Monastic Desires

Derek Krueger is Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and a preeminent scholar of Byzantine Christianity. His books include Liturgical Subjects: Christian Ritual, Biblical Narrative, and the Formation of the Self in Byzantium (2014) and Writing and Holiness: The Practice of Authorship in the Early Christian East (2004).

• 1. Loving God: the queer fantasies of Symeon the New Theologian; 2. The homophobia of George the Monk: an archeology of opprobrium; 3. The edge of yearning: deferred delights in Symeon's Hymns; 4. Homoeroticism and Byzantine monastic life: contexts and queries; 5. Andromania: homosexual panic in tenth-century hagiography; 6. The repenting sodomite: from penitential canons to the life of Nephon; 7. Of semen and tears: Niketas Stethatos on bodies and boundaries; 8. Icons of desire, bodies of devotion: Niketas Stethatos and the life of Symeon the New Theologian;Coda: glancing back at Sodom.

'A magnificent achievement – this is one of the finest examples of investigative historical empathy available. In addition to a game changing social history of homoeroticism, it offers a theology of queerness that shatters multiple contemporary expectations while providing revelatory interpretations of the medieval evidence.' Leonora Neville, John W. and Jeanne M. Rowe Chair of Byzantine History and Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor, University of Wisconsin, Madison