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The Sex Lives of Saints
Has a repressive morality been the primary contribution of Christianity to the history of sexuality? The ascetic concerns that pervade ancient Christian texts would seem to support such a common assumption. Focusing on hagiographical literature, Virginia Burrus pursues a fresh path of interpretation, arguing that the early accounts of the lives of saints are not antierotic but rather convey a sublimely transgressive \"countereroticism\" that resists the marital, procreative ethic of sexuality found in other strands of Christian tradition. Without reducing the erotics of ancient hagiography to a single formula,The Sex Lives of Saintsframes the broad historical, theological, and theoretical issues at stake in such a revisionist interpretation of ascetic eroticism, with particular reference to the work of Michel Foucault and Georges Bataille, David Halperin and Geoffrey Harpham, Leo Bersani and Jean Baudrillard. Burrus subsequently proceeds through close, performative readings of the earliest Lives of Saints, mostly dating to the late fourth and early fifth centuries-Jerome's Lives of Paul, Malchus, Hilarion, and Paula; Gregory of Nyssa's Life of Macrina; Augustine's portrait of Monica; Sulpicius Severus's Life of Martin; and the slightly later Lives of so-called harlot saints. Queer, s/m, and postcolonial theories are among the contemporary discourses that prove intriguingly resonant with an ancient art of \"saintly\" loving that remains, in Burrus's reading, promisingly mobile, diverse, and open-ended.
eBook
Asceticism and Society in Crisis
John of Ephesus traveled throughout the sixth-century Byzantine world in his role as monk, missionary, writer and church leader. In his major work,The Lives of the Eastern Saints, he recorded 58 portraits of monks and nuns he had known, using the literary conventions of hagiography in a strikingly personal way. War, bubonic plague, famine, collective hysteria, and religious persecution were a part of daily life and the background against which asceticism developed an acute meaning for a beleaguered populace. Taking the work of John of Ephesus as her guide, Harvey explores the relationship between asceticism and society in the sixth-century Byzantine East. Concerned above all with the responsibility of the ascetic to lay society, John's writing narrates his experiences in the villages of the Syrian Orient, the deserts of Egypt, and the imperial city of Constantinople. Harvey's work contributes to a new understanding of the social world of the late antique Byzantine East, skillfully examining the character of ascetic practices, the traumatic separation of \"Monophysite\" churches, the fluctuating roles of women in Syriac Christianity, and the general contribution of hagiography to the study of history. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1990.
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Metaphrasis : a Byzantine concept of rewriting and its hagiographical products
Metaphrasis: A Byzantine Concept of Rewriting and Its Hagiographical Products represents a first and authoritative discussion of rewriting in Byzantium. It brings together a rich variety of articles that treat the topic of hagiographical rewriting from various angles.The contributors discuss and comment on different kinds of texts in Greek and other languages, including Apophthegmata Patrum, Passions, Saints' Lives, Enkomia, Miracle Collections, Synaxaria, and Menologia which date from late antiquity to late Byzantium. The volume offers a series of case studies examining how the same legends evolved through time by the process of rewriting. It is shown that the main driving force behind such rewriting was adaptation to different audiences and contexts. This work argues that rewriting is central to Christian cultures in the Middle Ages. Contributors are Andria Andreou, Anne Alwis, Stavroula Constantinou, Koen de Temmerman, Kristoffel Demoen, Marina Detoraki, Bernard Flusin, Laura Franco, Martin Hinterberger, Christian Høgel, Daria D. Resh, Klazina Staat, Julie van Pelt, Robert Wisniewski, and † John Wortley.
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The Saint and the Chopped-Up Baby
Vincent Ferrer (1350-1419), a celebrated Dominican preacher from Valencia, was revered as a living saint during his lifetime, receiving papal canonization within fifty years of his death. In The Saint and the Chopped-Up Baby, Laura Ackerman Smoller recounts the fascinating story of how Vincent became the subject of widespread devotion, ranging from the saint's tomb in Brittany to cult centers in Spain, Italy, France, Germany, and Latin America, where Vincent is still venerated today. Along the way, Smoller traces the long and sometimes contentious process of establishing a stable image of a new saint.
Vincent came to be epitomized by a singularly arresting miracle tale in which a mother kills, chops up, and cooks her own baby, only to have the child restored to life by the saint's intercession. This miracle became a key emblem in the official portrayal of the saint promoted by the papal court and the Dominican order, still haunted by the memory of the Great Schism (1378-1414) that had rent the Catholic Church for nearly forty years. Vincent, however, proved to be a potent religious symbol for others whose agendas did not necessarily align with those of Rome. Whether shoring up the political legitimacy of Breton or Aragonese rulers, proclaiming a new plague saint, or trumpeting their own holiness, individuals imposed their own meanings on the Dominican saint.
Drawing on nuanced readings of canonization inquests, hagiography, liturgical sources, art, and devotional materials, Smoller tracks these various appropriations from the time of Vincent's 1455 canonization through the eve of the Enlightenment. In the process, she brings to life a long, raucous discussion ranging over many centuries. The Saint and the Chopped-Up Baby restores the voices of that conversation in all its complexity.
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Metaphrasis
This volume represents the first discussion of rewriting in Byzantium. It brings together a rich variety of articles treating hagiographical rewriting from various angles. The contributors discuss and comment on different kinds of texts from late antiquity to late Byzantium.
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Syriac Hagiography
Chapters gathered in Syriac Hagiography: Texts and Beyond explore a wide range of Syriac hagiographical works, while following two complementary methodological approaches, i.e. literary and cultic, or formal and functional. Grouped into three main sections, these contributions reflect three interrelated ways in which we can read Syriac hagiography and further grasp its characteristics: \"Texts as Literature\" seeks to unfold the mechanisms of their literary composition; \"Saints Textualized\" offers a different perspective on the role played by hagiographical texts in the invention and/or maintenance of the cult of a particular saint or group of saints; \"Beyond the Texts\" presents cases in which the historical reality behind the nexus of hagiographical texts and veneration of saints can be observed in greater details.
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