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The articles that comprise this special issue on "Origenist Textualties" were first presented at two workshop sessions of the same name at the 16th International Conference on Patristic Studies held at Oxford in Summer 2011. Thanks are due the organizers of the Oxford conference and to the audiences at both sessions. The lively question and answer portions of each session and the collegial atmosphere of the workshop format have contributed greatly to these articles. Each of the articles presented here has been substantially revised and expanded since the original presentation at Oxford (my own submission differs in toto from my Oxford paper). I would also like to thank David Brakke and the anonymous reviewers for JECS for their collaboration and critical feedback.
In developing the workshop at which these papers were originally presented, no concerted effort was made to come to a fixed definition of "textuality" or "Origenist." In practical terms, the present collection takes "Origenist" primarily as a heuristic term to identify individuals and works that stand within a particular intellectual trajectory in the history of early Christianity. Thus Pamphilus, Eusebius, Evagrius, and Rufinus are all "Origenist" in so far as for each Origen of Alexandria and his works represent a key source, influence, inspiration, tradition, or other crucial point of contact. Of course Epiphanius, the subject of two of the five articles, was self-consciously anti-Origenist. In devising the original seminar and this collection, it was felt that including at least one anti-Origenist would offer an important foil to the "Origenist textualities" we hoped to illuminate. Rather than mere foils, however, the two contributions on Epiphanius show just how contingent and specific "Origenist" textualities were, despite their centrality in histories of early Christian thought.
The term "Origenist" necessarily also brings a set of heresiological discourses in tow. Indeed, as a whole and individually, these articles have much to offer to the study of "Origenist controversies." Pamphilus, Eusebius, Evagrius, Rufinus, and Epiphanius all belong to the set of social networks and textual relationships that made up the "Origenist controversy" in the fourth century.
The "textuality" of the collection's title signals a commitment to the centrality of literary texts in early Christian studies. If historians of early Christianity work on texts, the collection asks, what might...