This collection explores how the body became a touchstone for late antique religious practice and imagination. When we read the stories and testimonies of late ancient Christians, what different types of bodies stand before us? How do we understand the range of bodily experiences—solitary and social, private and public—that clothed ancient Christians? How can bodily experience help us explore matters of gender, religious identity, class, and ethnicity? The Garb of Being investigates these questions through stories from the Eastern Christian world of antiquity: monks and martyrs, families and congregations, and textual bodies.
Contributors include S. Abrams Rebillard, T. Arentzen, S. P. Brock, R. S. Falcasantos , C. M. Furey, S. H. Griffith, R. Krawiec, B. McNary-Zak, J.-N. Mellon Saint-Laurent, C. T. Schroeder, A. P. Urbano, F. M. Young
- Cover
- THE GARB OF BEING
- Title
- Copyright
- Dedication
- CONTENTS
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction. Dangling Bodies, Robes of Glory: The Garb of Embodiment in Ancient Christianity
- PART I: MAKING BODIES
- Body and Soul: Union in Creation, Reunion at Resurrection
- Jesus’s Dazzling Garments: Origen’s Exegesis of the Transfiguration in the Commentary on Matthew
- Conversing with Clothes: Germanos and Mary’s Belt
- PART II: PERFORMING BODIES
- “Denominationalism” in Fourth-Century Syria: Readings in Saint Ephraem’s Hymns against Heresies, Madrāshê 22–24
- A School for the Soul: John Chrysostom on Mimēsis and the Force of Ritual Habit
- A Question of Character: The “Labor of Composition” as “Preventative Medicine” in Theodoret of Cyrrhus’s Religious History
- “I Want to Be Alone”: Ascetic Celebrity and the Splendid Isolation of Simeon Stylites
- Crowds and Collective Affect in Romanos’s Biblical Retellings
- Christian Legend in Medieval Iraq: Siblings, Sacrifice, and Sanctity in Behnam and Sarah
- PART III: SCRIPTING BODIES
- Five Women Martyrs: From Persia to Crete
- Gregory of Nazianzus’s Poetic Ascetic Aesthetic
- Eclipsed in Exile: In Defense of Athanasius and the Ethiopians
- Sacred Bonds: Religion, Relationships, and the Art of Pedagogy
- “And Yet the Books”: Patristics in the Footnotes
- Cultural Heritage Preservation and Canon Formation: What Syriac and Coptic Can Teach Us about the Historiography of the Digital Humanities
- Bibliography
- List of Contributors
- Index