The Garb of Being
ByPublisher Description
This collection explores how the body became a touchstone for late antique religious practice and imagination. When we read the stories and testimonies of late ancient Christians, what different types of bodies stand before us? How do we understand the range of bodily experiences—solitary and social, private and public—that clothed ancient Christians? How can bodily experience help us explore matters of gender, religious identity, class, and ethnicity? The Garb of Being investigates these questions through stories from the Eastern Christian world of antiquity: monks and martyrs, families and congregations, and textual bodies.
Contributors include S. Abrams Rebillard, T. Arentzen, S. P. Brock, R. S. Falcasantos , C. M. Furey, S. H. Griffith, R. Krawiec, B. McNary-Zak, J.-N. Mellon Saint-Laurent, C. T. Schroeder, A. P. Urbano, F. M. Young
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About Georgia Frank
Georgia Frank is Professor of Religion at Colgate University.
Other books by Georgia Frank
Susan Holman
Susan R. Holman is the Eckrich Chair and Professor of Religion and the Healing Arts at Valparaiso University.
Andrew Jacobs
Andrew S. Jacobs is Senior Fellow at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard University.
Suzanne Abrams Rebillard
Suzanne Abrams Rebillard is an independent scholar in Ithaca, New York. She received her PhD in Classics from Brown University and her master’s degree in Library and Information Science at Syracuse University. She is currently completing a translation of Gregory of Nazianzus’s Poemata de seipso for the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library.
Thomas Arentzen
Thomas Arentzen is a reader in church history and works as a researcher in Greek philology at Uppsala University and as a senior lecturer in Eastern Christian studies at Sankt Ignatios College, Stockholm School of Theology. He specializes in Byzantine literature and ecocriticism. Publications include The Virgin in Song: Mary and the Poetry of Romanos the Melodist (2017) and Byzantine Tree Life: Christianity and the Arboreal Imagination (2021), coauthored with Virginia Burrus and Glenn Peers.
Sebastian Brock
Sebastian Brock is Reader (Retired) in Syriac Studies on the Faculty of Oriental Studies at the University of Oxford. He is a prolific scholar and widely renowned mentor in all aspects of Syriac literature. His interests focus on translations from Greek and the history of translation technique, dialogue and narrative poems, hagiography, select liturgical texts, and monastic literature. He is presently editing a number of unpublished Syriac texts and exploring diachronic aspects of Syriac word formation and Syriac dialogue poems. Among his publications are The Bible in the Syriac Tradition (Gorgias Press, 2006), An Introduction to Syriac Studies (Gorgias Press, 2006), and From Ephrem to Romanos: Interactions between Syriac and Greek in Late Antiquity (Variorum, 1999); and he is co-editor, with Susan Ashbrook Harvey, of Holy Women of the Syrian Orient (University of California Press, 1998).
Rebecca Stephens Falcasantos
Rebecca Stephens Falcasantos is a Research Associate and Lecturer in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. Her research focuses on the intersection of religious practices, rhetoric, and contestations over cultural dominance in the late Roman East. Her forthcoming book, Constantinople: Ritual, Violence, and Memory in the Making of a Christian Imperial Capital (University of California Press, 2020), explores the role of ritual performance, rhetoric about violence, and the curation of memory in shaping Constantinople’s public ritual life during the transition between traditional Mediterranean cults (“paganism”) and Christianity.
Georgia Frank
Georgia Frank is Professor of Religion at Colgate University.
Other books by Georgia Frank
Constance Furey
Constance M. Furey is Professor and Chair of Religious Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington. Author of two monographs, Erasmus, Contarini, and the Religious Republic of Letters (Cambridge University Press, 2006) and Poetic Relations: Faith and Intimacy in the English Reformation (University of Chicago Press, 2016), she specializes in Renaissance and Reformation literature and theology and has published essays on a range of topics, including mystic sexuality, the theology of errancy, and spiritual discernment as a model for secular critique. She is currently at work on a series of essays about teaching and a co- authored book about faith and/in literature.
