Author:
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520920958
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 224
Get Book Here
Book Description
The fifteen hagiographies about holy women of the Syrian Orient collected here include stories of martyrs' passions and saints' lives, pious romances and personal reminiscences. Dating from the fourth to seventh centuries A.D., they are translated from Syriac into accessible and vivid prose. Annotations and source notes by the translators help clarify elements that may be unfamiliar to some readers. This collection bears witness to the profound contributions women made to early Chistianity: their various roles, their leadership inside and outside the church structure, and their power to influence others. A new preface discusses recent developments in the field and updates the bibliography.
Author: Virginia Burrus
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812200721
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 224
Get Book Here
Book Description
Has a repressive morality been the primary contribution of Christianity to the history of sexuality? The ascetic concerns that pervade ancient Christian texts would seem to support such a common assumption. Focusing on hagiographical literature, Virginia Burrus pursues a fresh path of interpretation, arguing that the early accounts of the lives of saints are not antierotic but rather convey a sublimely transgressive "countereroticism" that resists the marital, procreative ethic of sexuality found in other strands of Christian tradition. Without reducing the erotics of ancient hagiography to a single formula, The Sex Lives of Saints frames the broad historical, theological, and theoretical issues at stake in such a revisionist interpretation of ascetic eroticism, with particular reference to the work of Michel Foucault and Georges Bataille, David Halperin and Geoffrey Harpham, Leo Bersani and Jean Baudrillard. Burrus subsequently proceeds through close, performative readings of the earliest Lives of Saints, mostly dating to the late fourth and early fifth centuries—Jerome's Lives of Paul, Malchus, Hilarion, and Paula; Gregory of Nyssa's Life of Macrina; Augustine's portrait of Monica; Sulpicius Severus's Life of Martin; and the slightly later Lives of so-called harlot saints. Queer, s/m, and postcolonial theories are among the contemporary discourses that prove intriguingly resonant with an ancient art of "saintly" loving that remains, in Burrus's reading, promisingly mobile, diverse, and open-ended.
Author: Lynda L. Coon
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812201671
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 253
Get Book Here
Book Description
Late antique and early medieval hagiographic texts present holy women as simultaneously pious and corrupt, hideous and beautiful, exemplars of depravity and models of sanctity. In Sacred Fictions Lynda Coon unpacks these paradoxical representations to reveal the construction and circumscription of women's roles in the early Christian centuries. Coon discerns three distinct paradigms for female sanctity in saints' lives and patristic and monastic writings. Women are recurrently figured as repentant desert hermits, wealthy widows, or cloistered ascetic nuns, and biblical discourse informs the narrative content, rhetorical strategies, and symbolic meanings of these texts in complex and multivalent ways. If hagiographers made their women saints walk on water, resurrect the dead, or consecrate the Eucharist, they also curbed the power of women by teaching that the daughters of Eve must make their bodies impenetrable through militant chastity or spiritual exile and must eradicate self-indulgence through ascetic attire or philanthropy. The windows the sacred fiction of holy women open on the past are far from transparent; driven by both literary invention and moral imperative, the stories they tell helped shape Western gender constructs that have survived into modern times.
Author: Peter Brown
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691242283
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 736
Get Book Here
Book Description
"An intellectual autobiography by Peter Brown, one of the most eminent historians of the last 50 years, who is credited with having created the field of study know as Late Antiquity, the period during which Rome fell, the three major monotheistic religions took shape, and Christianity spread across Europe situating it in the major developments in historiography and the study of the religion in the 20th century and the minds behind them"--
Author: Sabrina Petra Ramet
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134822111
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 266
Get Book Here
Book Description
Gender Reversals and Gender Cultures is a collection of specially commissioned essays taking a cross cultural and cross historical perspective on the subject. The book documents the universality of gender reversals, with chapters ranging from early Christianity up to the present. It examines how gender reversals are bound up with taboo, and how this underlies various religious and ritual activities. Gender Reversals and Gender Cultures also shows how attitudes to gender-reversal can reveal much about a particular culture. Anne Bolin, Elon College, Judith Ochshorn, University of South Florida, Karen Torjesen, Claremont Graduate School, California, Julia Welch, Winfried Schleiner, Unive
Author: Sabrina P. Ramet
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9780415114820
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 266
Get Book Here
Book Description
This collection of original essays explores the historical and cultural diversity of the experience of gender reversal over an exceptional geographical and chronological range. Topics cove- red include anthropology, history, literature.Gender reversal is a perennial theme in the cultures of both East and West. It emerges in classical Chinese theatre, in the ceremony consecrating the Japanese emperor, and in Hindu mythology; in the ancient Greek rites of Dionysos, in medieval Christian thought and in the culture of the American Indians.The original essays in Gender Reversals and Gender Cultures explore the historical and cultural diversity of the experience of gender reversal over an exceptional geographical and chronological range. The contributors bring a unique mixture of perspectives to bear on the subject, with backgrounds in anthropology, history, literature, political science, comparative religion and women's studies. They reveal the complex relation of gender reversal to taboo, and show how differing attitudes reveal much about particular cultures.
