'Patricia Cox Miller [is] a master of the skillfully wrought essay, able to communicate far beyond her subdisciplines. Students of theology, hermeneutics, and comparative literature would do well to take notice... Miller's essays make their most eloquent case for the ongoing relevance of Early Christian Studies to contemporary critical debate... [these essays present] vivid and imaginative visions.' Journal of Religion 'There is very little work in late antique studies comparable to this collection. Cox Miller has brought the task of literary theory to late antiquity in a more thorough, and consequently more convincing, manner than anyone else... a book of essays that collectively have taught scholars of late aniquity so much about how to read our texts in the unsettling ways they were intended to be read.' The Heythrop Journal

• Contents: Introduction; Poetic images and nature: Preface; Adam ate from the animal tree: a bestial poetry of soul; Origen on the bestial soul: a poetics of nature; The Physiologus: A Poetics of Nature; Jerome’s centuar: a hyper-icon of the desert; Poetic images and the body: Preface; Plenty sleeps there: the myth of Eros and Psyche in Plotinus and Gnosticism; Pleasure of the text, text of pleasure: Eros and language. Origen’s Commentary on the Song of Song; The blazing body: ascetic desire in Jerome’s Letter to Eustochium; Desert ascetism and The body from nowhere; Poetic images and theology: Preface; In my Father’s house are many dwelling places: Origen’s De principiis; Origen and the witch of Endor: toward an iconoclastic typology; Poetic words, abysmal words: reflections on Origen’s hermeneutics; In praise of nonsense: a piety of the alphabet in ancient magic; Words with an alien voice: gnostics, scripture and canon; Bibliography.

'Patricia Cox Miller [is] a master of the skillfully wrought essay, able to communicate far beyond her subdisciplines. Students of theology, hermeneutics, and comparative literature would do well to take notice... Miller's essays make their most eloquent case for the ongoing relevance of Early Christian Studies to contemporary critical debate... [these essays present] vivid and imaginative visions.' Journal of Religion 'There is very little work in late antique studies comparable to this collection. Cox Miller has brought the task of literary theory to late antiquity in a more thorough, and consequently more convincing, manner than anyone else... a book of essays that collectively have taught scholars of late aniquity so much about how to read our texts in the unsettling ways they were intended to be read.' The Heythrop Journal

• Contents: Introduction; Poetic images and nature: Preface; Adam ate from the animal tree: a bestial poetry of soul; Origen on the bestial soul: a poetics of nature; The Physiologus: A Poetics of Nature; Jerome’s centuar: a hyper-icon of the desert; Poetic images and the body: Preface; Plenty sleeps there: the myth of Eros and Psyche in Plotinus and Gnosticism; Pleasure of the text, text of pleasure: Eros and language. Origen’s Commentary on the Song of Song; The blazing body: ascetic desire in Jerome’s Letter to Eustochium; Desert ascetism and The body from nowhere; Poetic images and theology: Preface; In my Father’s house are many dwelling places: Origen’s De principiis; Origen and the witch of Endor: toward an iconoclastic typology; Poetic words, abysmal words: reflections on Origen’s hermeneutics; In praise of nonsense: a piety of the alphabet in ancient magic; Words with an alien voice: gnostics, scripture and canon; Bibliography.

'Patricia Cox Miller [is] a master of the skillfully wrought essay, able to communicate far beyond her subdisciplines. Students of theology, hermeneutics, and comparative literature would do well to take notice... Miller's essays make their most eloquent case for the ongoing relevance of Early Christian Studies to contemporary critical debate... [these essays present] vivid and imaginative visions.' Journal of Religion 'There is very little work in late antique studies comparable to this collection. Cox Miller has brought the task of literary theory to late antiquity in a more thorough, and consequently more convincing, manner than anyone else... a book of essays that collectively have taught scholars of late aniquity so much about how to read our texts in the unsettling ways they were intended to be read.' The Heythrop Journal

• Contents: Introduction; Poetic images and nature: Preface; Adam ate from the animal tree: a bestial poetry of soul; Origen on the bestial soul: a poetics of nature; The Physiologus: A Poetics of Nature; Jerome’s centuar: a hyper-icon of the desert; Poetic images and the body: Preface; Plenty sleeps there: the myth of Eros and Psyche in Plotinus and Gnosticism; Pleasure of the text, text of pleasure: Eros and language. Origen’s Commentary on the Song of Song; The blazing body: ascetic desire in Jerome’s Letter to Eustochium; Desert ascetism and The body from nowhere; Poetic images and theology: Preface; In my Father’s house are many dwelling places: Origen’s De principiis; Origen and the witch of Endor: toward an iconoclastic typology; Poetic words, abysmal words: reflections on Origen’s hermeneutics; In praise of nonsense: a piety of the alphabet in ancient magic; Words with an alien voice: gnostics, scripture and canon; Bibliography.