Sidney Griffith
Sidney H. Griffith is Ordinary Professor Emeritus of Semitic and Egyptian Languages and Literature at the Catholic University of America. His areas of interest include Syriac patristics, Christian Arab literature, and the history of Christian/Muslim relations, especially within the world of Islam and in the early Islamic period. He is the author of The Beginnings of Christian Theology in Arabic: Muslim-Christian Encounters in the Early Islamic Period (Ashgate, 2002), The Church in the Shadow of the Mosque: Christians and Muslims in the World of Islam (Princeton University Press, 2008), and The Bible in Arabic: The Scriptures of the “People of the Book” in the Language of Islam (Princeton University Press, 2013).
Susan Holman
Susan R. Holman is the Eckrich Chair and Professor of Religion and the Healing Arts at Valparaiso University.
Andrew Jacobs
Andrew S. Jacobs is Senior Fellow at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard University.
Rebecca Krawiec
Rebecca Krawiec is Chair of Religious Studies and Theology at Canisius College. She is the author of Shenoute and the Women of the White Monastery: Egyptian Monasticism in Late Antiquity (Oxford University Press, 2002). Her current research examines the intersection of literacy and social memory in texts that both create and report on Egyptian monasticism.
Bernadette McNary-Zak
Bernadette McNary-Zak is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Rhodes College. She is the co-editor of Teaching Undergraduate Research in Religious Studies (Oxford University Press, 2011); co-translator of Useful Servanthood: A Study of Spiritual Formation in the Writings of Abba Ammonas (Cistercian Publications, 2010); and co-editor of Resurrecting the Brother of Jesus: The James Ossuary Controversy and the Quest for Religious Relics (University of North Carolina Press, 2009).
Other books by Bernadette McNary-Zak
Jeanne-Nicole Mellon Saint-Laurent
Jeanne-Nicole Mellon Saint-Laurent (PhD, Brown University, 2009) is a scholar of Syriac studies and early Christianity, with special interests in hagiography and sacred narrative. She is the author of Missionary Stories and the Formation of the Syriac Churches (University of California Press, 2015). She co-authored with Kyle R. Smith The History of Mar Behnam and Sarah: Martyrdom and Monasticism in Medieval Iraq (Gorgias Press, 2018). She is the co-editor of The Gateway to the Syriac Saints, a two-volume digital database on Syriac saints (Qadishe: http://syriaca.org/q/index.html) and their Lives (Bibliotheca Hagiographica Syriac Electronica: http://syriaca.org/bhse/index.html), published in 2016 with www.syriaca.org, an online reference portal for Syriac studies.
Other books by Jeanne-Nicole Mellon Saint-Laurent
Arthur Urbano
Arthur P. Urbano is Professor of Theology at Providence College. His research focuses on the role of biographical literature and art as arenas of philosophical debate and cultural competition among late ancient intellectuals. He is the author of The Philosophical Life: Biography and the Crafting of Intellectual Identity in Late Antiquity (Catholic University Press, 2013). He is currently working on a monograph that explores the links between dress, art, and philosophical competition in late antiquity.
Frances Young
Frances Young is Emerita Edward Cadbury Professor of Theology at the University of Birmingham (UK), where she has also served as Dean of the Faculty of Arts and as Pro–Vice Chancellor. An ordained Methodist minister, in 1998 she was awarded an Order of the British Empire (OBE) for services to theology and has been an elected Fellow of the British Academy since 2004. She is author of or contributor to over a dozen books, including From Nicaea to Chalcedon: A Guide to the Literature and Its Background (SCM Press, 1983), Brokenness and Blessing: Towards a Biblical Spirituality (Baker Academic, 2007), God’s Presence: A Contemporary Recapitulation of Early Christianity (Cambridge University Press, 2013), and Arthur’s Call: A Journey of Faith in the Face of Severe Learning Disability (SPCK, 2014).
Other books by Frances Young
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