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Journal of the American Academy of Religion 75.1 (2007) 185-188

Reviewed by
Andrew S. Jacobs
University of California, Riverside
The Cultural Turn in Late Ancient Studies: Gender, Asceticism, and Historiography. Edited by Dale B. Martin and Patricia Cox Miller. Duke University Press, 2005. 364 pages. $24.95.

These fifteen essays (eight of which were previously published in a special issue of the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies) and introduction coalesce around the scholarship of Elizabeth A. Clark, leader of the field of early Christian studies*. Not quite a Festschrift nor even simple homage, Cultural Turn takes the major themes of Clark's oeuvre (gender, asceticism, and historiography, the three rubrics into which the essays are divided) and uses them to create a rewarding survey of the burgeoning discipline of "late ancient studies." The thematic emphases are intertwined with theoretical considerations (the "cultural turn" of the title): the development of the field of late ancient studies from social history, relying on the tools and templates of sociology and anthropology, to cultural history, drawing on the post-structuralist insights of literary criticism. Clark's scholarship becomes not so much an object of festschriftliche veneration as an intellectual point of departure for sixteen sharp and compelling cultural historical studies.

The volume opens with an introduction by co-editor, and former Clark colleague, Dale B. Martin. Martin incisively demonstrates how Clark's scholarship both exemplifies and patterns a series of wider intellectual narratives: the emergence of a new chronological field of inquiry ("late antiquity"); the shift from "theology" to religious studies in the North American academy; and, perhaps most significantly, the move from socio-anthropological models for "reconstructing" the early Christian past to a more self-aware turn to the cultural and discursive. Martin then explores the three themes of the subtitle. The realization that "gender is everywhere in the ancient world, even when women [End Page 185] are not" (10) has allowed the study of late ancient women to blossom from a project of "recovery" to one of ideological criticism. The revaluation of asceticism at the intersection of materiality, society, and piety has likewise created new space for moving beyond the constraints of earlier intellectual and doctrinal studies. Finally, the impact of the "linguistic turn"—moving away from the assumption that historians can simply "sail past the 'epiphenomenon' of language to arrive at the 'real stuff' . . . behind or below language" (8)—has transformed late ancient approaches to the very project of history, from an archeological science of salvage to an infinitely complex array of representations and interpretations ("a hermeneutical enterprise" [18]).

Five essays under the rubric of "Gender" explore the permutations of gender analysis undertaken with a sensitivity to this "cultural turn." David Brakke ("The Lady Appears: Materialization of 'Woman' in Early Monastic Literature") brings traditional materials on Egyptian monasticism together with a sophisticated analysis of the structuring, yet destabilizing, role of women in Egyptian monastic tales (informed by Judith Butler's writings on gender). Maureen Tilley ("No Friendly Letters: Augustine's Correspondence with Women") surveys the North African bishop's extant correspondence with women and finds a deliberate reticence on Augustine's part to read (or write) these women as true friends and companions in the Christian endeavor. Susan Ashbrook Harvey ("On Mary's Voice: Gendered Words in Syriac Marian Tradition") explores east Syrian poetic elaborations of the Virgin's words, both embedded in and yet simultaneously challenging to "normative social and political order" (82). Volume co-editor Patricia Cox Miller's essay ("Is There a Harlot in This Text? Hagiography and the Grotesque") rereads the lives of so-called "repentant harlot" saints Mary of Egypt and Pelagia of Antioch through Geoffrey Harpham's concept of the grotesque, as "paradoxes whose allure is the truth of female holiness" (97). Finally, Virginia Burrus ("Macrina's Tattoo"), interweaves personal and historical reflection on the first female saint's life, analogizing Macrina's "stigma" to the traces available to create a "postpositivist 'women's history'" (113).

Three...

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