Browsing by Author "Clark, Elizabeth A"

My dissertation explores how constructions of memory, space, and violence intersected in the history of early Christianity. It analyzes the crucial roles of memory and space/place in the formation, practice, and understanding of late ancient asceticism in Egypt's northwestern desert (Scetis, Kellia, Nitria, and Pherme). After a "barbarian" raid of Scetis in the early fifth century supposedly exiled Christian monks from the desert, Egypt came to be remembered as the birthplace of ascetic practice. Interpreting texts (in Coptic, Latin, Greek, Syriac, and Classical Arabic) and archaeological remains associated with the northwestern Egyptian desert, my dissertation investigates ascetic ideas about the relationship between memories and places: memory-acts as preserved in the liturgical and literary texts, memory in the liturgical contexts of church and cell, the ascetic use of Scriptural interpretation to thwart "worldly" recollection caused by demonic incitement to abandon the desert, and remembrance of a past moment through the perceived loss of Scetis. Wedding textual evidence, material culture, and theoretical insights, I highlight how the memorialization of a particular moment in the history of early Christian asceticism overshadowed other, contemporary late ancient asceticisms. My dissertation produces a new understanding of the negotiations between memory and space, often a process of contestation, and sheds new light not only on how violence was performed in late antiquity, but also on modern struggles over memorialized locales.

Among the numerous commitments late ancient Christians throughout the Roman Empire shared with their non-Christian neighbors was a preoccupation with justice. Not only was the latter one of the celebrated characteristics of God, the New Testament had charged Christians, particularly those who served as bishops or elders, with ensuring and maintaining justice in their communities from the tradition's very origins. In the early fourth century, this aspect of episcopal responsibilities had received an unexpected boost when the Emperor Constantine not only recognized bishops' role in intra-Christian conflict resolution, but expanded their judicial capacity to include even outsiders in the so-called audientia episcopalis, the bishop's court.

Christians had, of course, never resolved the question of what constituted justice in a vacuum. Yet bishops' increasing integration into the sprawling and frequently amorphous apparatus of the Roman legal system introduced new pressures as well as new opportunities into Christian judicial discourse. Roman law could become an ally in a minister's exegetical or homiletical efforts. Yet it also came to intrude into spheres that had previously regarded themselves as set apart from Roman society, including especially monastic and clerical communities. The latter proved to be particularly permeable to different shades of legal discourse, inasmuch as they served as privileged feeders for episcopal sees. Their members were part of the Christian elites, whose judicial formation promised to bear disproportionate fruit among the laity under their actual or eventual care. This dissertation's task is the examination of the ways in which Christians in these environments throughout the Latin West at the turn of the fifth century thought and wrote about justice. I contend that no single influence proved dominant, but that three strands of judicial discourse emerge as significant throughout these sources: that of popular philosophical thought; that of biblical exegesis; and that of reasoning from Roman legal precept and practice. Late ancient Christian rhetoric consciously and selectively deployed these threads to craft visions of justice, both divine and human, that could be treated as distinctively Christian while remaining intelligible in the broader context of the Roman Empire.

My dissertation analyzes early Christian representations of Jewish sexuality and explores how early Christian writers attacked opponents by depicting them as subjects of perverse or excessive sexual desires. Beginning with the New Testament, I examine how Paul employed sexual stereotypes to distinguish the community of believers in Christ from the wider Gentile world. In the decades after Paul, Greek writers such as Justin Martyr and the author of the Epistle of Barnabas turned accusations of sexual licentiousness and literalist interpretive practices against the Jews. Origen of Alexandria, moreover, utilized accusations of carnality, fleshliness, and sexual licentiousness to produce Jewish-Christian difference; he drew on dichotomies of "flesh" and "spirit" in Paul's letters to support his argument for the superiority of Christian "spiritual" exegesis over Jewish "carnal" exegesis. Examining the writings of major Christian writers such as Origen and John Chrysostom, I argue that Christian sexual slander against Jews intensified as Christian exegetes endeavored to claim Jewish scripture for Christian use in the third and fourth centuries. My research examines these literary constructions of Jewish sexuality in early Christian writings of Greek Fathers and illuminates how these constructions function in relation to the development of Christian biblical hermeneutics, the formation of Christian practices of self-mastery, and the expansion of Christian imperial power. By exploring how early Christian writers appealed to categories of gender and sexuality to produce Jewish-Christian difference, I aim to contribute to recent scholarship on the variety of strategies by which early Christians negotiated identity and defined Otherness.

According to the Syriac Acts of the Persian Martyrs, the Sasanian king Shapur II began persecuting Christians in Persia soon after Constantine's death in 337 CE. Previous studies of the Acts (and related material) set Shapur's persecution within the context of Constantine's support for Christianity in the Roman Empire. Religious allegiances are said to have been further amplified during the Roman-Persian war over Rome's Mesopotamian provinces that followed Constantine's death. According to most interpretations, by the mid-fourth century Christianitas had become coextensive with Romanitas: Persian Christians were persecuted because they worshipped Caesar's god and, thereby, allied themselves with Rome.

By contrast, this dissertation reconsiders Christian historical narratives, the rhetorical and identity-shaping nature of the martyrological genre, and assumptions about the clear divisions of religious groups in late antiquity. Although the notion of Christianity as a "Roman" religion can be found in some of the historiography of persecution in Persia, our knowledge about Christians in fourth-century Persia is a harmonized event history woven from a tapestry of vague and conflicting sources that often exhibit later religious, political, and hagiographical agendas.

