How and why did virginity come to play such a crucial part in the Christian Church in the formative and defining period of Late Antiquity? Sissel Undheim analyzes the negotiations over what constituted virginity and assesses its socio-religious value in fourth-century Rome by looking at those at the very margins of virginity and non-virginity. The Church Fathers’ efforts to demarcate an exclusively Christian virginity, in contrast to the ‘false virgins’ of their pagan adversaries, displays a tension that, it is argued, played a larger role in the construction of a specifically Christian sacred virginity than previous studies have acknowledged. Late fourth-century Christian theologians’ persistent appraisals of sacred virgins paved the way for a wide variety of virgins that often challenged the stereotype of the unmarried female virgin. The sources abound with seemingly paradoxical virgins, such as widow virgins, married virgins, virgin mothers, infant virgins, old virgins, heretical virgins, pagan virgins, male virgins, false virgins and fallen virgins. Through examining these kinds of ‘borderline virgins’ as they appear in a range of textual sources from varied genres, Undheim demonstrates how physical, cultural and cognitive boundaries of virginity were contested, drawn and redrawn in the fourth and early fifth centuries in the Latin West.

The annual Review of Biblical Literature presents a selection of reviews of the most recent books in biblical studies and related fields, including topical monographs, multi-author volumes, reference works, commentaries, and dictionaries. RBL reviews German, French, Italian, and English books and offers reviews in those languages. Features: Reviews of new books written by top scholars Topical divisions make research easy Indexes of authors and editors, reviewers, and publishers

Women's virginity held tremendous significance in early Christianity and the Mediterranean world. Early Christian thinkers developed diverse definitions of virginity and understood its bodily aspects in surprising, often nonanatomical ways. Eventually Christians took part in a cross-cultural shift toward viewing virginity as something that could be perceived in women's sex organs. Treating virginity as anatomical brought both benefits and costs. By charting this change and situating it in the larger landscape of ancient thought, Virgin Territory illuminates unrecognized differences among early Christian sources and historicizes problematic ideas about women's bodies that still persist today.

The relationship between Augustine of Hippo and the subject of gender raises important questions. Augustine and Gender address these issues head-on. This volume offers original interpretations of the many ways that gender appears throughout Augustine’s thought and works. Contributions draw from a wide range of sources including Augustine’s sermons, letters, treatises, and dialogues. Readers will discover detailed analyses about the nature of desire and emotion, the politics of sex and marriage, the possibilities of human speech and exegesis, and the hope of education and community. In addition, this book is a persuasive demonstration of the benefits of bringing together Augustinian scholars with the most pressing concerns of the present.

The Beatitudes are among the most influential teachings in human history. For two millennia, they have appeared in poetry and politics, and in the thought of mystics and activists, as Christians and others have reflected on their meaning and shaped their lives according to the Beatitudes’ wisdom. But what does it mean to be hungry, or meek, or pure in heart? Is poverty a material condition or a spiritual one? And what does being blessed entail? In this book, Rebekah Eklund explores how the Beatitudes have affected readers across differing eras and contexts. From Matthew and Luke in the first century, to Martin Luther King Jr. and Billy Graham in the twentieth, Eklund considers how men and women have understood and applied the Beatitudes to their own lives through the ages. Reading in the company of past readers helps us see how rich and multifaceted the Beatitudes truly are, illuminating what they might mean for us today.

This volume examines questions concerning the construction of gender and identity in the earliest days of what is now Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Methodologically explicit, the contributions analyze textual and material sources related to these religious traditions in their cultural contexts. The sources examined are predominantly products of patriarchal elite discourses requiring innovative approaches to unveil aspects of gender otherwise hidden. This volume extends the discussion represented in the volume Gender and Second-Temple Judaism (2020) and highlights the fruitfulness of interdisciplinary research beyond anachronistic discipline distinctions.

