Social Control in Late Antiquity
The Violence of Small Worlds

Explores how in late antiquity women, slaves, and children claimed agency in small-scale communities despite intimidation by the powerful.

Kate Cooper (Edited by), Jamie Wood (Edited by)

9781108479394, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 1 October 2020

348 pages
16 x 23.5 x 2.5 cm, 0.72 kg

'Social Control in Late Antiquity offers a number of truly excellent and thought-provoking contributions to the still highly relevant project of studying the role of power relations in the formation of early Christian identity and institutions.' Kristina Sessa, Journal of Early Christian Studies

Social Control in Late Antiquity: The Violence of Small Worlds explores the small-scale communities of late antiquity – households, monasteries, and schools – where power was a question of personal relationships. When fathers, husbands, teachers, abbots, and slave-owners asserted their own will, they saw themselves as maintaining the social order, and expected law and government to reinforce their rule. Naturally, the members of these communities had their own ideas, and teaching them to 'obey their betters' was not always a straightforward business. Drawing on a wide variety of sources from across the late Roman Mediterranean, from law codes and inscriptions to monastic rules and hagiography, the book considers the sometimes conflicting identities of women, slaves, and children, and documents how they found opportunities for agency and recognition within a system built on the unremitting assertion of the rights of the powerful.

Introduction. The violence of small worlds: re-thinking small-scale social control in late antiquity Kate Cooper and Jamie Wood
Part I. Women and Children First: Autonomy, Social Control, and Social Reproduction in the Late Ancient Household: 1. Female crime and female confinement in late antiquity Julia Hillner
2. Holy beatings: Emmelia, her son Gregory of Nyssa, and the Forty Martyrs of Sebasteia Vasiliki Limberis
3. Power, faith, and reciprocity in a slave society: domestic relationships in the preaching of John Chrysostom Jonathan Tallon
4. A predator and a gentleman: Augustine, autobiography, and the ethics of Christian marriage Kate Cooper
Part II. 'Slaves, Be Subject to your Masters': Discipline, Reciprocity, and Moral Autonomy in a Slave Society: 5. Modelling msarrq?t?: humiliation, Christian monasticism, and the ascetic life of slavery in late antique Syria and Mesopotamia Chris L. de Wet
6. Constructing complexity: slavery in the small worlds of early monasticism Lillian Larsen
7. Disciplining the slaves of god: monastic children in Egypt at the end of antiquity Maria Chiara Giorda
Part III. Knowledge, Power, and Symbolic Violence: The Aesthetics of Control in Christian Pedagogy: 8. John Chrysostom and the strategic use of fear Blake Leyerle
9. The fear of belonging: the violent training of elite males in the late fourth century Jamie Wood
10. Words at war: textual violence in Eusebius of Caesarea Aaron Johnson
11. Of sojourners and soldiers: demonic violence in the letters of Antony and the life of Antony Blossom Stefaniw
12. Coercing the catechists: Augustine's De Catechizandis rudibus Melissa Markauskas
Part IV. Vulnerability and Power: Christian Heroines and the Small Worlds of Late Antiquity: 13. Reading Thecla in fourth-century Pontus: violence, virginity, and female autonomy in Gregory of Nyssa's Life of Macrina James Corke-Webster
14. Family heroines: female vulnerability in the writings of Ambrose of Milan David Natal
15. Women on the edge: violence, 'othering', and the limits of imperial power in Euphemia and the Goth Thomas Dimambro.

Subject Areas: Church history [HRCC2], Ancient history: to c 500 CE [HBLA], European history [HBJD]