Virgins Of God The Making Of Asceticism In Late Antiquity

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Virgins of God

Author : Susanna Elm
Publisher : Oxford University Press on Demand
ISBN 13 : 9780198150442
Total Pages : 443 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (54 download)

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Book Synopsis Virgins of God by : Susanna Elm

Download or read book Virgins of God written by Susanna Elm and published by Oxford University Press on Demand. This book was released on 1996-01 with total page 443 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Situated in a period that witnessed the genesis of institutions that have lasted to this day, this path-breaking study looks at how ancient Christian women, particularly in Asia Minor and Egypt, initiated ascetic ways of living, and how these practices were then institutionalized. Susanna Elm demonstrates that--in direct contrast to later conceptions--asceticism began primarly as an urban movement, in which women were significant protagonists. In the process, they completely transformed and expanded their roles as wife, mother, or widow: as Christian ascetics, they became `virgin wives', `virgin mothers', and `virgin widows' - with all the legal and economic implications of such a dramatic shift. As importantly, though, Christian men and women ascetics lived together. As `virgins of God' they created new families `in Christ'. No longer determined by their human bonds or human sexuality, they were `neither male nor female'. Finally, the book demonstrates how asceticbishops - today known as saints - eventually `reformed' these early models of communal, ascetic life by dividing the `virgins of God' into monks and nuns and thus laid the foundation for the monasticism we know today.

Virgins of God

Author : Susanna Elm
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 443 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (97 download)

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Book Synopsis Virgins of God by : Susanna Elm

Download or read book Virgins of God written by Susanna Elm and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 443 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

`Virgins of God' : The Making of Asceticism in Late Antiquity

Author : Susanna Elm
Publisher : Clarendon Press
ISBN 13 : 0191591637
Total Pages : 466 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (915 download)

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Book Synopsis `Virgins of God' : The Making of Asceticism in Late Antiquity by : Susanna Elm

Download or read book `Virgins of God' : The Making of Asceticism in Late Antiquity written by Susanna Elm and published by Clarendon Press. This book was released on 1994-09-15 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many of the institutions fundamental to the role of men and women in society today were formed in late antiquity. This path-breaking study offers a comprehensive look at how Christian women of this time initiated alternative, ascetic ways of living, both with and without men. The author studies how these practices were institutionalized, and why later they were either eliminated or transformed by a new Christian Roman elite of men we now think of as the founding fathers of monasticism. - ;Situated in a period that witnessed the genesis of institutions fundamental to this day, this path-breaking study offers a comprehensive look at how ancient Christian women initiated ascetic ways of living, and how these practices were then institutionalized. Using the organization of female asceticism in Asia Minor and Egypt as a lever, the author demonstrates that - in direct contrast to later conceptions - asceticism began primarly as an urban movement. Crucially, it also originated with men and women living together, varying the model of the family. The book then traces how, in the course of the fourth century, these early organizational forms underwent a transformation. Concurrent with the doctrinal struggles to redefine the Trinity, and with the formation of a new Christian --eacute--;lite, men such as Basil of Caesarea changed the institutional configuration of ascetic life in common: they emphasized the segregation of the sexes, and the supremacy of the rural over urban models. At the same time, ascetics became clerics, who increasingly used female saints as symbols for the role of the new ecclesiastical elite. Earlier, more varied models of ascetic life were either silenced or condemned as heretical; and those who had been in fact their reformers became known as the founding fathers of monasticism. -

Children and Asceticism in Late Antiquity

Author : Ville Vuolanto
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317167864
Total Pages : 272 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (171 download)

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Book Synopsis Children and Asceticism in Late Antiquity by : Ville Vuolanto

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.

There Is No Crime for Those Who Have Christ

Author : Michael Gaddis
Publisher : Univ of California Press
ISBN 13 : 0520241045
Total Pages : 415 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (22 download)

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Book Synopsis There Is No Crime for Those Who Have Christ by : Michael Gaddis

Download or read book There Is No Crime for Those Who Have Christ written by Michael Gaddis and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2005-10-14 with total page 415 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on the 4th and 5th centuries, Michael Gaddis explores how various groups employed the language of religious violence to construct their own identities, to undermine the legitimacy of their rivals, & to advance themselves in the competitive & high stakes process of Christianizing the Roman Empire.

