Centuries.... By studying together pagan and Christian dreams, Cox Miller hopes to reach a better understanding of some fundamental patterns of late antique culture. DLGuy G. Stroumsa, The Journal of Religion A fluent and discursive text.... This is an adventurous exploration of a range of material which deserves to be more widely known.DLGillian Clark, The Classical Review.

Our imagination reveals our experience of ourselves and our world. The late philosopher of science and poetry Gaston Bachelard introduced the notion that each image that comes to mind spontaneously is a visual representation of the cognitive and affective pattern that is moving us at the time - often unconsciously. When such a mental image inspires a picture or text, it evokes in the mind of the reader or beholder a replication of the internal pattern that originally inspired the artist or writer. Thus mental images are rarely empty phantasies. Whereas intellectual concepts are conscious constructions of abstracted relations, mental images evoked by texts and pictures often point - like dreams - to pre-verbal experience that patterns itself through multiplying associations and analogies. These mental images can also manifest their own limits, pointing indirectly to experiences beyond what can be expressed and communicated. The six essays in this volume seek to uncover the dynamic patterns in verbal and pictorial images and to evaluate their potentialities and limitations. Thematically ordered according to their specific focus, the essays begin with material images and move on to increasing degrees of immateriality. The subjects treated are: verbal descriptions of an icon and of a statue; imaginative visions and auditions evoked by material depictions; verbal imagery describing imagined sculptures and scenes as compared with drawings of a moving historical pageant; drawings of symbolic figures representing subtle relationships between verbal expositions that cannot be syntactically represented; dream images that precipitate actual healing; and aural patterns in a sounded text that are experienced as 'images' of affective dynamisms.

This title was first published in 2001. These collected essays by Patricia Cox Miller identify new possibilities of meaning in the study of religion in late antiquity. The book addresses the topic of the imaginative mindset of late ancient authors from a variety of Greco-Roman religious traditions. Attending to the play of language, as well as to the late ancient sensitivity to image, metaphor, and paradox, Cox Miller's work highlights the poetizing sensibility that marked many of the texts of this period and draws on methods of interpretation from a variety of contemporary literary-critical theories. This book will appeal to scholars of late antiquity, religious literature, and literary critical theory more widely, illustrating how fruitful dialogue across the centuries can be - not only in eliciting aspects of late ancient texts that have gone unnoticed but also in showing that many 'modern' ideas, such as Roland Barthes', were actually already alive and well in ancient texts.

Classicizing Christian poetry has largely been neglected by literary scholars, but has recently been receiving growing attention, especially the poetry written in Latin. One of the objectives of this volume is to redress the balance by allowing more space to discussions of Greek Christian poetry. The contributions collected here ask how Christian poets engage with (and are conscious of) the double reliance of their poetry on two separate systems: on the one hand, the classical poetic models and, on the other, the various genres and sub-genres of Christian prose. Keeping in mind the different settings of the Greek-speaking East and the Latin-speaking West, the contributions seek to understand the impact of historical setting on genre, the influence of the paideia shared by authors and audiences, and the continued relevance of traditional categories of literary genre. While our immediate focus is genre, most of the contributions also engage with the ideological ramifications of the transposition of Christian themes into classicizing literature. This volume offers important and original case studies on the reception and appropriation of the classical past and its literary forms by Christian poetry.

At one time when an individual wanted a direct, personal experience of God that person turned to his or her dreams. The early third century Christian defender of the faith, Tertullian, observed, "Is it not known to all people that the dream is the most usual way that God reveals himself to man?" Yet by the eleventh century, King William II of England states, "They are not good Christians that regard dreams." Why did this reversal of opinion occur, not only in Christian thinking, but in Jewish and Islamic attitudes also? God and Dreams: Is There a Connection? traces the historic connection between God and dreams and examines why this shift happened. While particular attention is given to Jewish, Christian, and Islamic thought, several secular disciplines are discussed also. After investigating the different points of view, an argument is made that the connection between God and dreams still exists.

