The College of Humanities congratulates Dr. Courtney Friesen, Assistant Professor of Classics in the Department of Religious Studies and Classics, for receiving the international Manfred Lautenschlaeger Award for his first book, Reading Dionysus: Euripides’ Bacchae and the Cultural Contestations of Greeks, Jews, Romans, and Christians (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2015). This award is for dissertations or first books addressing “God and Spirituality (broadly understood)” and finalists are selected by a committee of distinguished scholars from 19 countries.
Dr. Friesen is Assistant Professor of Classics where he teaches classical Greek language, religion, and literature, including New Testament and early Christianity. His current projects investigate the diverse encounters of ancient Jews and Christians with Greek drama in the process of cultural negotiation and the formation of religious identity. He explores, for example, the ways in which heroes and heroines from the stage are appropriated as exempla of virtue, and how “tragic” deaths come to influence representations of martyrdom.
"God and Spirituality” in the award winning book: Reading Dionysus explores conceptions of God and spirituality across shifting boundaries of ancient religions and ethnicities by way of the reception of an especially popular tragedy, Euripides’ Bacchae. As a play staging political crises provoked by the arrival of a “foreign” god and his ecstatic cult, audiences and readers throughout antiquity found ongoing resonances with their own cultural moments. This dramatic deity became emblematic of exuberant and liberating spirituality and, at the same time, a symbol of imperial conquest. Thus, readings of the Bacchae frequently foreground conflicts between religious autonomy and political authority, and between ethnic diversity and social cohesion. Such literary engagements are evident not only among “pagans” but also Jews and Christians. Therefore, this study is a cross-disciplinary exercise that traces a series of appropriations and evocations of this drama ranging from the fifth century BCE through Byzantium. Of particular interest are the manifold ways in which Jewish and Christian writers articulated their own theological visions over against Dionysus, often while paradoxically adopting the god’s language and symbols. Consequently, in the reception of the Bacchae, imitation and emulation are at times indistinguishable from polemics and subversion.
For more information, visit the Manfred Lautenschlaeger Award website: https://www.uni-heidelberg.de/fiit/preistraeger2015_en.html