Sons of Hellenism, Fathers of the Church

Author : Susanna Elm
Publisher : Univ of California Press
ISBN 13 : 0520287541
Total Pages : 576 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (22 download)

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Book Synopsis Sons of Hellenism, Fathers of the Church by : Susanna Elm

Download or read book Sons of Hellenism, Fathers of the Church written by Susanna Elm and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2015-09-08 with total page 576 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This groundbreaking study brings into dialogue for the first time the writings of Julian, the last non-Christian Roman Emperor, and his most outspoken critic, Bishop Gregory of Nazianzus, a central figure of Christianity. Susanna Elm compares these two men not to draw out the obvious contrast between the Church and the Emperor’s neo-Paganism, but rather to find their common intellectual and social grounding. Her insightful analysis, supplemented by her magisterial command of sources, demonstrates the ways in which both men were part of the same dialectical whole. Elm recasts both Julian and Gregory as men entirely of their times, showing how the Roman Empire in fact provided Christianity with the ideological and social matrix without which its longevity and dynamism would have been inconceivable.

Sacred Fictions

Author : Lynda L. Coon
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN 13 : 0812201671
Total Pages : 253 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (122 download)

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Book Synopsis Sacred Fictions by : Lynda L. Coon

Download or read book Sacred Fictions written by Lynda L. Coon and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2010-11-24 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Religious Diversity in Late Antiquity

Author : David Morton Gwynn
Publisher : BRILL
ISBN 13 : 9004180001
Total Pages : 584 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (41 download)

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Book Synopsis Religious Diversity in Late Antiquity by : David Morton Gwynn

Download or read book Religious Diversity in Late Antiquity written by David Morton Gwynn and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2010 with total page 584 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume in the ongoing Late Antique Archaeology series draws on material and textual evidence to explore the diverse religious world of Late Antiquity. Subjects include Jews and Samaritans, orthodoxy and heresy, pilgrimage, stylites, magic, the sacred and the secular.

Religious Violence in the Ancient World

Author : Jitse H. F. Dijkstra
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1108494900
Total Pages : 447 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (84 download)

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Book Synopsis Religious Violence in the Ancient World by : Jitse H. F. Dijkstra

Download or read book Religious Violence in the Ancient World written by Jitse H. F. Dijkstra and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-10 with total page 447 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comparative examination and interpretation of religious violence in the Graeco-Roman world and Late Antiquity.

Individuality in Late Antiquity

Author : Alexis Torrance
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317117093
Total Pages : 235 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (171 download)

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Book Synopsis Individuality in Late Antiquity by : Alexis Torrance

Download or read book Individuality in Late Antiquity written by Alexis Torrance and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-05-23 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Late antiquity is increasingly recognised as a period of important cultural transformation. One of its crucial aspects is the emergence of a new awareness of human individuality. In this book an interdisciplinary and international group of scholars documents and analyses this development. Authors assess the influence of seminal thinkers, including the Gnostics, Plotinus, and Augustine, but also of cultural and religious practices such as astrology and monasticism, as well as, more generally, the role played by intellectual disciplines such as grammar and Christian theology. Broad in both theme and scope, the volume serves as a comprehensive introduction to late antique understandings of human individuality.

Repentance in Late Antiquity

Author : Alexis Torrance
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0199665362
Total Pages : 255 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (996 download)

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Book Synopsis Repentance in Late Antiquity by : Alexis Torrance

Download or read book Repentance in Late Antiquity written by Alexis Torrance and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study provides a fresh perspective on the concept of repentance in early Christianity. Alexis Torrance focuses on writings by several ascetic theologians of the fifth to seventh centuries, and also examines texts from Scripture, early Christian treatises and homilies, apocalyptic material, and canonical literature.