Author: John Anthony McGuckin
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
ISBN: 0830899529
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 1009
Get Book Here
Book Description
John McGuckin, a world-renowned expert on ancient Christianity, has synthesized a lifetime of work to produce the most comprehensive and accessible history of the first millennium of the Christian church. This readable account explores the history in chronological order and then examines the same period thematically, looking at issues like women, war, and the Bible.
Author: Catherine Michael Chin
Publisher: University of California Press
ISBN: 0520379217
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 338
Get Book Here
Book Description
Melania the Elder and her granddaughter Melania the Younger were major figures in early Christian history, using their wealth, status, and forceful personalities to shape the development of nearly every aspect of the religion we now know as Christianity. This volume examines their influence on late antique Christianity and provides an insightful portrait of their legacies in the modern world. Departing from the traditionally patriarchal view, Melania gives a poignant and sometimes surprising account of how the rise of Christian institutions in the Roman Empire shaped our understanding of women’s roles in the larger world.
Author: Uriel Simonsohn
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192871250
Category : Islam
Languages : en
Pages : 278
Get Book Here
Book Description
Female Power and Religious Change in the Medieval Near East engages with two levels of scholarly discussion that are all too often dealt with separately in modern scholarship: the Islamization of the Near East and the place of women in pre-modern Near Eastern societies. It outlines how these two lines of inquiry can and should be read in an integrative manner. Major historical themes such as conversion to Islam, Islamization, religious violence, and the regulation of Muslim/non-Muslim ties are addressed and reframed by attending to the relatively hidden, yet highly meaningful, role that women played throughout this period. This book is about the history of Islam from the perspective of female social agents. It argues that irrespective of their religious affiliation, women possessed crucial means for affecting or hindering religious changes, not only in the form of religious conversion, but also in the adoption of practices and the delineation of communal boundaries. Its focus on the role and significance of female power in moments of religious change within family households offers a historical angle that has hitherto been relatively absent from modern scholarship. Rather than locating signs of female autonomy or authority in the political, intellectual, religious, or economic spheres, Female Power and Religious Change in the Medieval Near East is concerned with the capacity of women to affect religious communal affiliations thanks to their kinship ties.
Author: Peter Brown
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
ISBN: 0500779368
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 348
Get Book Here
Book Description
A remarkable study in social and cultural change that explains how and why the late antique world (circa 150–750CE) came to differ from "classical civilization." The first century CE was one of momentous events: the end of the Roman Empire, the rise of Christianity across Western Europe, and the disappearance of Persia from the Near East. An era in which the most deep-rooted ancient institutions disappeared, creating divergent legacies that are still present today. Renowned historian Peter Brown examines these changes and the reactions to them to show that the late antiquity was an outstanding period of new beginnings with far-reaching impacts. The result is a lucid answer to a crucial question in world history: how the exceptionally homogenous Mediterranean world of the first century CE became divided into the three mutually estranged societies of the Middle Ages: Catholic Western Europe, Byzantium, and the Islamic world. Brown’s remarkable study in social and cultural transformation explains how and why the late antique world came to differ from the "classical civilization" of the Greeks and Romans. Featuring a new preface and updated with color illustrations throughout, The World of Late Antiquity demonstrates that we still have much to learn from this enduring and intriguing period of history.
