Brian P. Sowers – författare

In Her Own Words: The Life and Poetry of Aelia Eudocia is the first full-length study to examine Eudocia’s writings as a unified whole and to situate them within their wider fifth-century literary, social, and religious contexts. Responsible for over 3,000 lines of extant poetry, Eudocia is one of the best-preserved ancient female poets. Because she wrote in a literary mode frequently suppressed by proto-orthodox (male) leaders, much of her poetry does not survive, and what does survive remains understudied and underappreciated. This book represents a detailed investigation into Eudocia’s works: her epigraphic poem in honor of the therapeutic bath at Hammat Gader, her Homeric cento—a poetic paraphrase of the Bible using lines from Homer—and her epic on the fictional magician-turned-Christian, Cyprian of Antioch.Reading her poetry as a whole and in context, Eudocia emerges as an exceptional author representing three unique late-antique communities: poets interested in preserving and transforming classical literature; Christians whose religious views positioned them outside and against traditional power structures; and women who challenged social, religious, and literary boundaries.

This edited volume brings together renowned specialists from History, Medieval Studies, Religious Studies, Archaeology and Art History to critically examine the topic of religious experience and so-called “lived religion” from Late Antiquity to the Central Middle Ages. With papers on Judaism, Christianity and Islam in this period, the volume is the first of its kind to consider this question in the early medieval era from a comparative perspective, drawing from a wide variety of theoretical literatures and multiple approaches, including performance theory, history of emotions, eco-criticism, queer phenomenology, history of experience and new materialism culture, to name just a few.Recovering a historical community’s religious experiences is a delicate, oftentimes difficult task. This is particularly true of religious experiences from Late Antiquity to the Central Middle Ages (c. 300–1100 C.E.), where the number and quality of sources for religious communities increase (compared to classical antiquity) yet have not reached the fevered pitch of the so-called High Middle Ages.

This book explores the body’s physical limits and the ways in which the confines of the body are delineated, transgressed, or controlled in literary and philosophical texts. Drawing on classics, philosophy, religious studies, medieval studies, and critical theory and examining material ranging from Homer to Game of Thrones, this volume facilitates an interdisciplinary investigation into how the boundaries of the body define the human form in language. This volume’s essays suggest that the body’s meaning is perhaps never more evident than in the violation of its wholeness. The boundaries of the body are areas of transition between states and are therefore vulnerable. As individuals find themselves isolated from their world and one another, their bodies regularly allow for physical interactions, incur transgressions and violations, and undergo profound transformations. Thus sympathy, sexuality, disease, and violence are among the main themes of the volume, which, ultimately, reexamines the place of the body in our understanding of what it means to be human.