Cultural Turn in Late Ancient Studies

Dale B. Martin is Professor and Chair of Religious Studies at Yale University. Among his books are Inventing Superstition: From the Hippocratics to the Christians and The Corinthian Body.Patricia Cox Miller is W. Earl Ledden Professor of Religion at Syracuse University. Among her books are The Poetry of Thought in Late Antiquity: Essays in Imagination and Religion and Dreams in Late Antiquity: Studies in the Imagination of a Culture.

• Acknowledgments ixIntroduction / Dale B. Martin 1Gender The Lady Appears: Materializations of "Woman" in Early Monastic Literature / David Brakke 25No Friendly Letters: Augustine's Correspondence with Women / Maureen A. Tilley 40On Mary's Voice: Gendered Words in Syriac Marian Tradition / Susan Ashbrook Harvey 63Is There a Harlot in This Text?: Hagiography and the Grotesque / Patricia Cox Miller 87Macrina's Tattoo / Virginia Burrus 103Aestheticism Rereading the Jovinianist Controversy: Aestheticism and Clerical Authority in Late Ancient Christianity / David G. Hunter 119The Dark Side of Landscape: Ideology and Power in the Christian Myth of the Desert / James E. Goehring 136Monks and Other Animals / Blake Leyerle 150Historiography Archives in the Fiction: Rabbinic Historiography and Church History / Daniel Boyarin 175How to Read Heresiology / Averil Cameron 193Ascetic Practice and the Genealogy of Heresy: Problems in Modern Scholarship and Ancient Textual Representation / Teresa M. Shaw 213History, Fiction, and Figuralism in Book 8 of Augustine's Confessions / Mark Vessey 237Hellenism and Historiography: Gregory of Nazianzus and Julian in Dialogue / Susanna Elm 258Knowing Theodoret: Text and Self / Philip Rousseau 278Damasus and the Invention of Early Christian Rome / Dennis E. Trout 298Bibliography 317Contributors 355Index of Modern Authors 357Index of Citations to Ancient Authors and Scriptures 360

“The essays in The Cultural Turn in Late Ancient Studies are all significant in their own rights, and collectively they provide an excellent portrait of the ‘state of the art.’ This book both charts the history of a generation of scholarship and points forward toward the next steps in the critical, theoretically inflected engagement with the cultural world of late antiquity.”-Elizabeth Castelli, Associate Professor of Religion at Barnard College and author of Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture Making “This collection’s foci-gender, asceticism, and historiography-outline the very engines of the cultural turn in the discipline and show early Christian studies at its most engaged with current trends throughout the humanities.”-Derek Krueger, Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro and author of Writing and Holiness: The Practice of Authorship in the Early Christian East