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Rhetoric and Religious Identity in Late Antiquity takes an interdisciplinary approach to the question of how individuals and groups ascribed religious categories during late antiquity. Particular focus is given to the role of rhetoric in the expression of religious identity, in order to give mutual illumination to both phenomena in this period.
List of contents
- 1: Richard Flower and Morwenna Ludlow: Introduction
- PART I: THE NATURE OF RELIGIOUS IDENTITIES AND THEIR REPRESENTATION
- 2: Éric Rebillard: Approaching 'Religious Identity' in Late Antiquity
- 3: Aaron P. Johnson: The Rhetoric of Pagan Religious Identities: Porphyry and his First Readers
- 4: Douglas Boin: The Maccabees, 'Apostasy' and Julian's Appropriation of Hellenismos as a Reclaimed Epithet in Christian Conversations of the Fourth Century C.E.
- PART II: AGENTS OF THE REPRESENTATION OF RELIGIOUS IDENTITY
- 5: Shaun Tougher: Julian the Apologist: Christians and Pagans on the Mother of the Gods
- 6: Susanna Elm: Bodies, Books, Histories: Augustine of Hippo and the Extraordinary (civ. Dei 16.8 and Pliny, HN 7)
- 7: Raffaella Cribiore: Classical Decadence or Christian Aesthetics? Libanius, John Chrysostom, and Augustine on Rhetoric
- 8: Nicholas Baker-Brian: 'Very great are your words': Dialogue as Rhetoric in Manichaean Kephalaia
- 9: Maijastina Kahlos: 'A Christian Cannot Employ Magic': Rhetorical Self-fashioning of the Magicless Christianity of Late Antiquity
- PART III: MODES OF THE REPRESENTATION OF RELIGIOUS IDENTITY
- 10: Mark Humphries: The Rhetorical Construction of a Christian Empire in the Theodosian Code
- 11: Peter Van Nuffelen: What Happened after Eusebius? Chronicles and Narrative Identities in the Fourth Century
- 12: Richard Flower: The Rhetoric of Heresiological Prefaces
- 13: Robin M. Jensen: Constructing Identity in the Tomb: The Visual Rhetoric of Early Christian Iconography
- 14: Hajnalka Tamas: Renunciation and Ascetic Identity in the Liber ad Renatum of Asterius Ansedunensis
- 15: Morwenna Ludlow: Christian Literary Identity and Rhetoric about Style
About the author
Prof Richard Flower studied for his BA, MPhil and PhD in Classics at Clare College, Cambridge, and has worked at the Universities of Cambridge, Sheffield and Exeter. He specialises in the construction of imperial and ecclesiastical authority, particularly in late-antique polemical literature and heresiology. His publications include Emperors and Bishops in Late Roman Invective (Cambridge, 2013) and Imperial Invectives against Constantius II (Liverpool, 2016), and he is also editing The Cambridge Companion to Christian Heresy.
Prof Morwenna Ludlow studied Classics and then Theology at the University of Oxford. She has written widely on Gregory of Nyssa. Her latest book, Art, Craft and Theology in Fourth Century Greek Authors (also published by OUP) examines the use of literary and rhetorical tropes by Christian authors and argues that they interpret themselves as both theologians and craftsmen with words.
Summary
Rhetoric and Religious Identity in Late Antiquity takes an interdisciplinary approach to the question of how individuals and groups ascribed religious categories during late antiquity. Particular focus is given to the role of rhetoric in the expression of religious identity, in order to give mutual illumination to both phenomena in this period.
Additional text
The volume,...successfully accomplishes what the editors promised in the first chapter and delivers a collection of contributions replete with rich sources and insightful approaches to understand how rhetoric and religious identities interacted.