Wandering, Begging Monks

Author : Daniel Folger Caner
Publisher : University of California Press
ISBN 13 : 0520344561
Total Pages : 342 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (23 download)

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Book Synopsis Wandering, Begging Monks by : Daniel Folger Caner

Download or read book Wandering, Begging Monks written by Daniel Folger Caner and published by University of California Press. This book was released on 2020-05-12 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An apostolic lifestyle characterized by total material renunciation, homelessness, and begging was practiced by monks throughout the Roman Empire in the fourth and fifth centuries. Such monks often served as spiritual advisors to urban aristocrats whose patronage gave them considerable authority and independence from episcopal control. This book is the first comprehensive study of this type of Christian poverty and the challenge it posed for episcopal authority and the promotion of monasticism in late antiquity. Focusing on devotional practices, Daniel Caner draws together diverse testimony from Egypt, Syria, Asia Minor, and elsewhere—including the Pseudo-Clementine Letters to Virgins, Augustine's On the Work of Monks, John Chrysostom's homilies, legal codes—to reveal gospel-inspired patterns of ascetic dependency and teaching from the third to the fifth centuries. Throughout, his point of departure is social and cultural history, especially the urban social history of the late Roman empire. He also introduces many charismatic individuals whose struggle to persist against church suppression of their chosen way of imitating Christ was fought with defiant conviction, and the book includes the first annotated English translation of the biography of Alexander Akoimetos (Alexander the Sleepless). Wandering, Begging Monks allows us to understand these fascinating figures of early Christianity in the full context of late Roman society.

Subversive Virtue

Author : James A. Francis
Publisher : Penn State Press
ISBN 13 : 9780271013046
Total Pages : 254 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (13 download)

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Book Synopsis Subversive Virtue by : James A. Francis

Download or read book Subversive Virtue written by James A. Francis and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Much attention has been devoted in recent years to Christian asceticism in Late Antiquity. But Christianity did not introduce asceticism to the ancient world. An underlying theme of this fascinating study of pagan asceticism is that much of the work on Christian &"holy men&" has ignored earlier manifestations of asceticism in Antiquity and the way Roman society confronted it. Accordingly, James Francis turns to the second century, the &"balmy late afternoon of Rome's classical empire,&" when the conflict between asceticism and authority reached a turning point. Francis begins with the emperor Marcus Aurelius (121&–180), who warned in his Meditations against &"display[ing] oneself as a man keen to impress others with a reputation for asceticism or beneficence.&" The Stoic Aurelius saw ascetic self-discipline as a virtue, but one to be exercised in moderation. Like other Roman aristocrats of his day, he perceived practitioners of ostentatious physical asceticism as a threat to prevailing norms and the established order. Prophecy, sorcery, miracle working, charismatic leadership, expressions of social discontent, and advocacy of alternative values regarding wealth, property, marriage, and sexuality were the issues provoking the controversy. If Aurelius defined the acceptable limits of ascetical practice, then the poet Lucian depicted the threat ascetics were perceived to pose to the social status quo through his biting satire. In an eye-opening analysis of Philostratus's Life of Apollonius of Tyana, Francis shows how Roman society reined in its deviant ascetics by &"rehabilitating&" them into pillars of traditional values. Celsus's True Doctrine shows how the views pagans held of their own ascetics influenced their negative view of Christianity. Finally, Francis points out striking parallels between the conflict over pagan asceticism and its Christian counterpart. By treating pagan asceticism seriously in its own right, Francis establishes the context necessary for understanding the great flowering of asceticism in Late Antiquity

The Oxford Dictionary of Late Antiquity

Author : Oliver Nicholson
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0192562460
Total Pages : 1743 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (925 download)

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Book Synopsis The Oxford Dictionary of Late Antiquity by : Oliver Nicholson

Download or read book The Oxford Dictionary of Late Antiquity written by Oliver Nicholson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-04-19 with total page 1743 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Dictionary of Late Antiquity is the first comprehensive reference book covering every aspect of history, culture, religion, and life in Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Near East (including the Persian Empire and Central Asia) between the mid-3rd and the mid-8th centuries AD, the era now generally known as Late Antiquity. This period saw the re-establishment of the Roman Empire, its conversion to Christianity and its replacement in the West by Germanic kingdoms, the continuing Roman Empire in the Eastern Mediterranean, the Persian Sassanian Empire, and the rise of Islam. Consisting of over 1.5 million words in more than 5,000 A-Z entries, and written by more than 400 contributors, it is the long-awaited middle volume of a series, bridging a significant period of history between those covered by the acclaimed Oxford Classical Dictionary and The Oxford Dictionary of the Middle Ages. The scope of the Dictionary is broad and multi-disciplinary; across the wide geographical span covered (from Western Europe and the Mediterranean as far as the Near East and Central Asia), it provides succinct and pertinent information on political history, law, and administration; military history; religion and philosophy; education; social and economic history; material culture; art and architecture; science; literature; and many other areas. Drawing on the latest scholarship, and with a formidable international team of advisers and contributors, The Oxford Dictionary of Late Antiquity aims to establish itself as the essential reference companion to a period that is attracting increasing attention from scholars and students worldwide.

