“Virtue is a fruit, a sacrifice, a state of health” (5). In this excellent monograph, Dana Robinson unites case studies of three of the most influential authors of late ancient Mediterranean Christianity to reconstruct the ideological uses and social possibilities of food discourse in early Christian communities. John Chrysostom, Shenoute of Atripe, and Paulinus of Nola were engaged in transforming the religious landscape of the Roman Empire in the late fourth and early fifth centuries, and they did so to a substantial degree using the subject of food. Since they wrote from three sides of the Mediterranean and in three of its most important languages, Syria/Greek, Egypt/Coptic, and Italy/Latin, respectively, they form an especially representative triad. In Robinson’s analysis of Shenoute, virtue is a fruit, while ascesis is the labor of cooking and farming. In Paulinus, piety and ascesis are both sacrificial gifts embodied through the mouth as a threshold...
University of California Press