John Cassian and the historian Socrates write of ‘anthropomorphites’ dwelling in the Egyptian desert—uneducated monks who crudely believed that God has a body. Their characterization was largely accepted—that is, until the late-nineteenth-century discovery of The Life of Apa Aph…
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The promotion of holy land pilgrimage, which began in earnest in the fourth century CE, redefined Christian notions of the sacred. At a time when Christians were articulating a new relation to the material world in their theologies and practices, pilgrimage provided a means of g…
This dissertation presents an ethnography of a local moral world created by the intersection of a nunnery, a monastery, and a village within the Zangskar region of Himalayan Kashmir. These three entities are related within an economy of merit constituted by institutional practic…
The significance of this study lies in the fact that the fear of God was key to the desert Christian culture that developed in Egypt and spread throughout the Eastern church from the third through the seventh century. My thesis is that the fear of God played an essential role bo…
This project is reflective of an interdisciplinary approach which includes spiritual, historical and theological insights into the events connected to the Genesee Abbey's first fifty years. While the work is primarily a history, I have attempted to draw on upon resources which r…
This dissertation focuses on the career of Peter the Iberian as it is accessible from historical sources. Peter participated in the Christological controversies over Chalcedon in fifth-century Palestine as a monk and as a bishop of Maiuma (Gaza). Royal descent allowed him access…
In the ninth century, the community of St Filibert, which was established on the island of Noirmoutier in the late-seventh century, relocated five times reportedly due to pressures caused by the invasions of the Northmen. The community produced texts during the period of relocat…
This thesis explores the depiction of ecclesiastical restorers in narrative sources in England between c.1070 and 1130. It examines the way in which contemporaries wrote about churchmen who were engaged in restoring the English Church, particularly the actions which were attribu…
The history of western monasticism in the early middle ages has traditionally been viewed as a continuous process of development. Women religious have been excluded from this discourse, although early work which ‘rediscovered’ female communities has been built on to place them i…
This dissertation undertakes an analysis of Nag Hammadi Codex II (NHC II), a Christian book copied in the fourth century, and discovered in 1945, near the modern town of Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt. Unlike previous scholarship that investigated each of the seven tractates of NHC …
Hesychia, Greek for quiet and stillness, is a method of controlling the body and focusing the mind's attention with silence and prayer in petition to Jesus Christ. It is an ancient Orthodox Christian ascetic practice that can provide an opportunity for peace and a transcendent s…
Is monastic profession in the West-Syriac tradition a “second baptism”? I have argued, in this dissertation, that it is. There exists, clearly, a relationship between the two rites of initiation: the monastic profession and baptism. This dissertation examines these two rites of …
This dissertation contributes to the study of late antique demonology and the development of Christian monasticism in fourth century Egypt. In particular, I explore the relationship between the development of the Pachomian Koinonia and the belief its members held about demons. W…
At both ends of the Eurasian continent, cenobitic monasticism took root and flourished in the fourth century. This parallel development at roughly the same time in regions so different and distant from each other as Egypt and China lends itself to an interesting comparison and a…
This study explores the representation of holy places in devotional images from the early Christian era to the post-Byzantine period. I delineate five phases of this development. The first phase (300s–500s) was connected to the rise of Christian sacred sites. Christian ideas abo…
The present study investigates attitudes towards and teachings about the end of life and the soul’s passage to the next world, as expressed in late antique religious tales in Greek, particularly from Egypt and the Sinai. The intellectual setting is that of Chalcedonian Christian…
Chapter 2 examined the importance of the city in Greek thought. The Greek culture of Antioch was inspected and the effect on Antioch of Greek thinking about the ideal of city. This chapter concluded with an investigation of the goal of renewing cities found in the writings of tw…
Historians now acknowledge that the celebrated reforms of monastic life that spread from France and northern Italy in the late eleventh century to all parts of Western Europe owed much of their impetus to small eremitical communities founded in opposition to the established mona…
Spiritual marriage was the name given to men and women who lived together under a vow of sexual continence. It was widespread in the early church. John Chrysostom, priest of Antioch and then bishop of Constantinople (d. 407), wrote two treatises against this practice. In these, …