The Cultural Turn In Late Ancient Studies

Download or read book The Cultural Turn in Late Ancient Studies written by Philip Rousseau and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2005-04-28 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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

Download or read book Women and Modesty in Late Antiquity written by Kate Wilkinson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-03-30 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a fresh approach to some of the most studied documents relating to Christian female asceticism in the Roman era. Focusing on the letters of advice to the women of the noble Anicia family, Kate Wilkinson argues that conventional descriptions of feminine modesty can reveal spaces of agency and self-formation in early Christian women's lives. She uses comparative data from contemporary ethnographic studies of Muslim, Hindu, and indigenous Pakistani women to draw out the possibilities inherent in codes of modesty. Her analysis also draws on performance studies for close readings of Ambrose, Augustine, Jerome and Pelagius. The book begins by locating itself within the complex terrain of feminist historiography, and then addresses three main modes of modest behavior - dress, domesticity and silence. Finally, it addresses the theme of false modesty and explores women's agency in light of Augustinian and Pelagian conceptions of choice.

Download or read book Conversion in Late Antiquity: Christianity, Islam, and Beyond written by Arietta Papaconstantinou and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-03 with total page 475 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The papers in this volume were presented at a Mellon-Sawyer Seminar held at the University of Oxford in 2009-2010, which sought to investigate side by side the two important movements of conversion that frame late antiquity: to Christianity at its start, and to Islam at the other end. Challenging the opposition between the two stereotypes of Islamic conversion as an intrinsically violent process, and Christian conversion as a fundamentally spiritual one, the papers seek to isolate the behaviours and circumstances that made conversion both such a common and such a contested phenomenon. The spread of Buddhism in Asia in broadly the same period serves as an external comparator that was not caught in the net of the Abrahamic religions. The volume is organised around several themes, reflecting the concerns of the initial project with the articulation between norm and practice, the role of authorities and institutions, and the social and individual fluidity on the ground. Debates, discussions, and the expression of norms and principles about conversion conversion are not rare in societies experiencing religious change, and the first section of the book examines some of the main issues brought up by surviving sources. This is followed by three sections examining different aspects of how those principles were - or were not - put into practice: how conversion was handled by the state, how it was continuously redefined by individual ambivalence and cultural fluidity, and how it was enshrined through different forms of institutionalization. Finally, a topographical coda examines the effects of religious change on the iconic holy city of Jerusalem.

Download or read book Children and Asceticism in Late Antiquity written by Ville Vuolanto and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-03 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Late Antiquity the emergence of Christian asceticism challenged the traditional Greco-Roman views and practices of family life. The resulting discussions on the right way to live a good Christian life provide us with a variety of information on both ideological statements and living experiences of late Roman childhood. This is the first book to scrutinise the interplay between family, children and asceticism in the rise of Christianity. Drawing on texts of Christian authors of the late fourth and early fifth centuries the volume approaches the study of family dynamics and childhood from both ideological and social historical perspectives. It examines the place of children in the family in Christian ideology and explores how families in the late Roman world adapted these ideals in practice. Offering fresh viewpoints to current scholarship Ville Vuolanto demonstrates that there were many continuities in Roman ways of thinking about children and, despite the rise of Christianity, the old traditions remained deeply embedded in the culture. Moreover, the discussions about family and children are shown to have been intimately linked to worries about the continuity of family lineage and of the self, and to the changing understanding of what constituted a meaningful life.

Download or read book Orthodoxy and the Courts in Late Antiquity written by Caroline Humfress and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2007-11 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Approaching the subject of late Roman law from the perspective of legal practice revealed in courtroom processes, Caroline Humfress argues for a vibrant culture of forensic argumentation in late Antiquity - which included Christian controversies concerning 'heresy' and 'orthodoxy', revealing its far-reaching effects on theological debate.

Download or read book Jewish, Christian, and Classical Exegetical Traditions in Jerome’s Translation of the Book of Exodus written by Matthew A. Kraus and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2017-04-03 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Jewish, Christian, and Classical Exegetical Traditions in Jerome’s Translation of the Book of Exodus: Translation Technique and the Vulgate, Matthew Kraus offers a layered understanding of Jerome’s translation of biblical narrative, poetry, and law from Hebrew to Latin. Usually seen as a tool for textual criticism, when read as a work of literature, the Vulgate reflects a Late Antique conception of Hebrew grammar, critical use of Greek biblical traditions, rabbinic influence, Christian interpretation, and Classical style and motifs. Instead of typically treating the text of the Vulgate and Jerome himself separately, Matthew Kraus uncovers Late Antiquity in the many facets of the translator at work—grammarian, biblical exegete, Septuagint scholar, Christian intellectual, rabbinic correspondent, and devotee of Classical literature.

Download or read book Theory, History, and the Study of Religion in Late Antiquity written by Maia Kotrosits and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-02-28 with total page 135 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Theory is not a set of texts, it is a style of approach. It is to engage in the act of speculation: gestures of abstraction that re-imagine and dramatize the crises of living. This Element is a both a primer for understanding some of the more predominant strands of critical theory in the study of religion in late antiquity, and a history of speculative leaps in the field. It is a history of dilemmas that the field has tried to work out again and again - questions about subjectivity, the body, agency, violence, and power. This Element additionally presses us on the ethical stakes of our uses of theory, and asks how the field's interests in theory help us understand what's going on, half-spoken, in the disciplinary unconscious.