, Brepols - Harvey Miller, 2025 Hardback, Pages: 388 pages, Size:156 x 234 mm, Illustrations:6 b/w, 7 col., 1 tables b/w., Language:English, *New. ISBN 9782503613604.
This collection of essays on religious practice in the Mediterranean, Near East, and Middle East (ca. 100?800 CE) celebrates the impact that Professor David Brakke has had on the study of late antique religious history. Nineteen scholars celebrate the career of Professor Brakke with essays on a range of subjects on late ancient religion. Some chapters treat monastic texts, ascetic practice, and ritual performance; others address the roles of magic, demons, and miracle stories; still others examine Christian violence and martyrdom. In particular, many of these essays explore the kinds of ascetic theory, practice, identity, organization, performance, and writing found throughout the diverse authors, groups, and locales of Late Antiquity. Essay topics cross disciplinary boundaries and operate in the overlapping intellectual space of Religious Studies, History, Classics, English, Anthropology, and Comparative Literature. By treating asceticism as a phenomenon within a relatively confined time period and geography across a variety of religious and literary traditions, this volume highlights the ascetic impulse within new areas. The volume thus stands alone for its multifaceted discussions of religion and asceticism in Late Antiquity, and advances scholarly investigation of and discourse about late antique asceticism by expanding conceptual and disciplinary boundaries in new and exciting directions. TABLE OF CONTENTS Preface BRADLEY K. STORIN and ELLEN MUEHLBERGER Purification in the Mud: Protology and Symbolic Purity in Iamblichus and the Greco-Egyptian Magical Papyri BRIAN ALT Monks Making Magic: A Case Study of Marian Iconography in P. Heid. Inv. Kopt. 685 MICHAEL BESHAY Narrative Construction from Interpretive Clue: The Secret Book according to John and the Gospel of Mark CHARLES BOBERTZ Ancient Asceticism and Myths of Divine Rape AUSTIN BUSCH An Arabic Miracle of Saint Shenoute: Hagiographical Devotion and Patriarchal Patronage in Medieval Old Cairo STEPHEN J. DAVIS Lists and Lairs: The Legend of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesos in Egyptian Christianity GEORGIA FRANK On the Gender of Demons DAVID FRANKFURTER New Approaches to Martyrdom: Seeing Living Martyrdom in Augustine of Hippo and Caesarius of Arles DIANE S. FRUCHTMAN Teacher and Student as Ideal Ascetics in the Astrological Handbook of Vettius Valens J. ALBERT HARRILL Made by Mistake: Concern for Ritual Error as Mandaean Asceticism JENNIFER HART Death on (well, near) the Nile: Death as Ascetic Practice in Tales of Egyptian Monks REBECCA KRAWIEC ?Not about Orthodoxy and Faith?: Eunomian Polemic, the Valences of Asceticism, and Ethnic Argument in Philostorgius?s Church History DAVID MALDONADO RÍVERA Caveat: The Term ?Asceticism? and the History of Early Christianity ELLEN MUEHLBERGER Debating the Philosophers: The Monastic Construction of a New Philosophical Identity in Late Ancient Egypt TOLA RODRICK Reconsidering the ?Standards of their Time?: Violence, Late Antique Monastic Leadership, and Modern Historiography CAROLINE SCHROEDER Early Palestinian Passion Piety and the Monastic Origins of Marian Lament at Mar Saba STEPHEN SHOEMAKER On the Death Curse in Late Antique Hagiography BRADLEY K. STORIN Ascetic Practice as Political Praxis: Imperial Asceticism in the Chronicle of John, Bishop of Nikiu FELEGE-SELAM SOLOMON YIRGA *** David Brakke?s Curriculum Vitae