The Limits of Ancient Christianity: Essays on Late Antique Thought and Culture in Honor of R. A. Markus (review)

Willaim E. Klingshirn and Mark Vessey, editors. The Limits of Ancient Christianity: Essays on Late Antique Thought and Culture in Honor of R. A. Markus. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1999. Pp. xxv + 348. $54.50.

This well-deserved tribute to Robert Markus is long overdue. Nearly all of the essayists owe a direct debt to the scholar who has made "Late Antiquity" a distinct field of study. The articles fall into four divisions. Their progress from one section to the next parallels the course of Markus's own bibliography from Saeculum: History and Society in the Theology of Saint Augustine (1970) to The End of Ancient Christianity (1990).

In the first section, "Sacred Histories," Oliver Nicholson, Paula Fredriksen, and Robert Wilken demonstrate how Lactantius, Augustine, and Cyril of Jerusalem, respectively, reconfigure history to promote Christian self-definition. In Nicholson's and Fredriksen's essays and elsewhere throughout the volume, essayists acknowledge Markus's essay in Jewish and Christian Self-Definition (1980) as seminal for their own projects.

In the second part, "Constructing Orthodoxy" Gerald Bonner, Virginia Burrus, Sidney Griffith, and Frederick Russell look at the ways in which Chris-tianity and the lives of individual Christians dovetailed with a conscious project of self-construction in the first century after Nicaea in their considerations of heresiology, rhetoric, and hymnography.

The third part, "Ascetic Identities," shows how the tension between public and private roles for bodies served to shape Christian self-definition. David Hunter draws the connections between the rise of clerical celibacy and the domestication of vowed virginity through their mutual definition as images of Christ. Elizabeth Clark traces the development of Christian teachings on divorce through the delicate dance of various verses of Scripture. Phillip Rousseau surveys the conversion rhetoric in the handling of the husks of the parable of the prodigal son in Jerome, Augustine, and Paulinus to find the place Christians would allow the husks of classical culture. Conrad Leyser considers the public roles the Lerins monks allowed their private selves.

The final major section, "From Augustine to Bede," leads the reader chronologically from the height of Late Antiquity to its demise. James O'Donnell proposes new models to understand the life of Augustine. John Cavadini records Augustine's transformation of Ambrose's teachings on the good of death. Carole Straw considers how Gregory the Great transforms martyrdom from heroic to everyday role model. Paul Meyvaert brings the reader to Bede, the first of the medievals to look back on the era as a time substantially different from his own. Although this section is the least consciously indebted to Markus--O'Donnell does not refer to him; the others do but sparingly--it shows his influence nevertheless in defining the territory and approaches.

Peter Brown has the last word in this tribute to Markus. "Gloriosus Obitus: The End of the Ancient Other World," considers global changes in late antique attitudes toward death as indicators of the end of antiquity and the beginning of the Middle Ages. Markus's curriculum vitae (at least up to 1998), notes on contributors, and indices complete the volume.

The editors should be commended for their selection and the introductions to these essays. The value of the volume is multifaceted. The authors of the articles readily pay their debt to Markus (and occasionally to Peter Brown) in such a transparent way that between the introductions to each section and the text and footnotes one may readily discern the historiography of Late Antiquity over the last three decades. The length and clarity of each of the essays commend them to graduate students both for their content and as exemplars of scholarship and writing in the field. A good balance of historical and theoretical concerns allows the reader of the entire volume to experience the plurality...