theology Archives

Sahidic Coptic was the literary language of Late Antique Egypt during the years 350–800 and the final phase of Ancient Egyptian as a living language, bringing an end to four millennia of written history. Sahidic Coptic texts are among our most detailed written sources regarding: the end of ancient Egypt; Byzantine imperial rule; the early Bible; the development of Christian orthodoxy; Christianity in Africa; religious assimilation and persecution; the origin of mediaeval monasticism; and the rise of Islam.

This concise textbook teaches beginner students the grammar of documents written in Sahidic Coptic, and provides the historical and cultural context required for reading primary sources through informal as well as more formal and religious texts.

There are 20 language lessons followed by 7 chapters of sample reading and a detailed vocabulary list.

William Lawrence and the Organ of Mind explores the historical origins and ideological valence of the conceptualisation of thought and mind as functions of the brain in early nineteenth-century Britain.

Taking as its starting point the controversy provoked by Lawrence’s Lectures on Physiology, Zoology, and the Natural History of Man, the book draws on archival and published texts, as well as images, to reveal overlooked parallels and connections with the concurrent rise of phrenology and the longstanding Christian mortalist tradition. It shows how the sentient brain served as a radical icon, marking a break with ancient Galenic medical models and Athanasian religious dogma, and charts how – in part through Lawrence’s contributions – it was united with a biological vision that identified human exceptionality more directly with the structure and function of our brains.

Elfed Huw Price’s work indicates that, although Lawrence was silenced, his Lectures lived on, a contributor to the rising tide of Victorian naturalism, and part of a wider transformation of beliefs and values that swept aside the ancient politico-religious structures of the Confessional State, leaving the cerebral organ standing alongside the soul as the source of human reason and a distinguishing feature of humanity.