of Mary Magdalene in Jerusalem and the Monastery of Moses in Nebk—between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, analysing how these texts constructed and articulated collective identity and memory.

She serves as the Middle Eastern Studies editor for The Digital Orientalist. Her forthcoming publications include contributions to Visual Culture in Medieval Syriac Traditions (De Gruyter) and Speculations: The Centennial Issue of Speculum.

Maria had already collaborated with the project having given a paper in the GenAut online seminar: “Mary Magdalene in Twelfth-Century Syriac Fenqitho Manuscripts from Jerusalem.”

Starting on August 1st, Andy is the first postdoc to join the GenAut team; he will be working mainly on the Armenian side of the project. Welcome aboard!

With research experience in Syriac, Armenian, Greek, Coptic and Arabic Christianity, as well as a background in Egyptology and archaeology, Andy is interested in the interaction between religious and secular traditions in the Eastern Mediterranean and its consequences, positive (intercultural exchange of information and texts, multilingualism and translation) as well as negative (religious debate and polemic).

Andy previously worked in the ERC StG project ‘Reviving the Ascetic Ideal in the Eastern. Mediterranean (969-1375 AD)‘ (PI: Adrian Pirtea) at the Institute for Medieval Research (IMAFO) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna. He previously held fellowships and positions at the University of Florence, University of Oxford (British Academy Newton International Fellowship), Ghent University, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

He currently teaches Coptic at the University of Vienna in the Department of Egyptology, and is co-editor of the book series Eastern Christian Cultures in Contact (Brepols).

Andy and Dan have previously collaborated in preliminary stages of the project, for the project description, and in the long run for the TeTra | Text and Transmission Research Seminar.

A GenAut overview was just published in Early Christianity‘s “New Projects” section:

• Dan Batovici, Andy Hilkens, Mina Monier, and Marion Pragt, “The Followers of the Apostles as Literary Characters, and Paratext,” EC 16.2 (2025) 225-239.

The online research seminar of the project is launched! See the full program here. 

The theme for 2025 is the construction of GenAut characters in relation to the apostles, and the recorded papers are available on the GenAut Youtube Channel.

A recent interview about the project, published in Die Presse, the daily Viennese newspaper founded in 1848: “Spin-off der Bibel: Die Nebendarsteller werden zum Superstar” (17 April). The Press dossier of the project can be found here.

Join our team! We’re looking for a specialist in Syriac studies who will either hold or is close to obtaining a PhD in a relevant field, and has significant experience in working with Syriac manuscripts. | See the by now expired announcement here.

Deadline: 1 June 2025 | Position available for up to 4 years from 1 August 2025.

The GenAut Project is focused on the network of late antique and medieval literary works – both apocryphal and hagiographic – with early Christian figures connected to apostles as main characters.

The project is funded through the FWF START 2024 Award for five years (2024-2029) by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), and is hosted at the University of Vienna, in the Institute of Church History, Christian Archaeology and Ecclesiastical Art. | Grant DOI 10.55776/STA214

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“The martyrdom of the blessed bishop and martyr of Christ, Abba Polycarp, the disciple of the apostles, which he suffered on the 29th day of the month of Mechir. In the peace of God. Amen.”

This is the title of the Martyrdom of Polycarp in Coptic as found in Vat. copt. 58, a Bohairic manuscript of the tenth century, emphasising the apostolic connection of the main character. Below can be seen the first page of the work (folio 78r), with the superscript title at the top: