The corporeal imagination : signifying the holy in late ancient Christianity / Patricia Cox Miller.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Miller, Patricia Cox, 1947-

Series:

Divinations.

Divinations

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Human body--Religious aspects--Christianity.

Human anatomy--Religious aspects.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (272 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, c2009.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

With few exceptions, the scholarship on religion in late antiquity has emphasized its tendencies toward transcendence, abstraction, and spirit at the expense of matter. In The Corporeal Imagination, Patricia Cox Miller argues instead that ancient Christianity took a material turn between the fourth and seventh centuries. During this period, Miller contends, there occurred a major shift in the ways in which the human being was oriented in relation to the divine, a shift that reconfigured the relationship between materiality and meaning in a positive direction.The Corporeal Imagination is a groundbreaking investigation into the theological poetics of material substance in late ancient Christian texts. From hagiographies to literary descriptions of sacred paintings to treatises on relics and theurgy, Miller examines a wide variety of ancient texts to reveal how Christian writers increasingly described the matter of the world as invested with divine power. By appealing to the reader's sensory imagination, Christian texts endowed phenomena like relics, saints' bodies in hagiography, and saints' presence in icons with a visual and tactile presence. The book draws on a variety of contemporary theoretical models to elucidate the significance of all these materials in ancient religious life and imagination.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Introduction

Chapter One. Bodies and Selves

Chapter Two. Bodies in Fragments

Chapter Three. Dazzling Bodies

Chapter Four. Bodies and Spectacles

Chapter Five. Ambiguous Bodies

Chapter Six. Subtle Bodies

Chapter Seven. Animated Bodies and Icons

Chapter Eight. Saintly Bodies as Image-Flesh

Chapter Nine. Incongruous Bodies

Conclusion

Abbreviations

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references (p. [231]-248) and index.

ISBN:

9781283891110

1283891115

9780812204681

0812204689

OCLC:

794702354