Augustine, Martyrdom, and Classical Rhetoric

Adam Ployd is Vice Principal at Wesley House, Cambridge. He previously served as Assistant Professor of Church History and Historical Theology at Eden Theological Seminary in St. Louis. An ordained deacon in the United Methodist Church, Ployd's work on Augustine has appeared in Augustinian Studies, Journal of Early Christian Studies, Journal of Theological Studies, Harvard Theological Review, Scottish Journal of Theology, Augustiniana, and Vigiliae Christianae. He is the author of Augustine, the Trinity, and the Church: A Reading of the Anti-Donatist Sermons (OUP, 2015).

• AcknowledgementsIntroductionChapter 1: The Context of the MartyrsChapter 2: The Example of the MartyrsChapter 3: The Time of the MartyrsChapter 4: The Court of the MartyrsChapter 5: The Rhetoric of the MartyrsConclusionBibliography

Using an extensive literature and suggesting a re-visitation of the work of Saint Augustine, one of the most important Christian writers of all time, Adam Ployd's book entitled Augustine, Martyrdom and Classical Rhetoric,...succeeds not only as a work of theological research useful for scholars which suggests a new way of understanding his ideas, his influences and how he came to develop the preceding tradition of the Church, how he sought continuity with it, but is also useful reading for any reader aiming to find out more about the history of Christianity in its earliest centuries, to understand why martyrdom was so important for it and even created a specific rhetoric in the discourse, and how Saint Augustine managed to use this aspect of the life of the Church and to develop an original way of thinking based on it.