Nicholas Montague-Jones

My PhD, funded by an Ibn-Battutah Studentship (AHRC OOC DTP), will consider the intervention of demons and the demonic world in the lives of the later Roman Empire’s inhabitants. It will focus on how Christian literature from the 3rd to the 5th centuries AD construed the emotional dynamics of encounters with the demonic realm. My work builds upon a burgeoning scholarly interest in ancient writing about demons as a means of elaborating a lively mythology and compelling cosmology of evil that impinged on the institutions, decision-making and self-construction of Christians. I seek, however, to reach beyond a modern scholarly tradition of reading demons as a rhetorical tool or even mere metaphor to delineate the behaviours, spaces and people who fell outside the pale of socio-religious normativity. Accordingly, I draw upon modern studies on emotional history and ancient ethical theories of emotion to look at the phenomenology of encounters with a class of entity believed to operate in space and time. Starting with the literary output of monastic communities in Late Antique Egypt and Syria, which offers exceptionally vivid theoretical constructions and narratives about demons, I will illuminate how literary representations of demon-inspired emotions reflect Late Antique understandings of human psychology, identity, power and conflict in a divinely charged world.

I studied a BA in Classics at Christ’s College, Cambridge (2019-2022) and MPhil in Classics also at Christ’s College (2022-2023), funded by the Cambridge Trust.