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Meals, Mouths, And Martyrs: Paulinus Of Nola And Sacrificial Spaces (Chapter 6 Of Food, Virtue, And The Shaping Of Early Christianity), Dana Robinson
Meals, Mouths, And Martyrs: Paulinus Of Nola And Sacrificial Spaces (Chapter 6 Of Food, Virtue, And The Shaping Of Early Christianity), Dana Robinson
Faculty Publications - Department of History and Politics
In January 406, Paulinus of Nola devotes his twelfth Natalicium, or birthday poem, in honor of St. Felix’s festival day (Carm. 20), to three miracle stories about local farmers and devotees of the saint.1 Each one vows to bring a fattened animal – two pigs and a calf, respectively – to the shrine of Felix as a devotional offering. After much misadventure, and thanks only to Felix’s intervention, each one successfully performs his vow. The first “cuts the throat of the fat beast he had vowed, as men bound by a promise do.” The second brings a pig who “demands …
Shenoute’S Feast: Monastic Ideology, Lay Piety, And The Discourse Of Food In Late Antiquity, Dana Robinson
Shenoute’S Feast: Monastic Ideology, Lay Piety, And The Discourse Of Food In Late Antiquity, Dana Robinson
Faculty Publications - Department of History and Politics
In the fourth and fifth centuries c.e., food provides a dense and value-laden web of meaning which lay and monastic Christians use to negotiate their identity with the culture at large, but also vis-à-vis each other. The works of Shenoute of Atripe are a valuable source of insight into the workings of this discourse in a Christian community, since they embrace both internal monastic instruction (the Canons) and public sermons (the Discourses). The first half of this paper constructs Shenoute’s ideology of the Christian meal in terms of the larger discourse of food in which it participates. He …