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Religion Faculty Research

2007

Book review

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities

Abandoned To Lust: Sexual Slander And Ancient Christianity – By Jennifer Wright Knust [Review Of The Book Abandoned To Lust: Sexual Slander And Ancient Christianity By J. W. Knust], Rubén R. Dupertuis Jul 2007

Abandoned To Lust: Sexual Slander And Ancient Christianity – By Jennifer Wright Knust [Review Of The Book Abandoned To Lust: Sexual Slander And Ancient Christianity By J. W. Knust], Rubén R. Dupertuis

Religion Faculty Research

The author argues that accusations of sexual depravity in early Christian literature, whatever their historical value, must be placed in the broader context of Greco-Roman rhetorical traditions in which charges of sexual deviance were stock elements of rhetorical slander. The first chapter, “Sexual Slander and Ancient Invective,” shows the degree to which the discourses of status and gender were intertwined in the Greco-Roman world. In this context, accusations of sexual deviance served the construction and maintenance of an elite identity understood as a male who is able to control his passions and avoid excess. In four subsequent chapters she tracks …


Memory, Tradition And Text: Uses Of The Past In Early Christianity - Edited By Alan Kirk And Tom Thatcher [Review Of The Book Memory, Tradition And Text: Uses Of The Past In Early Christianity, By A. Kirk & T. Thatcher, Ed.], Rubén R. Dupertuis Jul 2007

Memory, Tradition And Text: Uses Of The Past In Early Christianity - Edited By Alan Kirk And Tom Thatcher [Review Of The Book Memory, Tradition And Text: Uses Of The Past In Early Christianity, By A. Kirk & T. Thatcher, Ed.], Rubén R. Dupertuis

Religion Faculty Research

The aim of this collection of essays is, at least in part, to remedy the lack of attention that studies of early Christianity have paid to recent developments, in the fields of sociology and anthropology, in the study of memory. An excellent introductory survey by Alan Kirk of recent developments in memory studies is followed by eleven essays applying some aspect of the approach to various texts or problems in the study of early Christianity, and then by responses by Werner Kelber and Barry Schwartz. While the various contributions interact in different ways with the relevant theories and models, all …