Christian Political Cultures in Late Antiquity

An Open Access edition will be available on publication on the Liverpool University Press website, thanks to funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).The last generation of work on late antiquity has transformed our understanding of how the Roman world became Christian. But in this push for a new social and cultural history of late ancient Christianity, perceptions and practical realities of politics and government have largely been left behind. *Christian Political Cultures *seeks to diversify and reinvigorate the study of Christian political thought in late antiquity by moving beyond contemporary theorisations of the ideal Christian polity and the traditional problems of ‘church and state’. Its eleven essays use rich and sometimes overlooked case studies to map out sophisticated approaches to key themes in late ancient political culture: ‘popular’ perceptions of rule; Roman masculinity; the relationship between orthodoxy and legitimacy; and the political uses of hagiography. Taken as a whole, the book provides a springboard for new thinking about the role of Christian cultural frameworks within the social history of governance in late antiquity.