Religions of Late Antiquity in Practice

Author : Richard Valantasis
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780691057514
Total Pages : 532 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (575 download)

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Book Synopsis Religions of Late Antiquity in Practice by : Richard Valantasis

Download or read book Religions of Late Antiquity in Practice written by Richard Valantasis and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2000-06-19 with total page 532 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a collection of nearly seventy Late Antique primary religious texts that constitute a comprehensive view of religious practice in Late Antiquity. This sourcebook includes discussions of asceticism, religious organization, ritual, martyrdom ...

Christianity and the Contest for Manhood in Late Antiquity

Author : Nathan D. Howard
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1009093142
Total Pages : 357 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (9 download)

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Book Synopsis Christianity and the Contest for Manhood in Late Antiquity by : Nathan D. Howard

Download or read book Christianity and the Contest for Manhood in Late Antiquity written by Nathan D. Howard and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-11-24 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, Nathan Howard explores gender and identity formation in fourth-century Cappadocia, where pro-Nicene bishops used a rhetoric of contest that aligned with conventions of classical Greek masculinity. Howard demonstrates that epistolary exhibitions served as 'a locus for' asserting manhood in the fourth century. These performances illustrate how a culture of orality that had defined manhood among civic elites was reframed as a contest whereby one accrued status through merits of composition. Howard shows how the Cappadocians' rhetoric also reordered the body and materiality as components of a maleness over which they moderated. He interrogates fourth-century theological conflict as part of a rhetorical battle over claims to manhood that supported the Cappadocians' theology and cast doubt on non-Trinitarian rivals, whom they cast as effeminate and disingenuous. Investigating accounts of pro-Nicene protagonists overcoming struggles, Howard establishes that tropes based on classical standards of gender contributed to the formation of Trinitarian orthodoxy.

The Making of Fornication

Author : Kathy L. Gaca
Publisher : Univ of California Press
ISBN 13 : 0520296176
Total Pages : 380 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (22 download)

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Book Synopsis The Making of Fornication by : Kathy L. Gaca

Download or read book The Making of Fornication written by Kathy L. Gaca and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2017-10-26 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This provocative work provides a radical reassessment of the emergence and nature of Christian sexual morality, the dominant moral paradigm in Western society since late antiquity. While many scholars, including Michel Foucault, have found the basis of early Christian sexual restrictions in Greek ethics and political philosophy, Kathy L. Gaca demonstrates on compelling new grounds that it is misguided to regard Greek ethics and political theory—with their proposed reforms of eroticism, the family, and civic order—as the foundation of Christian sexual austerity. Rather, in this thoroughly informed and wide-ranging study, Gaca shows that early Christian goals to eradicate fornication were derived from the sexual rules and poetic norms of the Septuagint, or Greek Bible, and that early Christian writers adapted these rules and norms in ways that reveal fascinating insights into the distinctive and largely non-philosophical character of Christian sexual morality. Writing with an authoritative command of both Greek philosophy and early Christian writings, Gaca investigates Plato, the Stoics, the Pythagoreans, Philo of Alexandria, the apostle Paul, and the patristic Christians Clement of Alexandria, Tatian, and Epiphanes, freshly elucidating their ideas on sexual reform with precision, depth, and originality. Early Christian writers, she demonstrates, transformed all that they borrowed from Greek ethics and political philosophy to launch innovative programs against fornication that were inimical to Greek cultural mores, popular and philosophical alike. The Septuagint's mandate to worship the Lord alone among all gods led to a Christian program to revolutionize Gentile sexual practices, only for early Christians to find this virtually impossible to carry out without going to extremes of sexual renunciation. Knowledgeable and wide-ranging, this work of intellectual history and ethics cogently demonstrates why early Christian sexual restrictions took such repressive ascetic forms, and casts sobering light on what Christian sexual morality has meant for religious pluralism in Western culture, especially among women as its bearers.