Discipline, Authority, and Text in Late Ancient Religion

This collection of essays on religious practice in the Mediterranean, Near East, and Middle East (ca. 100–800 CE) celebrates the impact that Professor David Brakke has had on the study of late antique religious history. Nineteen scholars celebrate the career of Professor Brakke with essays on a range of subjects on late ancient religion. Some chapters treat monastic texts, ascetic practice, and ritual performance; others address the roles of magic, demons, and miracle stories; still others examine Christian violence and martyrdom.

In particular, many of these essays explore the kinds of ascetic theory, practice, identity, organization, performance, and writing found throughout the diverse authors, groups, and locales of Late Antiquity. Essay topics cross disciplinary boundaries and operate in the overlapping intellectual space of Religious Studies, History, Classics, English, Anthropology, and Comparative Literature. By treating asceticism as a phenomenon within a relatively confined time period and geography across a variety of religious and literary traditions, this volume highlights the ascetic impulse within new areas.

The volume thus stands alone for its multifaceted discussions of religion and asceticism in Late Antiquity, and advances scholarly investigation of and discourse about late antique asceticism by expanding conceptual and disciplinary boundaries in new and exciting directions.

Preface
BRADLEY K. STORIN and ELLEN MUEHLBERGER

Purification in the Mud: Protology and Symbolic Purity in Iamblichus and the Greco-Egyptian Magical Papyri
BRIAN ALT

Monks Making Magic: A Case Study of Marian Iconography in P. Heid. Inv. Kopt. 685
MICHAEL BESHAY

Narrative Construction from Interpretive Clue: The Secret Book according to John and the Gospel of Mark
CHARLES BOBERTZ

Ancient Asceticism and Myths of Divine Rape
AUSTIN BUSCH

An Arabic Miracle of Saint Shenoute: Hagiographical Devotion and Patriarchal Patronage in Medieval Old Cairo
STEPHEN J. DAVIS

Lists and Lairs: The Legend of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesos in Egyptian Christianity
GEORGIA FRANK

On the Gender of Demons
DAVID FRANKFURTER

New Approaches to Martyrdom: Seeing Living Martyrdom in Augustine of Hippo and Caesarius of Arles
DIANE S. FRUCHTMAN

Teacher and Student as Ideal Ascetics in the Astrological Handbook of Vettius Valens
J. ALBERT HARRILL

Made by Mistake: Concern for Ritual Error as Mandaean Asceticism
JENNIFER HART

Death on (well, near) the Nile: Death as Ascetic Practice in Tales of Egyptian Monks
REBECCA KRAWIEC

‘Not about Orthodoxy and Faith’: Eunomian Polemic, the Valences of Asceticism, and Ethnic Argument in Philostorgius’s Church History
DAVID MALDONADO RÍVERA

Caveat: The Term ‘Asceticism’ and the History of Early Christianity
ELLEN MUEHLBERGER

Debating the Philosophers: The Monastic Construction of a New Philosophical Identity in Late Ancient Egypt
TOLA RODRICK

Reconsidering the ‘Standards of their Time’: Violence, Late Antique Monastic Leadership, and Modern Historiography
CAROLINE SCHROEDER

Early Palestinian Passion Piety and the Monastic Origins of Marian Lament at Mar Saba
STEPHEN SHOEMAKER

On the Death Curse in Late Antique Hagiography
BRADLEY K. STORIN

Ascetic Practice as Political Praxis: Imperial Asceticism in the Chronicle of John, Bishop of Nikiu
FELEGE-SELAM SOLOMON YIRGA

APPENDIX: David Brakke’s Curriculum Vitae