The Garb of Being: Embodiment and the Pursuit of Holiness in Late Ancient Christianity
Georgia Frank, Susan Holman, and Andrew Jacobs
Abstract
This collection of essays explores how the body became a touchstone for late antique practice and the religious imagination. When we read the stories and testimonies of late ancient Christians, what different types of bodies stand before us in such stories and what do they tell us? How do we understand the range of bodily experiences—solitary and social, private and public—that clothed ancient Christians? How might such experiences and the body as garb itself serve as a productive metaphor by which to explore this attention to matters of gender, religious identity, class, and ethnicity? The es ... More
This collection of essays explores how the body became a touchstone for late antique practice and the religious imagination. When we read the stories and testimonies of late ancient Christians, what different types of bodies stand before us in such stories and what do they tell us? How do we understand the range of bodily experiences—solitary and social, private and public—that clothed ancient Christians? How might such experiences and the body as garb itself serve as a productive metaphor by which to explore this attention to matters of gender, religious identity, class, and ethnicity? The essays in this book explore these and related questions through stories from the eastern Christian world of antiquity: monks and martyrs, families and congregations, and textual bodies from antiquity subject to modern interpretations.
Keywords:
asceticism,
Christianity—history,
30–600 C.E.,
embodiment,
late antiquity,
Orthodoxy
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2019 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780823287024 |
| Published to Fordham Scholarship Online: May 2020 |
DOI:10.5422/fordham/9780823287024.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
Georgia Frank, editor
Colgate University
Susan Holman, editor
Valparaiso University
Andrew Jacobs, editor
Harvard University
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