TY  - BOOK
AU  - Burrus,Virginia
TI  - The Sex Lives of Saints: An Erotics of Ancient Hagiography 
T2  - Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion
SN  - 9780812220209
AV  - BT708 .B885 2004eb
U1  - 261.8/357 21
PY  - 2010///]
CY  - Philadelphia : 
PB  - University of Pennsylvania Press, 
KW  - Christian hagiography
KW  - History
KW  - To 1500
KW  - Sex
KW  - Religious aspects
KW  - Christianity
KW  - History of doctrines
KW  - Religious Studies
KW  - HISTORY / Ancient / General
KW  - bisacsh
KW  - Ancient Studies
KW  - Gender Studies
KW  - Religion
KW  - Women's Studies
N1  - Frontmatter --; Contents --; Introduction: Hagiography and the History of Sexuality --; Chapter 1. Fancying Hermits: Sublimation and the Arts of Romance --; Chapter 2. Dying for a Life: Martyrdom, Masochism, and Female (Auto)Biography --; Chapter 3. Hybrid Desire: Empire, Sadism, and the Soldier Saint --; Chapter 4. Secrets of Seduction: The Lives of Holy Harlots --; Postscript (Catching My Breath) --; Notes --; Bibliography --; Index --; Acknowledgments; restricted access; Issued also in print
N2  - Has a repressive morality been the primary contribution of Christianity to the history of sexuality? The ascetic concerns that pervade ancient Christian texts would seem to support such a common assumption. Focusing on hagiographical literature, Virginia Burrus pursues a fresh path of interpretation, arguing that the early accounts of the lives of saints are not antierotic but rather convey a sublimely transgressive "countereroticism" that resists the marital, procreative ethic of sexuality found in other strands of Christian tradition.Without reducing the erotics of ancient hagiography to a single formula, The Sex Lives of Saints frames the broad historical, theological, and theoretical issues at stake in such a revisionist interpretation of ascetic eroticism, with particular reference to the work of Michel Foucault and Georges Bataille, David Halperin and Geoffrey Harpham, Leo Bersani and Jean Baudrillard. Burrus subsequently proceeds through close, performative readings of the earliest Lives of Saints, mostly dating to the late fourth and early fifth centuries-Jerome's Lives of Paul, Malchus, Hilarion, and Paula; Gregory of Nyssa's Life of Macrina; Augustine's portrait of Monica; Sulpicius Severus's Life of Martin; and the slightly later Lives of so-called harlot saints. Queer, s/m, and postcolonial theories are among the contemporary discourses that prove intriguingly resonant with an ancient art of "saintly" loving that remains, in Burrus's reading, promisingly mobile, diverse, and open-ended
UR  - https://doi.org/10.9783/9780812200720
UR  - https://www.degruyter.com/isbn/9780812200720
UR  - https://www.degruyter.com/document/cover/isbn/9780812200720/original
ER  -