To demonstrate how Shapur's persecution came to be interpreted as the result of religious changes within the Roman Empire, the dissertation first reconsiders how Constantine is imagined as a patron of the Christians of Persia in Syriac and Greek sources. The second part looks at the ways by which constructed imperial ideals territorialized "religion" in the post-Constantinian era. Finally, the third part presents the first English translations of the Martyrdom and History of Simeon bar Sabba'e, a fourth-century Persian bishop whose martyr acts are central to the historiography of the period.

This dissertation examines ancient conceptualizations of female virginity. Giving particular attention to early Christian sources, I challenge the common assumption that virginity was a uniform concept in antiquity. In contrast to scholars’ tendency to treat virginity as a familiar and static concept in early Christian texts, I show that different writers construe it in different ways, often without including notions that modern readers have treated as universal—such as the idea that virginal women have intact hymens or the idea that virginity can be verified by medical inspection.

The early chapters of this dissertation emphasize the diversity of conceptualizations that can be found among ancient groups and thinkers. Surveying a wide range of pre- and non-Christian sources from various ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern regions, I show that these societies distinguished between female “virgins” and “women” but did so in a number of different ways, using “virginity” as a category for age, marital status, and more. Christians thus could work with a variety of ideas and assumptions when they wrote at length on virginity. An examination of second- and third-century writings about Jesus’ mother Mary reveals that the Christian authors of these texts held divergent opinions about what virginity is; they not only give different verdicts about whether Mary could be considered a virgin after giving birth, but employ different definitions of virginity in their answers to this question. A long central chapter identifies commonalities and significant differences between four fourth-century authors who wrote in Greek, Syriac, or Latin (Basil of Ancrya, Gregory of Nyssa, Ephrem the Syrian, and Ambrose of Milan). This comparison demonstrates that writers who utilized similar terminology and themes could construct surprisingly different configurations of the concept of virginity, especially the idea of “bodily” virginity.

The later chapters of this dissertation focus on developments in virginity discourse at the turn from the fourth to the fifth century C.E. and afterward. Unlike earlier sources, texts of this time indicate a widespread belief that virginity can be perceived in anatomical features of the female body. I draw on Christian, Jewish, medical, and encyclopedic sources to chart the shift, and I consider the relationship between belief in anatomical virginity and the social institutions of marriage, the sex trade, the slave trade, and Christian consecrated virginity. Turning to a Christian author who became especially influential in later periods (Augustine of Hippo), I provide a new reading of his discussions of virginity and chastity in the work City of God, exploring the tensions that the notion of anatomical virginity produces within his thinking. My analysis underscores the difficulties that emerged in Christian thought on virginity when writers both viewed virginity as an anatomical state and sought to promote it as a moral and spiritual state. I conclude that early Christians and their neighbors in the Mediterranean world held a variety of views on what female virginity is, and that the ideas of hymenal intactness and gynecological virginity testing did not become common until very late antiquity. In my concluding chapter, I offer brief observations about the connections between ancient conceptualizations of virginity and virginity’s meanings and value in present-day societies.

Ambrose, bishop of Milan, was one of the most outspoken advocates of Christian female virginity in the fourth century C.E. This dissertation examines his writings on virginity in the interest of illuminating the historical and social contexts of his teachings. Considering Ambrose's treatises on virginity as literary productions with social, political, and theological functions in Milanese society, I look at the various ways in which the bishop of Milan formulated ascetic discourse in response to the needs and expectations of his audience. Furthermore, I attend to the various discontinuities in Ambrose's ascetic writings in the hope of illuminating what kinds of ideological work these texts were intended to perform by the bishop within Milanese society and beyond.

In the first part of this dissertation, I consider the mechanisms of language and rhetoric promoting virginity in context of the Nicene-Homoian debate, highlighting the fluidity and flexibility of ascetic language in the late fourth century. While in his earliest teachings Ambrose expounds virginity in ways that reflect and support a Nicene understanding of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, his later ascetic writings display his use of anti-Homoian rhetoric in order to support his virginal ideals when they are challenged by Jovinian and others. In the second part, I examine some of the various ways in which the bishop formulated his teachings of virginity in response to the complaints and criticisms of lay members of the Christian community in Milan and elsewhere. I scrutinize the bishop's rhetorical expositions of Biblical figures such as Mary, Eve, the bride of the Song of Songs, and the Jews as a means of furthering his ascetic agenda, and consider his adaptation of a female voice to avoid incurring further criticism. Finally, I consider the role that the bishop's ascetic interests may have played in the so-called Altar of Victory controversy of 384. Largely at stake in Ambrose's dispute with the Roman senator Symmachus, I argue, were the rights and privileges of the Vestal Virgins, a well-established pagan ideology of virginity whose continued prominence and existence was largely unconscionable to the bishop. Ambrose's involvement in the controversy was partly attributable to his interest in ensuring the restriction of Vestal privileges as he perceived the cult to be in direct social and ideological competition with Christian virginity. Together, these three parts attempt to demonstrate the highly fluid and flexible nature of virginity discourse in the late fourth century and to draw attention to some of the socio-theological negotiations that took place as the cult of virginity gained increasing prominence in the Christian church.