The series seeks to extend and reframe scholarship on Mediterranean cultures in the late Roman imperial period through a focus on religion and an openness to innovative approaches that challenge traditional disciplinary boundaries. Judaism, Islam, Iranian religion, and the variety of local cults, as well as Christianity and Greco-Roman religions are understood as all equally significant to the inquiry. In addition, Divinations encourages scholarship that interrogates the very category of religion as applied to the late ancient Mediterranean world. The series is closed to new submissions.
In The Crucified Book, Anne Kreps shows how the Gospel of Truth, a second-century text associated with the Christian Platonist Valentinus, and its ideas about the nature of authoritative writing engaged with Greco-Roman culture and cohered with Jewish and Christian ideas about books in antiquity.
Monastic Memory and the Loss of Egypt's Golden Age
Christine Luckritz Marquis
Price: $65.00
ISBN: 9780812253627
Pub Date: March 2022
Format: Hardcover
224 Pages
Death of the Desert offers a fresh examination of Archbishop Theophilus of Alexandria's banishment of the so-called Tall Brothers, four Origenist monks who led monastic communities in the western Egyptian desert, and brings into dialogue narrative strands that have largely been separated in the scholarly tradition.
A New Reading of a Chain of Stories from the Babylonian Talmud
Haim Weiss and Shira Stav
Translated by Batya Stein
Price: $49.95
ISBN: 9780812253634
Pub Date: February 2022
Format: Hardcover
176 Pages
The Return of the Absent Father offers a new reading of stories from tractate Ketubot in the Babylonian Talmud in which sages abandon their homes and families to study. Haim Weiss and Shira Stav focus on the relations between fathers and children to reveal a complex tension between mundane domesticity and the sphere of spiritual learning.
Gregory of Nyssa and the Transformation of Mimesis
Michael A. Motia
Price: $69.95
ISBN: 9780812253139
Pub Date: December 2021
Format: Hardcover
288 Pages
In Imitations of Infinity, Michael A. Motia places Gregory of Nyssa at the center of a world filled with Platonic philosophers, rhetorical teachers, and early Christian leaders all competing over what and how to imitate. Their debates demanded the attentions of people at every level of the Roman Empire.
Tiered Salvation in the New Testament and Ancient Christianity
Alexander Kocar
Price: $69.95
ISBN: 9780812253269
Pub Date: July 2021
Format: Hardcover
312 Pages
Salvation is often thought to be an all-or-nothing matter: you are either saved or damned. Heavenly Stories examines how some important thinkers in the ancient world, including Paul the Apostle, John of Patmos, Hermas, the Sethians, and the Valentinians, believed that salvation comes in degrees.
In The Early Martyr Narratives, Éric Rebillard argues that accounts of ancient martyrs should be considered fluid "living texts" that existed between fact and fiction and made it possible for audiences to readily accept the historicity of a martyr while at the same time not expect to hear or read a truthful story.
The Empty Tomb, the Trauma of the Jews, and the Gospel of Mark
Michael J. Thate
Price: $84.95
ISBN: 9780812251517
Pub Date: November 2019
Format: Hardcover
328 Pages
Drawing on trauma theory, philosophical and literary themes in the western cultural canon, and historical context, Michael J. Thate presents a reading of the Gospel of Mark as an exemplary text that responds to and makes meaning of the trauma arising from the crucified and missing body of Jesus.
In Ancient Christian Ecopoetics, Virginia Burrus facilitates a provocative encounter between ancient Christian theology and contemporary ecological thought.
Focusing on the shared vocabulary of images and ideas with which late ancient Christians and Muslims imagined the past, present, and future, this book seeks to understand why violent expressions of religious devotion became central to the self-understandings of Christian and Muslim communities between the fourth and ninth centuries.
"Encourages us to see historic Christianity as but one expression of a universalistic potential in Jewish monotheism. . . . In a fruitful career not yet nearly over, Border Lines, the culmination of many years of work, may well remain Daniel Boyarin's masterpiece."—Jack Miles, Commonweal
