The transformation of the erotic Song of Songs into a mystical tract on the soul’s love for Christ was surely one of the great exegetical feats of late ancient Christianity. Recent work on the politics of meaning leads us to interrogate more closely the processes by which early Christian exegetes achieved that feat, and how their interpretations…[Read more]

In this essay I juxtapose a dominant culture discourse of the family, one which aims to construct an ethical center out of the marital union, with a deconstructive effort on the part of certain early Christian groups, in order to suggest that this particular Christian “antifamilial” rhetoric associated its family ethics with issues of class and…[Read more]

The Disorder of Books: Priscillian’s Canonical Defense of Apocrypha

Writing Demetrias: Ascetic Logic in Ancient Christianity

The Place of the Biblical Jew in the Early Christian Holy Land

In Greek literature from antiquity, there is a set of terms formed from verbs of origina-tion or generation and prefixed with αὐτο-, which are represented primarily in three types of literature prior to the fifth century: in the surviving fragments from Numenius, in apologetic histories which incorporate oracular statements about first gods,and i…[Read more]

In this piece, I consider the late ancient legend of Arius’s death and explain the context in which the legend developed. As I do so, I explore the relationship that late ancient Christians had to their own past, thinking about how they imagine the recent past and how they find confirmation of their view of the past in the urban landscape.

While many have seen the equation between Macrina and Socrates drawn in the Treatise on the Soul and the Resurrection as Gregory of Nyssa’s attempt to honor his sister, a closer look at Gregory’s attitude about the relative power of Christianity at the end of the fourth century suggests the opposite: that the character of Macrina lends val…[Read more]

This essay examines the ways in which Jews were encoded into the holy land travel literature of the Christian Roman Empire (fourth through sixth centuries) as a means of naturalising and authenticating new modes of Christian, imperial power. Postcolonial criticism is used to analyse pilgrimage texts of the holy land (the Bordeaux pilgrim, Egeria,…[Read more]

The Remains of the Jew: Imperial Christian Identity in the Late Ancient Holy Land

Fathers Know Best? Christian Families in the Age of Asceticism