front cover of Colors and Textures of Roman North Africa
Colors and Textures of Roman North Africa
Essays in Memory of Maureen A. Tilley
Elizabeth A. Clark
Catholic University of America Press, 2023
This book serves two purposes: first, it celebrates the career of the late Maureen Tilley; second, it provides a “state of the field” look at some of the latest scholarship on Christian North Africa in late antiquity. The chapters, written by both senior scholars and the next generation of North African researchers, fills gaps in some of our understandings of the colorful people, places, and disputes that arose in the unique environment of Christian North Africa. The book centers around Augustine, Donatist studies, and North African biblical interpretation, representing Tilley’s major areas of interest, while also ensuring coverage of Tertullian (a major figure in the North African church and one of Tilley’s hobbyhorses) and the pilgrimages to North Africa and other places. It contributes to the field(s) by providing new scholarship from some of the biggest names in Christian North Africa studies (Patout Burns, Robin Jensen, Bill Tabbernee, Anthony Dupont, and Allan Fitzgerald) and in Patristic/early Christian studies writ large (Blake Leyerle and Geoffrey Dunn) while demonstrating the new trajectories of Christian North Africa research from early career (Alden Bass) and emerging (Colum Dever) scholars. The editors were Tilley’s dissertation director (the late Liz Clark) and one of her last mentees (Zach Smith), so the entire collection has a meta-view of academic genealogy – knowledge flowing from Tilley’s mentor, through colleagues and mentees, and down through and to the next generation who carry on those legacies.
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front cover of Generation and Degeneration
Generation and Degeneration
Tropes of Reproduction in Literature and History from Antiquity through Early Modern Europe
Valeria Finucci and Kevin Brownlee, eds.
Duke University Press, 2001
This distinctive collection explores the construction of genealogies—in both the biological sense of procreation and the metaphorical sense of heritage and cultural patrimony. Focusing specifically on the discourses that inform such genealogies, Generation and Degeneration moves from Greco-Roman times to the recent past to retrace generational fantasies and discords in a variety of related contexts, from the medical to the theological, and from the literary to the historical.
The discourses on reproduction, biology, degeneration, legacy, and lineage that this book broaches not only bring to the forefront concepts of sexual identity and gender politics but also show how they were culturally constructed and reconstructed through the centuries by medicine, philosophy, the visual arts, law, religion, and literature. The contributors reflect on a wide range of topics—from what makes men “manly” to the identity of Christ’s father, from what kinds of erotic practices went on among women in sixteenth-century seraglios to how men’s hemorrhoids can be variously labeled. Essays scrutinize stories of menstruating males and early writings on the presumed inferiority of female bodily functions. Others investigate a psychomorphology of the clitoris that challenges Freud’s account of lesbianism as an infantile stage of sexual development and such topics as the geographical origins of medicine and the materialization of genealogy in the presence of Renaissance theatrical ghosts.
This collection will engage those in English, comparative, Italian, Spanish, and French studies, as well as in history, history of medicine, and ancient and early modern religious studies.

Contributors. Kevin Brownlee, Marina Scordilis Brownlee, Elizabeth Clark, Valeria Finucci, Dale Martin, Gianna Pomata, Maureen Quilligan, Nancy Siraisi, Peter Stallybrass,Valerie Traub

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front cover of History, Theory, Text
History, Theory, Text
Historians and the Linguistic Turn
Elizabeth A. Clark
Harvard University Press, 2004

In this work of sweeping erudition, one of our foremost historians of early Christianity considers a variety of theoretical critiques to examine the problems and opportunities posed by the ways in which history is written. Elizabeth Clark argues forcefully for a renewal of the study of premodern Western history through engagement with the kinds of critical methods that have transformed other humanities disciplines in recent decades.

History, Theory, Text provides a user-friendly survey of crucial developments in nineteenth- and twentieth-century debates surrounding history, philosophy, and critical theory. Beginning with the "noble dream" of "history as it really was" in the works of Leopold von Ranke, Clark goes on to review Anglo-American philosophies of history, schools of twentieth-century historiography, structuralism, the debate over narrative history, the changing fate of the history of ideas, and the impact of interpretive anthropology and literary theory on current historical scholarship. In a concluding chapter she offers some practical case studies to illustrate how attending to theoretical considerations can illuminate the study of premodernity.

Written with energy and clarity, History, Theory, Text is a clarion call to historians for richer and more imaginative use of contemporary theory.

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front cover of Sisters and Workers in the Middle Ages
Sisters and Workers in the Middle Ages
Edited by Judith M. Bennett, Elizabeth A. Clark, Jean F. O'Barr, B. Anne Vilen,
University of Chicago Press, 1989
Focusing on medieval women with a wide range of occupations and life-styles, the interdisciplinary essays in this collection examine women's activities within the patriarchal structures of the time. Individual essays explore women's challenges to a sexual ideology that confined them strictly to the roles of wives, mothers, and servants. Also included are sections on women and work, cultural production and literacy, and religious life.

These essays provide a greater understanding of the ways in which gender has played a part in determining relations of power in Western cultures. This volume makes a vital contribution to the current scholarship about women in the Middle Ages.
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