Soul, Body, and Gender in Late Antiquity

"Following the ways that Marianne Sághy opened, the authors of the contributions included in this collective work managed to follow a seldom tried avenue of approach, putting in a scholarly dialogue the classics and gender studies, which usually do not successfully intersect. A great achievement of the volume is to balance the feminist theory about the ancient philosophy (which can be, sometimes, marked by reductionism) with an in-depth knowledge of the classic and early medieval sources… Bringing together scholars who usually work separately in Patristics, philosophy, social history, literature, and gender studies, the volume is a very important contribution which could be used by various categories of the scholarly audience, going from senior researchers to students who are now entering the different fascinating fields pertaining to Late Antiquity and Early Middle Ages."

Ecaterina Lung, Professor of Late Antique and Medieval History, University of Bucharest

"Comprehensive and ambitious in its scope, this volume explores the complex depiction of women and the feminine across diverse traditions and eras of Late Antiquity. Opening and closing with the two Eastern traditions of Buddhism and a comparative reading of an Indian Vedic text, classical figures like Parmenides and Plotinus are analyzed while cultural phenomena like magical and medical practices further round out the volume. Finally, the volume’s main focus is Christian theological depictions of women, saints and, most fascinatingly, obscured but genuinely novel conceptions of both Marys in the early Christian literature and new readings of Augustine."

Danielle A. Layne, Professor of Philosophy, Gonzaga University

"Apart from the international celebrity of the contributors, the most attesting feature of this volume is its variety… to find the presocratic Parmenides championing the equality of women, the novelist (and bishop?) Heliodorus meditating with nuance on the relation of soul and body, a female saint making use of erotic suggestion to subdue her masculine critics, the old and beloved tale of the Virgin Mary’s birth slily functioning as a rebuttal of Gnosticism—all this is beyond what could have been foreseen, and a tribute to the power of the honorand, Marianne Sághy, to kindle the academic imagination."

Mark Edwards, FBA, Professor of Early Christian Studies, University of Oxford

"Five decades after Foucault’s History of Sexuality, and four decades after Peter Brown’s The Body and Society, the 20 essays in this volume offer new vistas on a wide range of writers that engage with the body as a way of thinking about overcoming the materiality of the created world—Buddhist sages, Greek philosophers, Roman poets, Christian theorists and pious storytellers… It is also a glorious assertion of gender studies that has recently been suffocated by nationalist politics and no longer exists as academic discipline in Hungary."

Claudia Rapp, Professor of Byzantine Studies, University of Vienna