As a whole, the volume provides compelling evidence that various, interrelated “techniques of self-authorisation” were employed across (what the modern reader might categorize as) different scientific and technical genres, as a means not only for professionals to establish their credentials, but also for non-professionals to situate themselves in the social and political networks of the late Republic and the Roman Empire.
Read MoreBook Note | The Politics of Heresy in Ambrose of Milan
Gerard Seghers (1591-1651) - "The Four Doctors of the Western Church, Saint Ambrose" (Wikimedia Commons)
Gerard Seghers (1591-1651) - "The Four Doctors of the Western Church, Saint Ambrose" (Wikimedia Commons)
Drawing on this scholarly paradigm shift, Williams argues that understanding Christianity in the Milan of Ambrose’s time requires manoeuvring around an object, “heresy,” successfully conjured into existence by Ambrose’s rhetoric.
Read MoreBook Note | At the Temple Gates: The Religion of Freelance Experts in the Roman Empire
Wendt brings together, in accessible prose, a series of fascinating characters that have been neglected by many classical scholars, and who are largely absent in early Christian studies, under the etic category of “freelance religious expert.”
Read MoreBook Note | Melania: Early Christianity Through the Life of One Family
Melania, then, is a testament both to the impact the Melanias had on the nascent Christianity of the fourth century as well as the impact that Elizabeth Clark has had in shaping the study of that very world.
Read MoreBook Note | Sexuality in the Babylonian Talmud
Book Note | Prudentius, Spain, and Late Antique Christianity: Poetry, Visual Culture, and the Cult of the Martyrs
This book represents a step forward in Prudentian scholarship by situating the Peristephanon in its social and historical context.
Read MoreBook Note | Raised on Christian Milk: Food and the Formation of the Soul in Early Christianity
Figure from the sarcophagus of Marcus Cornelius Statius, ca. 150 CE, Louvre Museum (Image courtesy of Marie-Lan Nguyen)
Figure from the sarcophagus of Marcus Cornelius Statius, ca. 150 CE, Louvre Museum (Image courtesy of Marie-Lan Nguyen)
Attention to the ways that the apparently natural is harnessed to specific cultural ideologies through our most basic metaphors of food is the first step in redefining what it means to “eat well.”
Read MoreBook Note | Rabbinic Body Language: Non-Verbal Communication in Palestinian Rabbinic Literature of Late Antiquity
Hezser treats body language exclusively and comprehensively, studying the phenomenon from head to toes and demonstrating its wide scope in classical rabbinic literature.
Read MoreBook Note | Kingship and Memory in Ancient Judah
Kingship and Memory in Ancient Judah is useful in reframing historiographic methods in biblical studies. Wilson aptly moves beyond the use of memory studies to merely determine the historicity of events of Israel’s past.
Read MoreBook Note | Making Amulets Christian: Artefacts, Scribes, and Contexts
Although many of the topics discussed in the book could shed light on ritual practice elsewhere in the Mediterranean world, de Bruyn limits himself to Egypt because this is where the bulk of textual amulets from this period are found.
Read MoreBook Note | The Song of Songs and the Fashioning of Identity in Early Latin Christianity
Shuve demonstrates that for some of its most prominent Latin readers, the Song was self-evidently an allegory about the Church and its purity.
Read MoreBook Note | How Repentance Became Biblical
In How Repentance Became Biblical, David Lambert argues that, rather than an inherently biblical concept, “repentance” came to be understood as such in a long process that continued into late antiquity.
Read MoreBook Note | The Red Monastery Church: Beauty and Asceticism in Upper Egypt
With essays from several renowned scholars of Coptology, Byzantine Studies, art history, anthropology, archaeology, and history, this volume seeks to present and preserve the marvels of the early Byzantine Red Monastery Church.
Read MoreBook Note | From Adapa to Enoch: Scribal Culture and Religious Vision in Judea and Babylon
![Odilon Redon [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5449167fe4b078c86b41f810/1522067286818-UQFGDLH9TBO2F6QFT8N2/576px-1908_Redon_Oannes_anagoria.JPG)
Odilon Redon [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
Odilon Redon [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
Sanders shows that the history of genre is enmeshed with political history as well as with the social and ritual roles that literary forms allow scribes to adopt.
Read MoreBook Note | The Levites and the Boundaries of Israelite Identity
Mark Leuchter’s The Levites and the Boundaries of Israelite Identity provides a compelling, innovative account of how the Hebrew Bible both reflects and encodes levitical concerns and power dynamics.
Read MoreBook Note | Our Divine Double
Stang’s argument successfully and elegantly traces the motif of the divine double throughout these 2nd and 3rd century texts. He offers mostly close readings of these texts in ways that echo ancient Aristarchean criticism and “New Criticism,” and, as one can see in the introduction and the philosophical conclusion, he sees these texts in light of perennial questions of selfhood.
Read MoreBook Note | From Sasanian Mandaeans to Ṣābians of the Marshes
Van Bladel’s book is thus not only a story of the Mandaean past, but a window into Sasanian Mesopotamia and the forging of “religious communities” beyond the “Greco-Roman” boundaries.
Read MoreBook Note | Incorruptible Bodies: Christology, Society, and Authority in Late Antiquity
The subject of Moss’s monograph, a revision of his Yale dissertation, is Severus’s theological, political, liturgical, and cultural contestations with fellow anti-Chalcedonians inclined to give up on the imperial church.
Read MoreBook Note | Are We Not Men? Unstable Masculinity in the Hebrew Prophets
Her innovation is bringing the male prophetic body, not just prophetic words, under consideration.
Read MoreBook Note | The Invention of Judaism
Originally delivered as a series of lectures at Berkley in 2013, Collins seeks to synthesize recent scholarly debates about the nature of ancient Jewish (or Judean) identity. In particular, Collins examines the role the Torah, or Law of Moses, played in the formation of a distinct religious and cultural way of life.
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