Patricia Cox Miller - Böcker

Dream interpretation was a prominent feature of the intellectual and imaginative world of late antiquity, for martyrs and magicians, philosophers and theologians, polytheists and monotheists alike. Finding it difficult to account for the prevalence of dream-divination, modern scholarship has often condemned it as a cultural weakness, a mass lapse into mere superstition. In this book, Patricia Cox Miller draws on pagan, Jewish, and Christian sources and modern semiotic theory to demonstrate the integral importance of dreams in late-antique thought and life. She argues that Graeco-Roman dream literature functioned as a language of signs that formed a personal and cultural pattern of imagination and gave tangible substance to ideas such as time, cosmic history, and the self. Miller first discusses late-antique theories of dreaming, with emphasis on theological, philosophical, and hermeneutical methods of deciphering dreams as well as the practical uses of dreams, especially in magic and the cult of Asclepius. She then considers the cases of six Graeco-Roman dreamers: Hermas, Perpetua, Aelius Aristides, Jerome, Gregory of Nyssa, and Gregory of Nazianus.Her detailed readings illuminate the ways in which dreams provided solutions to ethical and religious problems, allowed for the reconfiguration of gender and identity, provided occasions for the articulation of ethical ideas, and altogether served as a means of making sense and order of the world.

With few exceptions, the scholarship on religion in late antiquity has emphasized its tendencies toward transcendence, abstraction, and spirit at the expense of matter. In The Corporeal Imagination, Patricia Cox Miller argues instead that ancient Christianity took a material turn between the fourth and seventh centuries. During this period, Miller contends, there occurred a major shift in the ways in which the human being was oriented in relation to the divine, a shift that reconfigured the relationship between materiality and meaning in a positive direction.The Corporeal Imagination is a groundbreaking investigation into the theological poetics of material substance in late ancient Christian texts. From hagiographies to literary descriptions of sacred paintings to treatises on relics and theurgy, Miller examines a wide variety of ancient texts to reveal how Christian writers increasingly described the matter of the world as invested with divine power. By appealing to the reader's sensory imagination, Christian texts endowed phenomena like relics, saints' bodies in hagiography, and saints' presence in icons with a visual and tactile presence. The book draws on a variety of contemporary theoretical models to elucidate the significance of all these materials in ancient religious life and imagination.

Early Christian theology posited a strict division between animals and humans. Nevertheless, animal figures abound in early Christian literature and art-from Augustine's renowned "wonder at the agility of the mosquito on the wing," to vivid exegeses of the six days of creation detailed in Genesis-and when they appear, the distinctions between human and animal are often dissolved. How, asks Patricia Cox Miller, does one account for the stunning zoological imagination found in a wide variety of genres of ancient Christian texts?In the Eye of the Animal complicates the role of animals in early Christian thought by showing how textual and artistic images and interpretive procedures actually celebrated a continuum of human and animal life. Synthesizing early Christian studies, contemporary philosophy, animal studies, ethology, and modern poetry, Miller identifies two contradictory strands in early Christian thinking about animals. The dominant thread viewed the body and soul of the human being as dominical, or the crowning achievement of creation; animals, with their defective souls, related to humans only as reminders of the brutish physical form. However, the second strand relied upon the idea of a continuum of animal life, which enabled comparisons between animals and humans. This second tendency, explains Miller, arises particularly in early Christian literature in which ascetic identity, the body, and ethics intersect. She explores the tension between these modes by tracing the image of the animal in early Christian literature, from the ethical animal behavior on display in Basil of Caesarea's Hexaemeron and the anonymous Physiologus, to the role of animals in articulating erotic desire, and from the idyllic intimacy of monks and animals in literature of desert ascetism to early Christian art that envisions paradise through human-animal symbiosis.

From the fictional Thecla in the second century to the very real Olympias in the early fifth century, the history of women in early Christianity was as complex and rich as the religion itself. This comprehensive sourcebook brings together translations of a variety of ancient Christian texts that elucidate how women were perceived and portrayed in the Greek literature written in the second to the sixth centuries. The texts included in the volume have been generously excerpted, providing the modern reader with an in-depth view of the historical reality of early Christian women's lives as well as a nuanced perspective on the many ways in which women were understood in theological and ecclesiastical frameworks. Few documents written by early Christian women have been preserved; contemporary readers therefore do not have much direct access to these women's own perspectives on their lives and roles as Christians. Nevertheless, there are many kinds of texts that can be used both to reconstruct the history of actual women in early Christianity and to analyze the ancient ideologies and rhetoric that affected how they were perceived. This volume offers many different kinds of texts in order to present as complete a view as possible of early Christian women: documentary sources such as church orders and proceedings, popular narrative sources such as the novelistic apocryphal acts, biographies and lives of saints, and theological treatises on virginity and marriage. What emerges from these texts is a colorful portrayal of the many faces of ancient Christian women in their roles as teachers, prophets, martyrs, widows, deaconesses, ascetics, virgins, wives, and mothers. Whether celebrated as saints or denigrated as harlots, early Christian women were magnets of theological and social thought.

The essays in this provocative collection exemplify the innovations that have characterized the relatively new field of late ancient studies. Focused on civilizations clustered mainly around the Mediterranean and covering the period between roughly 100 and 700 CE, scholars in this field have brought history and cultural studies to bear on theology and religious studies. They have adopted the methods of the social sciences and humanities-particularly those of sociology, cultural anthropology, and literary criticism. By emphasizing cultural and social history and considerations of gender and sexuality, scholars of late antiquity have revealed the late ancient world as far more varied than had previously been imagined.The contributors investigate three key concerns of late ancient studies: gender, asceticism, and historiography. They consider Macrina’s scar, Mary’s voice, and the harlot’s body as well as Augustine, Jovinian, Gregory of Nazianzus, Julian, and Ephrem the Syrian. Whether examining how animal bodies figured as a means for understanding human passion and sexuality in the monastic communities of Egypt and Palestine or meditating on the almost modern epistemological crisis faced by Theodoret in attempting to overcome the barriers between the self and the wider world, these essays highlight emerging theoretical and critical developments in the field.Contributors. Daniel Boyarin, David Brakke, Virginia Burrus, Averil Cameron, Susanna Elm, James E. Goehring, Susan Ashbrook Harvey, David G. Hunter, Blake Leyerle, Dale B. Martin, Patricia Cox Miller, Philip Rousseau, Teresa M. Shaw, Maureen A. Tilley, Dennis E. Trout, Mark Vessey

This title was first published in 2001. These collected essays by Patricia Cox Miller identify new possibilities of meaning in the study of religion in late antiquity. The book addresses the topic of the imaginative mindset of late ancient authors from a variety of Greco-Roman religious traditions. Attending to the play of language, as well as to the late ancient sensitivity to image, metaphor, and paradox, Cox Miller's work highlights the poetizing sensibility that marked many of the texts of this period and draws on methods of interpretation from a variety of contemporary literary-critical theories. This book will appeal to scholars of late antiquity, religious literature, and literary critical theory more widely, illustrating how fruitful dialogue across the centuries can be - not only in eliciting aspects of late ancient texts that have gone unnoticed but also in showing that many 'modern' ideas, such as Roland Barthes', were actually already alive and well in ancient texts.