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Journal of Late Antiquity
Number of Followers: 6

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ISSN (Print) 1939-6716 - ISSN (Online) 1942-1273
Published by Project MUSE

[305 journals]

From the Editor
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  Abstract: This issue was produced in part under the aegis of my predecessor, Professor Andrew Cain, who steered the ship expertly over the past five years, and I cannot thank him enough for his generous and patient introduction to the complex business of being editor-in-chief. I am also delighted to have gathered around me a stellar editorial board that will support this journal in the years ahead. The Journal of Late Antiquity is composed of veteran editors, as well as younger members in our field, whose expertise covers a wide variety of areas, regions, and topics of the discipline. I feel very honored to be following in the footsteps of Ralph W. Mathisen, Noel Lenski, and most recently Andy Cain, and hope to do the ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-03-22T00:00:00-05:00
Hamstrung Horses: Dating Constantine's Departure from the Court of
Galerius
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  Abstract: Writing in the period 314 to 315, the notoriously creative Christian apologist Lactantius penned an account of the departure of Constantine to his dying father Constantius. Lactantius records that Constantine, hostage at the court of Galerius and intentionally exposed by that emperor to considerable physical danger, escaped Galerius's clutches in the east to careen headlong across the empire, killing the horses of the imperial post at each mansio through which he passed in order to frustrate any attempt at pursuit. By this daring getaway, Constantine slipped the Galerian net and joined his father at York for one last heartfelt goodbye before the pious Constantius slipped this mortal coil and Constantine was ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-03-22T00:00:00-05:00
The Famine and Plague of Maximinus (311 to 312): Between Ekphrasis,
Polemic, and Historical Reality in Eusebius's Ecclesiastical History
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  Abstract: Near the end of the ninth book of his Ecclesiastical History, Eusebius of Caesarea describes a horrific famine and plague that devastated the cities of the eastern Roman empire over 311 and 312 under the emperor Maximinus II Daia (reigned 308 to 313), whom Eusebius condemns as a persecutor of Christians.1 Most historians have treated these events as factual, if some-what rhetorically stylized, recordings of a real event. Peter Garnsey, writing over thirty years ago, typifies this habit: "[Eusebius's] hatred of the persecutor Maximin explains his willingness to go into the details, but does not impugn the essential veracity of the narrative."2 Since Garnsey, cataloguers of famine and plague such as Ioannis Telelis ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-03-22T00:00:00-05:00
A Bad Romance: Late Ancient Fantasy, Violence, and Christian Hagiography
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  Abstract: Judith Perkins, in her now classic work on the suffering self, helpfully reoriented our understanding of how Christians used the suffering body to articulate the parameters of a unified Christian narrative.1 In this article, I begin to push our understanding of the suffering self to a suffering gendered self in the fantastical bios written and dreamed of by men to construct a male fantasy.2 In Gerontius's labor of love, the Life of Melania the Younger, the hagiographer makes it clear that this is an intentional exercise in memory making as well as a performance of personal piety.3 To craft his hagiographical fantasy, Gerontius imports romantic themes from Greek romance novels and ancient dream theory to evaluate ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-03-22T00:00:00-05:00
No Voice of Reason: Socrates of Constantinople's Adaptation of Athanasius
of Alexandria as a Source for his Ecclesiastical History
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  Abstract: In his proem to the second book of his Ecclesiastical History, Socrates of Constantinople does something exceptional for the standards of antique historiography. Socrates admits that he had based major parts of the first draft of his Ecclesiastical History on a source which later proved to be erroneous. When initially writing the first two books of his work, the church historian had relied on Rufinus of Aquileia as the main witness for the intricate history of the "Trinitarian Controversy." It was only after finishing all seven volumes of his Ecclesiastical History that Socrates discovered the writings of Athanasius of Alexandria. Upon reading bishop Athanasius's own eyewitness account of the events, Socrates ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-03-22T00:00:00-05:00
Hagiographic History: Reading and Writing Holiness in the Ecclesiastical
History of Anonymous Cyzicenus