The idea of heaven held a special place in the late antique imagination, which was marked by a poignant sense of the relevance of otherworldly realities for earthly life. Such concerns can be found not only in Judaism and Christianity but also in the Greco-Roman religious, philosophical, scientific, and 'magical' traditions. Transcending social, regional and creedal boundaries, the preocupation with heaven in Late Antiquity serves as a focus for an interdisciplinary approach to understanding this formative era in Western culture and history. Drawing upon the expertise of scholars of Classics, Ancient History, Jewish Studies and Patristics, this volume explores the different functions of heavenly imagery in different texts and traditions in order to map the patterns of unity and diversity within the religious landscape of Late Antiquity.

In the religious systems of ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Mediterranean, gods and demigods were neither abstract nor distant, but communicated with mankind through signs and active intervention. Men and women were thus eager to interpret, appeal to, and even control the gods and their agents. In Prayer, Magic, and the Stars in the Ancient and Late Antique World, a distinguished array of scholars explores the many ways in which people in the ancient world sought to gain access to--or, in some cases, to bind or escape from--the divine powers of heaven and earth. Grounded in a variety of disciplines, including Assyriology, Classics, and early Islamic history, the fifteen essays in this volume cover a broad geographic area: Greece, Egypt, Syria-Palestine, Mesopotamia, and Persia. Topics include celestial divination in early Mesopotamia, the civic festivals of classical Athens, and Christian magical papyri from Coptic Egypt. Moving forward to Late Antiquity, we see how Judaism, Christianity, and Islam each incorporated many aspects of ancient Near Eastern and Graeco-Roman religion into their own prayers, rituals, and conceptions. Even if they no longer conceived of the sun, moon, and the stars as eternal or divine, Christians, Jews, and Muslims often continued to study the movements of the heavens as a map on which divine power could be read. The reader already familiar with studies of ancient religion will find in Prayer, Magic, and the Stars both old friends and new faces. Contributors include Gideon Bohak, Nicola Denzey, Jacco Dieleman, Radcliffe Edmonds, Marvin Meyer, Michael G. Morony, Ian Moyer, Francesca Rochberg, Jonathan Z. Smith, Mark S. Smith, Peter Struck, Michael Swartz, and Kasia Szpakowska. Published as part of Penn State's Magic in History series, Prayer, Magic, and the Stars appears at a time of renewed interest in divination and occult practices in the ancient world. It will interest a wide audience in the field of comparative religion as well as students of the ancient world and late antiquity.

An original study of Palestine in late antiquity, a time when the fortunes of the 'east' and the 'west' were intimately linked. Thousands of westerners flocked to what became a Christian holy land, while Jerusalem grew from a sleepy Roman town into an international centre of Christianity and ultimately into a centre of Islamic worship.

Rhetorical Strategies in Late Antique Literature: Images, Metatexts and Interpretation is a collection of essays that survey the rhetorical tropes and the metaliterary dimension of works by important authors in a period marked by intense and thriving contact between Classical paideia and Christian culture. The contributions of this volume dissect the reuse of Classical literature and the deployment of rhetorical techniques in the creation of texts and images meant for use in cultural and religious debates by building on recent interpretations of the late antique cultural landscape as a milieu in which our understanding of religious dichotomies requires a more nuanced reassessment. The authors treated in this volume include Eusebius of Caesarea, Methodius of Olympus, Gregory of Nazianzus, Nonnus and the emperor Julian.

The essays collected in Christians Shaping Identity celebrate Pauline Allen’s significant contribution to early Christian, late antique, and Byzantine studies, especially concerning bishops, heresy/orthodoxy and christology. Covering the period from earliest Christianity to middle Byzantium, the first eighteen essays explore the varied ways in which Christians constructed their own identity and that of the society around them. A final four essays explore the same theme within Roman Catholicism and oriental Christianity in the late 19th to 21st centuries, with particular attention to the subtle relationships between the shaping of the early Christian past and the moulding of Christian identity today. Among the many leading scholars represented are Averil Cameron and Elizabeth A. Clark.