Letters and Asceticism in Fourth-century Egypt

Letters and Asceticism in Fourth-century Egypt
Author: Bernadette McNary-Zak
Publisher:
Total Pages: 166
Release: 2000
Genre: History
ISBN:

In Letters and Asceticism in Fourth-Century Egypt, Bernadette McNary-Zak analyzes collections of ascetic letters written by prominent fourth-century Egyptian bishops, ascetics, and monks arguing that this neglected body of evidence deserves primary source recognition alongside hagiographic sources. Focusing principally on the works of Ammonas, Antony, Athanasius, Horsisios, Pachomius, Serapion of Thmuis, and Theodore, Letters and Asceticism begins with the analysis of the current state of scholarship on ascetic letters. McNary-Zak then moves into a discussion of the Antonian and Pachomian movements and assesses the authorship of the Life of Antony. She concludes with a succinct summation of the value of the ascetic letters in relation to the traditional, contemporary, hagiographic desert ascetic sources. A powerful argument for the use of ascetic letters, this book will be a boon to professors of theology and history as well as students interested in research of Egyptian asceticism.

Late Antique Letter Collections

Late Antique Letter Collections
Author: Cristiana Sogno
Publisher: University of California Press
Total Pages: 486
Release: 2019-11-19
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0520308417

Bringing together an international team of historians, classicists, and scholars of religion, this volume provides the first comprehensive overview of the extant Greek and Latin letter collections of late antiquity (ca. 300–600 c.e.). Each chapter addresses a major collection of Greek or Latin literary letters, introducing the social and textual histories of each collection and examining its assembly, publication, and transmission. Contributions also reveal how collections operated as discrete literary genres, with their own conventions and self-presentational agendas. This book will fundamentally change how people both read these texts and use letters to reconstruct the social history of the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries.

Monastic Bodies

Monastic Bodies
Author: Caroline T. Schroeder
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 246
Release: 2013-03-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0812203380

Shenoute of Atripe led the White Monastery, a community of several thousand male and female Coptic monks in Upper Egypt, between approximately 395 and 465 C.E. Shenoute's letters, sermons, and treatises—one of the most detailed bodies of writing to survive from any early monastery—provide an unparalleled resource for the study of early Christian monasticism and asceticism. In Monastic Bodies, Caroline Schroeder offers an in-depth examination of the asceticism practiced at the White Monastery using diverse sources, including monastic rules, theological treatises, sermons, and material culture. Schroeder details Shenoute's arduous disciplinary code and philosophical structure, including the belief that individual sin corrupted not only the individual body but the entire "corporate body" of the community. Thus the purity of the community ultimately depended upon the integrity of each individual monk. Shenoute's ascetic discourse focused on purity of the body, but he categorized as impure not only activities such as sex but any disobedience and other more general transgressions. Shenoute emphasized the important practices of discipline, or askesis, in achieving this purity. Contextualizing Shenoute within the wider debates about asceticism, sexuality, and heresy that characterized late antiquity, Schroeder compares his views on bodily discipline, monastic punishments, the resurrection of the body, the incarnation of Christ, and monastic authority with those of figures such as Cyril of Alexandria, Paulinus of Nola, and Pachomius.

Collecting Early Christian Letters

Collecting Early Christian Letters
Author: Bronwen Neil
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 275
Release: 2015-02-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 1316241025

Letter collections in late antiquity give witness to the flourishing of letter-writing, with the development of the mostly formulaic exchanges between elites of the Graeco-Roman world to a more wide-ranging correspondence by bishops and monks, as well as emperors and Gothic kings. The contributors to this volume study individual collections from the first to sixth centuries CE, ranging from the Pauline and Deutero-Pauline letters through monastic letters from Egypt, bishops' letter collections and early papal collections compiled for various purposes. This is the first multi-authored study of New Testament and late antique letter collections, crossing the traditional divide between these disciplines by focusing on Latin, Greek, Coptic and Syriac epistolary sources. It draws together leading scholars in the field of late antique epistolography from Australasia, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Ascetics, Society, and the Desert

Ascetics, Society, and the Desert
Author: James E. Goehring
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 324
Release: 1999-05-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9781563382697

Through rigorous examination of papyrological documentary sources, archaeology, and traditional literary sources, James Goehring gradually forces a new direction in understanding the evolution of monasticism. He ably transforms these sources into a clear narrative, thereby infusing the history of Egyptian monasticism with renewed energy.

