Review: From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity, by Kyle Harper

Four years on from its original publication in 2013, Kyle Harper's From Shame to Sin, now released in paperback, is a book that provokes reflection. This is a book that won an American Academy of Religion award in 2014 and that has been reviewed multiple times since, attracting some criticism, but largely enthusiasm. His is an argument drawn in broad strokes, as Harper admits in his introduction. It is a book that rode the momentum of a growing wave of research on gender and desire in the ancient to late-ancient world, while appealing to public interest in these topics currently being aroused in Western nations by debates around gender identity and same-sex marriage.¹ The question we address in this review is thus only tangentially the quality of Harper's scholarship or the validity of his argument—what he seeks to do he, to a large extent, does well. Consequently we...