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"I know of no other book like this. Lim is thoroughly grounded in a wide variety of primary sources; cognizant of scholarly debates in contemporary literature and conversant with many recent works on sociology, anthropology and theory. The approach is original."—Elizabeth Clark, Duke University
"Original treatment of recherché material in an unusual and stimulating manner. Specialists will welcome the novelty while others may follow with profit Lim's argument as a route of access into normally inaccessible territory."—Maud Gleason, Stanford University
About the author
Richard Lim is a professor of the ancient Mediterranean and Near East, Greece and Rome, and late antiquity. His scholarly research focuses on the history and religions of late antiquity in the Mediterranean and Near Eastern worlds, especially the later Roman Empire.
Summary
Richard Lim explores the importance of verbal disputation in Late Antiquity, offering a rich socio-historical and cultural examination of the philosophical and theological controversies. He shows how public disputation changed with the advent of Christianity from a means of discovering truth and self-identification to a form of social competition and "winning over" an opponent. He demonstrates how the reception and practice of public debate, like other forms of competition in Late Antiquity, were closely tied to underlying notions of authority, community and social order.
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1995.
