Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review"Luckritz Marquis innovates is her focus on violence for analyzing and approaching monastic thought. She has highlighted how scholars often have taken for granted a rhetoric of violence deeply entrenched in monastic literature...[W]e all would do well to remember that monks who dwelled in the desert thought of themselves as warriors wielding weaponry of prayer and unflinching belief in God, and they normalized violence against demons, heterodox believers, and even their own bodies, as a part of their ascetic experience. Luckritz Marquis reminds us of this fact." * Church History *
"Utilizing a wide range of scholarship and attending to the details of each of the ancient sources—including questions of origin, identification, content, circulation, reception history, and scholarly treatment—this book offers a multi-layered, highly nuanced interpretation of how violence functions in relation to power, identity, holiness, and belonging. The resulting complexity of the category of violence overturns a number of longstanding assumptions and ideas. This book demonstrates clearly and convincingly that violence played a notable role in the identity formation and memory construction of Egyptian ascetic life and practice in late antiquity." * Interpretation *