Plagues, Priests, and Demons

Plagues, Priests, and Demons
Author: Daniel T. Reff
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2004-12-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781139442787

Drawing on anthropology, religious studies, history, and literary theory, Plagues, Priests, and Demons explores significant parallels in the rise of Christianity in the late Roman empire and colonial Mexico. Evidence shows that new forms of infectious disease devastated the late Roman empire and Indian America, respectively, contributing to pagan and Indian interest in Christianity. Christian clerics and monks in early medieval Europe, and later Jesuit missionaries in colonial Mexico, introduced new beliefs and practices as well as accommodated indigenous religions, especially through the cult of the saints. The book is simultaneously a comparative study of early Christian and later Spanish missionary texts. Similarities in the two literatures are attributed to similar cultural-historical forces that governed the 'rise of Christianity' in Europe and the Americas.

Snapshots of Evolving Traditions

Snapshots of Evolving Traditions
Author: Liv Ingeborg Lied
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 384
Release: 2017-01-23
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 3110348055

An die Seite des Corpus der Griechischen Christlichen Schriftsteller (GCS) stellte Adolf von Harnack die Monographienreihe der Texte und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der altchristlichen Literatur (TU), die er bereits 1882 begründet hatte und die nunmehr als »Archiv für die ... Ausgabe der älteren christlichen Schriftsteller« diente. In ihr werden vor allem die alten Übersetzungen der im Corpus erscheinenden Schriften teils im Original, teils in deutscher oder einer anderen modernen Sprache gedruckt. Daneben steht die Reihe auch für Voruntersuchungen zu den Editionen und für begleitende Abhandlungen offen.

Asceticism in the Graeco-Roman World

Asceticism in the Graeco-Roman World
Author: Richard Finn
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 195
Release: 2009-07-02
Genre: History
ISBN: 1139480669

Asceticism deploys abstention, self-control, and self-denial, to order oneself or a community in relation to the divine. Both its practices and the cultural ideals they expressed were important to pagans, Jews, Christians of different kinds, and Manichees. Richard Finn presents for the first time a combined study of the major ascetic traditions, which have been previously misunderstood by being studied separately. He examines how people abstained from food, drink, sexual relations, sleep, and wealth; what they meant by their behaviour; and how they influenced others in the Graeco-Roman world. Against this background, the book charts the rise of monasticism in Egypt, Asia Minor, Syria, and North Africa, assessing the crucial role played by the third-century exegete, Origen, and asks why monasticism developed so variously in different regions.

Pachomius

Pachomius
Author: Philip Rousseau
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 268
Release: 1999-07-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780520219595

Pachomius, who died in 346, has long been regarded as the "founder of monasticism." Available again, Philip Rousseau's careful reading of the available texts reveals that Pachomius's pioneering enterprise has been consistently misread in light of later monastic practices. Rousseau not only provides a fuller and more accurate portrait of this great teacher and spiritual director but also gives a new perspective on the development of monasticism. In a new preface Rousseau reviews the scholarly developments that have modified his views and emphases since the book was published. The result is to make Pachomius an even less assured pioneer, a man likely to have been more involved in the village and urban society of his time than previously thought.

Metamorphoses

Metamorphoses
Author: Turid Karlsen Seim
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Total Pages: 408
Release: 2009
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 3110202980

This series will publish monographs and collected essays on topics concerning religious experience in antiquity. Volumes in this series will address a diverse array of religious experiences and movements, and particular expressions of religious experience, such as ecstatic trances, magic, healing, prophecy, divination, and dreams, as well as other phenomena that contribute to the scholarly exploration of religious experience. Methods will range widely, encompassing contemporary sociological, anthropological, and psychological approaches to religious experience, as well as historical analysis of textual, archaeological, and artistic evidence. Image: "firefox", 2007 (c) Elliot R. Wolfson - homepages.nyu.edu/ erw1