Yitzhak Hen

Yitzhak Hen is a Professor of late antique and early medieval History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the Director of the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies. His research focuses on the social, cultural and intellectual history of the post-Roman Barbarians kingdoms of the early medieval West; Western Liturgy; Early medieval Latin Palaeography and Codicology.

The project

Title: Purifying Texts in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages

"Throughout Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages, a vast corpus of potentially dangerous texts was dismissed as unorthodox and unauthorised by Christian scholars and policy makers. These texts exposed their readers to unorthodox systems of thought and belief, and hence should have been eradicated. And yet, although these texts and the world-view they represented were repeatedly questioned, denounced and condemned, they were still read, copied and commented upon by a select group of Christian scholars, who clearly realised the implications of what they were doing. Given the fact that the attitude towards these texts remained negative and reproachful, their preservation and use seem even more intriguing. In this paper I shall explore some of the mechanism that allowed the preservation, copying, and reading of such texts in the late-antique and the early medieval West. The significance of this study is two-fold. First, it will offer an original and innovative analysis of a hitherto neglected phenomenon, and a platform for introducing new approaches to the transformation of knowledge in the early medieval West. Second, it will provide some thoughts on the limits of censorship in Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages."

Hosting institution: Institut d'Études Avancées de Paris (IEA)

Selective Bibliography

• East and West in the Early Middle Ages: The Merovingian Kingdoms in Mediterranean Perspective, co-edited with Stefan Esders, Yaniv Fox and Laury Sarti (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2019)
• The Merovingian Kingdoms and the Mediterranean World: Revisiting the Sources, co-edited with Pia Bockius, Stefan Esders and Tamar Rotman (Bloomsbury: London, 2019)
• ‘Kultur und Religion zur Zeit Pippin des Jüngeren’, in Pippin dr Jüngere und die Erneuerung des Frankenreichs, ed. Karl Ubl and Patrick Breternitz (Stuttgart, 2020), pp. 11-20
• ‘The Byzantine Holy Land and the West’, in A Companion to the Byzantine Holy Land, ed. J. Patrich et al. (Jerusalem, 2023), pp. 1123-1140 [in Hebrew]
• ‘The Politics of Intellectual Networks in Late Merovingian Francia’, in Social and Intellectual Networking in the Early Middle Ages, ed. Michal J Kelly and Patrick Fazioli (Binghampton, 2023), pp. 93-115