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Being Christian in Late Antiquity

A Festschrift for Gillian Clark

Caroline Humfress editor Isabella Sandwell editor Carol Harrison editor

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Oxford University Press

Published:30th Jan '14

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Being Christian in Late Antiquity cover

What do we mean when we talk about 'being Christian' in Late Antiquity? This volume brings together sixteen world-leading scholars of ancient Judaism, Christianity and, Greco-Roman culture and society to explore this question, in honour of the ground-breaking scholarship of Professor Gillian Clark. After an introduction to the volume's dedicatee and themes by Averil Cameron, the papers in Section I, `Being Christian through Reading, Writing and Hearing', analyse the roles that literary genre, writing, reading, hearing and the literature of the past played in the formation of what it meant to be Christian. The essays in Section II move on to explore how late antique Christians sought to create, maintain and represent Christian communities: communities that were both 'textually created' and 'enacted in living realities'. Finally in Section III, 'The Particularities of Being Christian', the contributions examine what it was to be Christian from a number of different ways of representing oneself, each of which raises questions about certain kinds of 'particularities', for example, gender, location, education and culture. Bringing together primary source material from the early Imperial period up to the seventh century AD and covering both the Eastern and Western Empires, the papers in this volume demonstrate that what it meant to be Christian cannot simply be taken for granted. 'Being Christian' was part of a continual process of construction and negotiation, as individuals and Christian communities alike sought to relate themselves to existing traditions, social structures and identities, at the same time as questioning and critiquing the past(s) in their present.

This is a wonderful collection of essays worthy of its honorand. Without doubt it is a valuable contribution to the study of late antiquity and of great interest to all those interested in early Christianity, late-antique literature and culture, gender or Augustine. * Jan Willem Drijvers, Church History *
a fitting tribute to Gillian Clark's immense contribution to late antique and early Christian studies. A stellar cast of international scholars offer essays that range widely across the diverse world of late antique Christianity, and yet the volume retains an overall coherence that such compilations too often lack ... Being Christian in Late Antiquity can justly be hailed as a model of its kind and, like the works of Clark herself, offers much to challenge and inspire students and scholars alike. * David M. Gwynn, Journal of Roman Studies *

ISBN: 9780199656035

Dimensions: 241mm x 162mm x 25mm

Weight: 632g

316 pages