ABOUT THIS BOOK

The essays in this provocative collection exemplify the innovations that have characterized the relatively new field of late ancient studies. Focused on civilizations clustered mainly around the Mediterranean and covering the period between roughly 100 and 700 CE, scholars in this field have brought history and cultural studies to bear on theology and religious studies. They have adopted the methods of the social sciences and humanities—particularly those of sociology, cultural anthropology, and literary criticism. By emphasizing cultural and social history and considerations of gender and sexuality, scholars of late antiquity have revealed the late ancient world as far more varied than had previously been imagined.

The contributors investigate three key concerns of late ancient studies: gender, asceticism, and historiography. They consider Macrina’s scar, Mary’s voice, and the harlot’s body as well as Augustine, Jovinian, Gregory of Nazianzus, Julian, and Ephrem the Syrian. Whether examining how animal bodies figured as a means for understanding human passion and sexuality in the monastic communities of Egypt and Palestine or meditating on the almost modern epistemological crisis faced by Theodoret in attempting to overcome the barriers between the self and the wider world, these essays highlight emerging theoretical and critical developments in the field.

Contributors. Daniel Boyarin, David Brakke, Virginia Burrus, Averil Cameron, Susanna Elm, James E. Goehring, Susan Ashbrook Harvey, David G. Hunter, Blake Leyerle, Dale B. Martin, Patricia Cox Miller, Philip Rousseau, Teresa M. Shaw, Maureen A. Tilley, Dennis E. Trout, Mark Vessey

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Dale B. Martin is Professor and Chair of Religious Studies at Yale University. Among his books are Inventing Superstition: From the Hippocratics to the Christians and The Corinthian Body.

Patricia Cox Miller is W. Earl Ledden Professor of Religion at Syracuse University. Among her books are The Poetry of Thought in Late Antiquity: Essays in Imagination and Religion and Dreams in Late Antiquity: Studies in the Imagination of a Culture.

REVIEWS

“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 East

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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