Introduction

To the readers of JECS, an issue celebrating the work of Patricia Cox Miller, the W. Earl Ledden Professor of Religion at Syracuse University, scarcely needs an introduction, much less a justification. For nearly three decades, Miller's work has enriched, shaped, and expanded our understanding of late antiquity in countless ways: she has opened us to vistas of wonder and horror, the transmutations and imaginations of figures anguished and desirous, and to the textual and visual poetics of bodies and boundaries. Many of us were introduced to Miller's work through her book Biography in Late Antiquity: A Quest for the Holy Man (1983), wherein she argued that "ancient biographies of holy men were caricatures whose aim was to evoke, and thus to reveal, the interior geography of the hero's life."¹ In subsequent books-including Dreams in Late Antiquity: Studies in the Imagination of a Culture (1994) and The Poetry of Thought in Late Antiquity (2001)-and in dozens of ground-breaking essays, Miller has changed the course of late ancient studies by attending to the imaginative worlds of late antiquity, the power of the visual, and the aesthetics and poetics of interpretation and, indeed, representation.² If, as Umberto Eco has suggested, the poetic effect is "the capacity that a text displays for continuing to generate different readings, without ever being completely consumed," then Miller is a master of the poetic effect.³ Her work invites, and sometimes even demands, multiple readings; with each rereading, we find new insights onto late antiquity and new ways to imagine also our own confrontation and engagement with that world.

This special issue is inspired by and dedicated to Patricia Cox Miller. The contributors to this volume presented earlier versions of these essays at a conference held in Miller's honor at Cornell University on October 20-21, 2006. Miller's own paper was invited as our keynote address and set a tone that was at once congenial, lively, and intellectually rich. Upstate New York was a fitting site for this conference, since that is where a growing community of late antique scholars converge quarterly to share and discuss new scholarship in the field. Since its inception in 2000, LARCeNY ("Late Antique Religion in Central New York"), as the group is known, has benefited enormously from Miller's involvement. Always a mentor and, more often than not, host to this group, her example and insights have inspired many. As a token of the group's esteem for her unfailing dedication to promoting younger scholars, we invited a small group of scholars from other regions whose own work bears the marks of Miller's intellectual gifts and poetic sensibilities.

The themes of this special issue, "Bodies and Boundaries," signal key foci of Miller's work. By "bodies," the essays recognize the vast array of bodily experiences explored in her scholarship, whether a dream body, heroic body, gnostic body, divine body, gendered (and even regendered) body, or ascetic body, to name but a few examples. By "boundaries," we call attention to the deeply transgressive acts of these bodies, at once bounded and boundless, in their susceptibility to attack, seduction, love, and even transcendence. In exploring the erotics, aesthetics, and salvific wisdom emerging from early Christian attitudes toward bodily experiences, Miller takes seriously both the language and inner logic of embodied experiences. Each of the essays attend to early Christian bodies as maps to other realms. Like maps, bodies interrogate boundaries in order to represent boundless realms. Striking in this collection is the variety of bodies-these are not bodies wasted by hunger. Instead, these bodies are incubated in flesh and liturgy, adorned in text and trial, all icons of an emerging Christian piety of transcendence. Here, the martyr and the monk, the cosmic as well as the comic, the painted and the prayerful (and even the Protestant) interact to populate a Christian experiment with incarnation. As in Miller's work, these essays reveal paradoxes of embodiment, unrelenting materiality, and strange beauty.

At the forefront of the volume, Miller's essay stands as a reminder once...