1st Edition
Soul, Body, and Gender in Late Antiquity Essays on Embodiment and Disembodiment
Including both traditional and underrepresented accounts and geographies of soul, body, gender, and sexuality in late antique history, philosophy, and theology, this volume offers substantial re-readings of these and related concepts through theories of dis/embodiment.
Bringing together gender studies, late antique philosophy, patristics, history of asceticism, and history of Indian philosophy, this interdisciplinary volume examines the notions of dis/embodiment and im/materiality in late antique and early Christian culture and thought. The book’s geographical scope extends beyond the ancient Mediterranean, providing comparative perspectives from Late Antiquity in the Near East and South Asia. It offers critical interpretations of late antique scholarly objects of inquiry, exploring close readings of soul, body, gender, and sexuality in their historical context. These fascinating studies engage scholars from different fields and research traditions with one another, and reveal both change and continuity in the perception and social role of gender, sexuality, body, and soul in this period.
Soul, Body, and Gender in Late Antiquity is a valuable resource for students and scholars of Classics, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, as well as those working on late antique and early Christian history, philosophy, and theology.
Introduction STANIMIR PANAYOTOV, ANDRA JUGĂNARU, ANASTASIA THEOLOGOU AND ISTVÁN PERCZEL; I From India 1. Celibacy, Sexuality, and Monasticism in Early South Asia: A Personal Dialogue with the Past UMA CHAKRAVARTI; II Through the Late Antique Mediterranean II.1 Gender and the Self in Greek Philosophy 2. Light, Knowledge, Incorporeality, and the Feminine in Parmenides EMESE MOGYORÓDI; 3 Plotinus: Seeing the Self in Unity ANASTASIA THEOLOGOU; 4. Sexless Henology, or, Is Plotinus’ One Neutral to Sex and Gender? STANIMIR PANAYOTOV; 5 The Two Aphrodites: Plotinus, Proclus, and the Sublimation of Bodily Desires CHIARA MILITELLO; 6 In/violability as Evidence in Heliodorus NATHALIE SCHULER; II.2 Gender, The Body, and Christian Theology; 7 Male and Female in the Protevangelium Jacobi GYÖRGY GERÉBY; 8 Identical, But Not Alike: The Resurrection of the Body According to Amphilochius of Iconium István ISTVÁN PÁSZTORI-KUPÁN; 9 Fatherhood and Sonship: The Use of Concepts of Reproduction and Gendered Perspectives in the Ninth-Century Arabic Christian Controversy ORSOLYA VARSÁNYI; II.3 Augustine on Soul, Body, and Sexuality; 10 Man, Woman, and Serpent as the Inner State of One Person: Anthropology Based on the Interpretation of Genesis 3 in Didymus the Blind and Augustine of Hippo PETER D. STEIGER AND MAKIKO SATO; 11 From Matter to History: Towards a Disembodied Interpretation of Human Sexuality in Augustine ISABELLE KOCH; 12 Augustine on the Uniqueness of Sexual Desire Among the Passions and on the Ambivalent Character of Sexual Life Within a Christian Marriage GÁBOR KENDEFFY; II.4 Bodily Transformations in Hagiography and Magic; 13 Shame in the Development of Christian Identity in the Acts of the Christian Martyrs ANA-MARIA RĂDUCAN; 14 Historicizing Trans Saints: Gender, Sexuality, and Agency in the Life of Pelagia MARIANA BODNARUK; 15 The Im/materiality of the Will?: The Life of Dositheus and Delicia Children in Late Antiquity JONATHAN CAHANA-BLUM; 16 Menopause and Agency in Late Antiquity: A Case for Magical Gems JORDAN POOLE; 17 From the Depths of Sin to the Highness of Holiness: The Female Body as Witness of the Journey to Sanctity in the Life of Mary the Egyptian ANDRA JUGĂNARU; II.5 Virility in Roman Rhetoric; 18 “Neglegentissimus Vernula”: Manliness and Imperial Legitimation in Pacatus’ Panegyric in Praise of the Emperor Theodosius’s Civil War Victory SUSANNA ELM; 19 From Inanity to Ideology: The Allurements of Narrative in Martianus Capella’s De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii DAVID ROLLO; III. To the Ancient Mediterranean and India; 20 Solomon’s Song of Songs and Adi Shankara’s Soundarya Lahari: A Comparison SUSAN VISVANATHAN; IV APPENDIX; Marianne Sághy: Bibliography ANDRA JUGĂNARU
Biography
Stanimir Panayotov is Assistant Professor in Philosophy at the School of Advanced Studies, University of Tyumen, Russia. Most recently, he is a co-editor of Black Metal Rainbows (PM Press, 2023), and editor of O–Zone: An Ecology of Objects (Punctum Books, forthcoming 2024).