The Homeric Centos, a poem that is Homeric in style and biblical in theme, is a dramatic illustration of the creative cultural and religious dialogue between Classical Antiquity and Christianity taking place in the Roman Empire during the fifth century CE. The text is attributed to Eudocia, empress and poet, who died in exile in the Holy Land ca. 460. With lines drawn verbatim from Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, the poem begins with the Creation and Fall and ends with Jesus' Resurrection and Ascension. In this blend of Homeric style and Christian themes, there are also echoes of Classical and classicising literature, stretching from Homer and drama to imperial literature. Equally prominent are echoes of earlier Christian canonical and apocryphal works, verse models, and theological works. In The Homeric Centos: Homer and the Bible Interwoven, Anna Lefteratou analyzes the double inspiration of the poem by both classical and Christian traditions. This book explores the works relationship with the cultural milieu of the fifth century CE and offers in-depth analysis of the scenes of Creation and Fall, and Jesus' Passion, Resurrection, and Ascension. This book exposes the work's debt to centuries of Homeric reception and interpretation as well as Christian literature and exegesis, and places it at the crossroads of Christian and pagan literary traditions.

How did sexual relationships work before, in and outside of marriage in the pre-modern era? What problems did contraception and sexually transmitted diseases pose? How did people deal with prostitution and pornography back then? What were the possibilities for same-sex and queer desire and practice? Using numerous examples and sources from across the continent, Sexuality in Premodern Europe shows that even in earlier centuries, sexual life had an elementary significance for the coexistence of couples and communities. It was just as decisive for how individuals saw themselves and others as it was for maintaining the social, economic and political order. Franz X. Eder interestingly emphasises the socio-historical view of sexuality, offering an apt foil for the cultural perspective which is so prevalent in the field. In this book, sexual behaviour is understood and thought about as social practice. From this vantage point, Eder deals with the function of the sexual in upbringing and socialization, its significance for the image of men and women, its role in marriage initiation, and the importance of sexual life for marital relationships and concubinage. Deviant and discriminated sexual forms such as prostitution, pornography and same-sex acts are also addressed throughout. The book explores the ways in which many people gained sexual experiences before, besides or beyond marriage, even if these experiences were forbidden in former societies. While research into the history of sexuality has so far dealt with such forms of the sexual primarily from the point of view of regulation and sanctioning, here they are understood as 'positive' practices that allowed people to understand and take ownership of their sexual desire.

""Here I lie, a matron... I was wife to Fortunatus, my father was Veturius. Unlucky woman, born twenty-seven years ago and married for sixteen - one bed, one marriage - I died after six births, just one child remains." This epitaph of a Roman woman named Veturia, who died in the 3rd century BCE, starkly captures the relentless cycle of birthing, rearing, and burying children that defined the lives of ancient Mediterranean women. In this book, Anna Bonnell Freidin asks: how would Veturia and her family have understood such losses, child after child? What kinds of strategies might she have employed to protect herself and her infants, to equip them for better futures? How would she, her family, and any caretakers have worked to mitigate the dangers of pregnancy and birth? Put more generally, how did Romans approach the risks of childbearing? Freidin demonstrates how the perceptions of these fears and risks not only affected the ways individuals cared for their bodies, but also influenced Roman culture on a much greater scale. Freidin explores this against the backdrop of the Julian laws, which were introduced in 18BC by Rome's first emperor, Augustus, and were meant to guard against the perceived risk that women - and elites generally - might avoid childbearing. They formed part of an ideology of family values, central to imperial messaging for the next three hundred years. From elite medical treatments to birth charms to metaphorical language used by ancient authors to describe birth, Freidin marshals a wide range of evidence and theoretical frameworks to explore both the construction and distribution of risk in a deeply patriarchal, imperialist culture, one in which an ideology of fertility and control confronted the unpredictability of the environment and which, in turn, shaped Roman views of risk as they expanded their empire. Mistakes, misfortunes, and interventions in the reproductive process were seen to have far-reaching consequences, reverberating for generations, altering the course of people's lives, their family history, and even the fate of an empire"--

"Helena, the mother of the first Christian emperor Constantine, is best known for the last two years of her life, when she traveled around the Eastern Mediterranean, and for something that, in all likelihood, she did not do: the discovery of the True Cross relic. Using a vast range of sources, from textual and epigraphical to visual, and an array of archaeological insights from the places Helena lived at or visited, this book instead investigates Helena in the round, taking seriously the ruptures in her life course and her changing positions within the imperial and female networks of her time. The book follows Helena's life, the majority of which was spent in the third century and during the period of the tetrarchy, and explores the different ways in which she was commemorated after her death, up to the late sixth century. It wrestles Helena's historical significance back from medieval legends, to demonstrate the development and purpose of her role within Constantinian politics and to chart her meandering impact on the image and behavior of the Christian empress in the late Roman world"--