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  Abstract: One might expect the anonymous fifth-century Ecclesiastical History formerly attributed to "Gelasius of Cyzicus" to begin as many other ecclesiastical histories do: with a summary of the author's researches, an appeal to the work's patron, or an explanation of the benefits of studying the past.1 Instead, the Proemium begins with a protracted scene of meditative reading. The anonymous author explains howThe things that happened in that holy and great and world-wide synod of bishops gathered in Nicaea … I read while still in my father's house, having discovered these things written down in an exceedingly old book, on parchments containing all matters in uninterrupted sequence.2The author proceeds to describe the ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-03-22T00:00:00-05:00
Orfitus: The Rise and Fall of an Urban Prefect of Rome
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  Abstract: Inter haec Orfitus praefecti potestate regebat urbem aeternam ultra modum delatae dignitatis sese efferens insolenter, vir quidem prudens et forensium negotiorum oppido gnarus, sed splendore liberalium doctrinarum minus quam nobilem decuerat institutus.1Such is Ammianus Marcellinus's assessment of Memmius Vitrasius Orfitus, a man who was twice count of the first order, a commander of Constantius II in the war against Magnentius, twice special envoy of the Senate of Rome, a proconsul of Africa, and, as the crown of an active administrative career, twice urban prefect of Rome. While this description perhaps reveals more about the values and prejudices of Ammianus than it does about a man whom the historian probably ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-03-22T00:00:00-05:00
Historicizing Ontologies: Qur'ānic Preternatural Creatures between
Ancient Topoi and Emerging Traditions
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  Abstract: According to The Handbook of Contemporary Animism, the term "animism" can be used to describe "performative acts in which people engage with other species or with material things."1 In the The Oxford Companion to World Mythology, animism is instead defined as "the belief that all things are given life—that is, animated—by spirits."2 As such, animist worldviews are characteristic of those societies which engage with the preternatural world through cults. The belief in and portrayal of preternatural creatures is an ancient phenomenon. Liminal beings mediating between the physical and the spiritual worlds are topoi scattered throughout ancient texts. In the ancient Middle East, winged preternatural creatures were a ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-03-22T00:00:00-05:00
Does Smoke Mean Fire' Illumination, Incense, and the Senses in Late
Antique Synagogues
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  Abstract: In the tenth century, a Karaite theologian named Daniel Al-Qumisi redressed his Jewish peers for their reprehensible behaviors inside of synagogues. Al-Qumisi, writing from Jerusalem, declared that: "… it is forbidden in current times to burn incense and to set up lamps [in the synagogues], and to say that this is done in God's honor, as the Rabbanites do, as it says, 'It is an abomination to me.'"1 As a different type of Jew, Al-Qumisi had no trouble castigating his "Rabbanite" contemporaries. Indeed, by Late Antiquity, animosities flared between Karaites, such as Al-Qumisi, who followed regulations of the Torah but eschewed formalized hermeneutical traditions, and "Rabbanite" (rabbinic) Jews, who engaged in ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-03-22T00:00:00-05:00
Plagues upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History by Kyle
Harper (review)
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  Abstract: Presses are encouraged to submit books dealing with Late Antiquity for consideration for review to any of JLA's three Book Review Editors: Maria Doerfler (maria.doerfler@yale.edu); John Weisweiler (j.weisweiler@lmu.de); and Damián Fernández (dfernandez@niu.edu).We are inseparable from pathogens (at least, for much of our history). With good reason, this theme reverberates through the chapters of Kyle Harper's recent book, Plagues upon the Earth, a global history of disease stretching back to before our emergence as a species. We will call it a work of historical epidemiology. An ancient economic historian, Harper follows up his previous monograph, The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-03-22T00:00:00-05:00
The Formation of Christendom, 2nd ed. by Judith Herrin (review)
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  Abstract: It takes confidence to reissue, largely unchanged, a book more than thirty years old concerned with a scholarly field that has transformed itself over the intervening decades. But Judith Herrin's The Formation of Christendom was a bold enterprise from the beginning. The book investigated the changes wrought by the rise of Christianity on the Roman world over the course of Late Antiquity, starting in the fifth century and tracking the development of the three successors of Rome identified by the author as Latin Western Christendom, Byzantium, and the world of Islam, down to the middle of the ninth century. Nor was Herrin satisfied with a purely academic viewership for her vast canvas. The Formation was addressed to ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-03-22T00:00:00-05:00
La fin de la cité grecque: métamorphoses et disparition d'un modèle
politique et institutionnel local en Asie Mineure, de Dèce à Constantin
by Anne-Valérie Pont (review)
