The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity - Brossura

Brown, Peter

Brossura

ISBN 10: 0231144075 ISBN 13: 9780231144070

Casa editrice: Columbia Univ Pr, 2008

Riassunto

First published in 1988, Peter Brown's The Body and Society was a groundbreaking study of the marriage and sexual practices of early Christians in the ancient Mediterranean and Near East. Brown focuses on the practice of permanent sexual renunciation-continence, celibacy, and lifelong virginity-in Christian circles from the first to the fifth centuries A.D. and traces early Christians' preoccupations with sexuality and the body in the work of the period's great writers.

The Body and Society questions how theological views on sexuality and the human body both mirrored and shaped relationships between men and women, Roman aristocracy and slaves, and the married and the celibate. Brown discusses Tertullian, Valentinus, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Constantine, the Desert Fathers, Jerome, Ambrose, and Augustine, among others, and considers asceticism and society in the Eastern Empire, martyrdom and prophecy, gnostic spiritual guidance, promiscuity among the men and women of the church, monks and marriage in Egypt, the ascetic life of women in fourth-century Jerusalem, and the body and society in the early Middle Ages. In his new introduction, Brown reflects on his work's reception in the scholarly community.

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Recensione:

"The reader of Peter Brown's work is always uncertain which to admire most, the grace and clarity, the scope and erudition, or the ability to bring diverse and complex units into a meaningful whole. These merits are all fully on display in The Body and Society." -- New York Times Book Review "Peter Brown's book is a great achievement. It will long be read, its insights studied and discussed, and its prose admired and enjoyed... His work is a tour de force, showing a mastery of text and subject through six centuries of history." -- W. H. C. Frend, New York Review of Books "A profound exploration of the meaning of embodiment, celibacy, and chastity for early Christians." -- Christianity Today "A work of rediscovery and re-evaluation, written in luminous, heart-stopping prose." --Nicolas Rothwell, The Australian

L'autore:

Peter Brown, formerly professor of classics and history at the University of California, Berkeley, is the Philip and Beulah Rollins Professor of History at Princeton University and the most prominent scholar of late antiquity (between 250 and 800 A.D.). He is the author of a dozen books, including Augustine of Hippo, Authority and the Sacred: Aspects of the Christianization of the Roman World, The Rise of Western Christendom, and Poverty and Leadership in the Late Roman Empire.

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• Editore: Columbia Univ Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0231144075
• ISBN 13: 9780231144070
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 504