Andra Jugănaru (PhD in Medieval Studies) is Assistant Professor at the Faculty of History, University of Bucharest, Romania. Her current research interests involve the use of network theory in the research of late antique epistolography, and her other research interests are late antique monasticism and hagiography.
Anastasia Theologou is a PhD Candidate at the Department of Medieval Studies in the Central European University, Vienna, Austria, with a thesis on Plotinus and Sympatheia. Her research interests focus on ancient cosmology, psychology, and epistemology, and the ancient philosophical tradition in Medieval philosophy.
István Perczel is Professor in the Department of Medieval Studies at Central European University, Vienna, Austria. He has extensively worked on late antique and patristic philosophy. One of his research projects is on Christian Platonism and Byzantine theology, and he has worked on Syriac Christianity.
"Following the ways that Marianne Sághy opened, the authors of the contributions included in this collective work managed to follow a seldom tried avenue of approach, putting in a scholarly dialogue the classics and gender studies, which usually do not successfully intersect. A great achievement of the volume is to balance the feminist theory about the ancient philosophy (which can be, sometimes, marked by reductionism) with an in-depth knowledge of the classic and early medieval sources… Bringing together scholars who usually work separately in Patristics, philosophy, social history, literature, and gender studies, the volume is a very important contribution which could be used by various categories of the scholarly audience, going from senior researchers to students who are now entering the different fascinating fields pertaining to Late Antiquity and Early Middle Ages."
Ecaterina Lung, Professor of Late Antique and Medieval History, University of Bucharest
"Comprehensive and ambitious in its scope, this volume explores the complex depiction of women and the feminine across diverse traditions and eras of Late Antiquity. Opening and closing with the two Eastern traditions of Buddhism and a comparative reading of an Indian Vedic text, classical figures like Parmenides and Plotinus are analyzed while cultural phenomena like magical and medical practices further round out the volume. Finally, the volume’s main focus is Christian theological depictions of women, saints and, most fascinatingly, obscured but genuinely novel conceptions of both Marys in the early Christian literature and new readings of Augustine."
Danielle A. Layne, Professor of Philosophy, Gonzaga University
"Apart from the international celebrity of the contributors, the most attesting feature of this volume is its variety… to find the presocratic Parmenides championing the equality of women, the novelist (and bishop?) Heliodorus meditating with nuance on the relation of soul and body, a female saint making use of erotic suggestion to subdue her masculine critics, the old and beloved tale of the Virgin Mary’s birth slily functioning as a rebuttal of Gnosticism—all this is beyond what could have been foreseen, and a tribute to the power of the honorand, Marianne Sághy, to kindle the academic imagination."
Mark Edwards, FBA, Professor of Early Christian Studies, University of Oxford
"Five decades after Foucault’s History of Sexuality, and four decades after Peter Brown’s The Body and Society, the 20 essays in this volume offer new vistas on a wide range of writers that engage with the body as a way of thinking about overcoming the materiality of the created world—Buddhist sages, Greek philosophers, Roman poets, Christian theorists and pious storytellers… It is also a glorious assertion of gender studies that has recently been suffocated by nationalist politics and no longer exists as academic discipline in Hungary."
Claudia Rapp, Professor of Byzantine Studies, University of Vienna
