By close engagement with both traditional and contemporary approaches to ancient Christian literature, Latin Christian Writers in Late Antiquity and their Texts seeks to delineate a historiographical problem, at the same time rendering patristics as part of the subject-matter of a new literary history. After preliminary essays marking out the field, the volume is organized in three sections by authors, forms of discourse, and disciplines. Released from the theological discipline of patristics, the writings of the church fathers have in recent decades become the common property of students of early Christianity, late antiquity and the classical tradition. In principle, they are now no more (nor less) than sources, documents and literary texts like others from their period and milieux. Yet when replaced in the longer history of Western textual and literary practices, the collective literary oeuvre of Latin clerics, monks and ascetic freelances of the Later Roman Empire may still seem to occupy a place of decisive, if not canonical importance. How does one now account for the abiding formativeness of Latin Christian writing of the fourth and fifth centuries CE? What demands does such writing lay on a modern history of literature? These are the questions asked here, in view of a new literary history of patristic texts.

By close engagement with both traditional and contemporary approaches to ancient Christian literature, this volume delineates a historiographical problem, at the same time rendering patristics as part of the subject-matter of a new literary history. The essays consider how one should account for the abiding formativeness of Latin Christian writing of the fourth and fifth centuries CE, and what demands such writing lay on a modern history of literature.

Written by experts in the field, the essays in this volume examine the early Christian book from a wide range of disciplines: religion, art history, history, Near Eastern studies, and classics.

First Published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Introduction to the nature, function, production and dissemination of Late Antique literary letters and their importance for their society.

This book assembles eighteen studies by internationally renowned scholars that epitomize the latest and best advances in research on the greatest polymath in Latin Christian antiquity, Jerome of Stridon (c.346-420) traditionally known as "Saint Jerome." It is divided into three sections which explore topics such as the underlying motivations behind Jerome's work as a hagiographer, letter-writer, theological controversialist, translator and exegete of the Bible, his linguistic competence in Greek, Hebrew, and Syriac, his relations to contemporary Jews and Judaism as well as to the Greek and Latin patristic traditions, and his reception in both the East and West in late antiquity down through the Protestant Reformation. Familiar debates are re-opened, hitherto uncharted terrain is explored, and problems old and new are posed and solved with the use of innovative methodologies. This monumental volume is an indispensable resource not only for specialists on Jerome but also for students and scholars who cultivate interests broadly in the history, religion, society, and literature of the late antique Christian world.

In 11 in-depth essays and over 500 encyclopedia entries, a cast of experts provides fresh perspectives on an era marked by the rise of two world religions, unprecedented upheavals, and the creation of art of enduring glory. 79 illustrations, 16 in color.

The eighteen papers collected in this volume - fifteen of which are published in English for the first time - explore the transformations of religious practices between the third and the fifth centuries in the Western part of the Roman Empire. They share an approach that privileges the study of processes and interactions and does not take for granted the categories and roles traditionally ascribed to social actors. A first group of papers focuses on the sermons and letters of Augustine of Hippo. These texts are precious evidence for balancing the clerical perspective that characterizes most of our sources and can thus shed a different light on the problem of Christianization. The second group collects papers that propose to shift attention from the construction of heresies to that of orthodoxy through the case-study of the controversy of Augustine against Pelagius and Julian of Eclanum. A last group present studies that look at the complex relation between burial and religion, with a particular focus on the role played by the church in the organization of the burial of Christians in Late Antiquity.

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.

The papers presented here explore in various ways the interactions between clerics and the society in which Christian churches put down roots in Late Antiquity. Some of these complex processes, involved in the christianization of the Late Roman world, form the theme of the first three sections. Amongst other aspects, the essays in these sections examine the Three Chapters controversy and the participation of lay and clerical protagonists in it, the social standing of Italian bishops (including their use of lay personnel and their economic impact), and a comparison of pagan and Christian places of worship. The essays included in the last section deal with communication in Late Antiquity. They present the first results of a long-term project on the changing role of information during the last centuries of the Roman world. Eight papers in the volume are published in English for the first time.