The Christianization of Knowledge in Late Antiquity

Erscheinungsjahr 2025
ISBN: 978-1-009-36335-8
Verlag: Cambridge University Press

Buch, Englisch, 306 Seiten, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm, Gewicht: 415 g

The Christianization of Knowledge in Late Antiquity: Intellectual and Material Transformations traces the beginning of Late Antiquity from a new angle. Shifting the focus away from the Christianization of people or the transformation of institutions, Mark Letteney interrogates the creation of novel and durable structures of knowledge across the Roman scholarly landscape, and the embedding of those changes in manuscript witnesses. Letteney explores scholarly productions ranging from juristic writings and legal compendia to theological tractates, military handbooks, historical accounts, miscellanies, grammatical treatises, and the Palestinian Talmud. He demonstrates how imperial Christianity inflected the production of truth far beyond the domain of theology — and how intellectual tools forged in the fires of doctrinal controversy shed their theological baggage and came to undergird the great intellectual productions of the Theodosian Age, and their material expressions. Letteney's volume offers new insights and a new approach to answering the perennial question: What does it mean for Rome to become Christian? This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Letteney, Mark

Inhaltsverzeichnis

1. Christianizing knowledge, or beginning of Late Antiquity; Part I. New readers: 2. A history of Christian fact finding; 3. A methodological revolution in fourth-century theology; 4. A new order of books in the Theodosian age; Part II. New texts: 5. New bookforms; 6. New texts; 7. Christian tools in traditionalist texts; 8. New meanings.

Über Autor(innen)

Letteney, Mark
Mark Letteney holds a PhD from Princeton University and is a fellow of both the American Academy in Rome and the American School of Classical Studies in Athens. He is co-author, with Matthew D. C. Larsen, of Ancient Mediterranean Incarceration (University of California Press, forthcoming 2024).