Drawing on representations of bodies in sources from Paul to Augustine, this book focuses on the question of what is known in the body and demonstrates why that question is significant for a cultural history of Christian origins. The inevitable cultural habituation of bodies influenced Christians of the first centuries to replicate the habitus of the wider culture—that is, the hierarchical patterns of social relations familiar throughout the Roman Empire, despite the seeming incompatibility of those embodied patterns of relations with the good news of Christian preaching. A study of corporal e ... More

Drawing on representations of bodies in sources from Paul to Augustine, this book focuses on the question of what is known in the body and demonstrates why that question is significant for a cultural history of Christian origins. The inevitable cultural habituation of bodies influenced Christians of the first centuries to replicate the habitus of the wider culture—that is, the hierarchical patterns of social relations familiar throughout the Roman Empire, despite the seeming incompatibility of those embodied patterns of relations with the good news of Christian preaching. A study of corporal epistemology, this volume builds on a sequence of in-depth analyses of texts, historical problems, and theological questions. How does Paul manage to position his whippable body as a source of knowledge and power? How did the corporal conditioning of the Roman slaveholding system infiltrate Christian moral imagination and sexual ethics? What do primitive images of Mary in childbirth suggest about ancient—and modern—understandings of maternal epistemology? The book is informed by the work of theorists of corporeality, including Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Pierre Bourdieu, and Linda Martín Alcoff. What is known in the body is informed by but ultimately exceeds the grid of social location. Framing questions about corporal knowledge offers new insights into bodies, identities, and early Christian understandings of what it means to be human.