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  Abstract: Who killed the Greek city' The polis, as an ideal form of collective organization and esteemed as an object of historical (chiefly epigraphic) investigation, has kept ancient historians busy for a very long time indeed. The Greek city, as everybody knows, did not die at Chaeronea. In what is arguably the greatest achievement in this field of study over the last decades, Louis Robert and his disciples pinpointed the decadence of civic life, starting with the last quarter of the second century bce and continuing well into the early Roman period—the socalled Hellenistic turn.In this well-researched and powerfully argued book, Anne-Valérie Pont tells the story of a slow, limited, and tardy death. Hence her title and ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-03-22T00:00:00-05:00
Bishops in Flight: Exile and Displacement in Late Antiquity by Jennifer
Barry (review)
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  Abstract: The primary scope of this book is the exile primarily of two famous bishops, Athanasius of Alexandria and John Chrysostom, taking into account also some related exile cases (26). The main strength of the book is its thorough and novel application of spatial theories to the development of a fourth-century discourse of exile.The introduction gives a stimulating overview of models and theories underpinning Barry's interpretation of the discourse of exile in the main part of her book (11–25). Barry (like Daniel Washburn's 2013 book Banishment in the Later Roman Empire) sets out with the claim that exile came to be the new martyrdom, and that emperors were responsible for sending bishops into exile. Barry is right to ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-03-22T00:00:00-05:00
East and West in the Early Middle Ages: The Merovingian Kingdoms in
Mediterranean Perspective ed. by Stefan Esders et al. (review)
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  Abstract: This volume comprises twenty-one essays originally presented in 2014 as part of a joint German-Israeli project examining the Merovingian kingdoms in the context of the Mediterranean world. Like many conference proceedings, the contents of this collection range in quality and relevance to the volume's theme, but the arc and aggregate of the book suggests that the Merovingians had "complicated and multilayered social, cultural, and political relations with their eastern Mediterranean counterparts, that is, the Byzantine Empire and the Umayyad Caliphate" (3). Far from isolated in their western European territories, the Merovingians benefitted from commerce of all kinds—material, personal, intellectual, and ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-03-22T00:00:00-05:00
Children and Family in Late Antique Egyptian Monasticism by Caroline T.
Schroeder (review)
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  Abstract: When in 2006 Alice-Mary Talbot and I organized a conference on late antique and Byzantine childhood at Dumbarton Oaks, we felt we were venturing into new territory. In the fifteen years following that conference, the field has seen a spectacular rise in interest for all aspects of childhood in the broader late antique and Byzantine world. Caroline Schroeder's book is one of the most sophisticated products of this surge, both in its overall approach to the subject and in its nuanced and balanced discussions. Schroeder tackles a favorite of research on medieval childhood: the uneasy relationship between children and monasteries. This has not yet been studied comprehensively for the eastern Mediterranean, and this ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-03-22T00:00:00-05:00
Jephthah's Daughter, Sarah's Son: The Death of Children in Late Antiquity
by Maria E. Doerfler (review)
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  Abstract: In this nuanced and exquisitely written study, Maria Doerfler takes readers on an extended survey of the richly variegated terrain of loss. Drawing on hymns, as well as on homilies and commentaries, she not only assesses the response of clerics to child mortality but also illuminates the affective responses of bereaved parents. Throughout the work, she stresses the powerful role of the liturgy in scripting emotions, and she explores how expressions of grief are typically gendered.The merits of this splendid work are many. Chief among them is the rich array of cited evidence. With impressive ease, Doerfler ranges across genres and linguistic communities, weaving Syriac, Coptic, and Ethiopian sources into a ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-03-22T00:00:00-05:00
Justinian und die Armee des frühen Byzanz by Clemens Koehn (review)
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  Abstract: The emperor Justinian I is perhaps the most prominent figure in the history of Late Antiquity. In more than 38 years of rule (from 527 to 565), he managed to recapture great parts of the former western Roman Empire, even if it were only to last for his reign. It is therefore not surprising that he has gained much scholarly attention in recent years. While the emperor can therefore be seen as well studied, the army that was the main guarantor of the great successes in Africa and Italy, as well as Justinian's relationship to it, has been somewhat neglected. This gap in the research defines the starting point for Clemens Koehn's Justinian und die Armee des frühen Byzanz.In a very short introduction (1–7) Koehn sums up ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-03-22T00:00:00-05:00