Description
Book SynopsisCollection of essays that focuses on questions of gender and culture in early Christianity.
Trade Review“The essays in
The Cultural Turn in Late Ancient Studies are all significant in their own rights, and collectively they provide an excellent portrait of the ‘state of the art.’ This book both charts the history of a generation of scholarship and points forward toward the next steps in the critical, theoretically inflected engagement with the cultural world of late antiquity.”—Elizabeth Castelli, Associate Professor of Religion at Barnard College and author of
Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture Making“This collection’s foci—gender, asceticism, and historiography—outline the very engines of the cultural turn in the discipline and show early Christian studies at its most engaged with current trends throughout the humanities.”—Derek Krueger, Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro and author of
Writing and Holiness: The Practice of Authorship in the Early Christian EastTable of ContentsAcknowledgments ix
Introduction / Dale B. Martin 1
Gender
The Lady Appears: Materializations of "Woman" in Early Monastic Literature / David Brakke 25
No Friendly Letters: Augustine's Correspondence with Women / Maureen A. Tilley 40
On Mary's Voice: Gendered Words in Syriac Marian Tradition / Susan Ashbrook Harvey 63
Is There a Harlot in This Text?: Hagiography and the Grotesque / Patricia Cox Miller 87
Macrina's Tattoo / Virginia Burrus 103
Aestheticism
Rereading the Jovinianist Controversy: Aestheticism and Clerical Authority in Late Ancient Christianity / David G. Hunter 119
The Dark Side of Landscape: Ideology and Power in the Christian Myth of the Desert / James E. Goehring 136
Monks and Other Animals / Blake Leyerle 150
Historiography
Archives in the Fiction: Rabbinic Historiography and Church History / Daniel Boyarin 175
How to Read Heresiology / Averil Cameron 193
Ascetic Practice and the Genealogy of Heresy: Problems in Modern Scholarship and Ancient Textual Representation / Teresa M. Shaw 213
History, Fiction, and Figuralism in Book 8 of Augustine's Confessions / Mark Vessey 237
Hellenism and Historiography: Gregory of Nazianzus and Julian in Dialogue / Susanna Elm 258
Knowing Theodoret: Text and Self / Philip Rousseau 278
Damasus and the Invention of Early Christian Rome / Dennis E. Trout 298
Bibliography 317
Contributors 355
Index of Modern Authors 357
Index of Citations to Ancient Authors and Scriptures 360
