In this article, the authors propose that late antique medicine is a rich and versatile subject to teach in undergraduate courses, despite a seeming lack of sources and teaching resources. Following an introduction, authors Crislip, Langford, Llewellyn Ihssen, and Marx offer contributions describing their experiences teaching courses that offer some coverage of medicine in Late Antiquity. The contributions show that late antique medicine fits in easily as part of courses on magic and science, and that it lends itself to comparative or world-historical approaches. Late antique medicine likewise provides opportunities to explore the relationship of religion to science and of medicine to the humanities. The authors show that a range of approaches to late antique medicine, including disability studies and medical anthropology, can inspire productive and thoughtful responses from students, and serve as a helpful introduction to the medical humanities for aspiring healthcare professionals.

Using data collected in the early Christian catacombs of St. Callixtus on the Appian Way and comparing these with data from the Jewish catacombs of Villa Torlonia on the Via Nomentana, this article discusses what sort of labor the building of the early Christian catacombs of Rome entailed, what kind of investment this required, and how these expenses related to the costs incurred in other big architectural projects dating to the same general period. It then explores the significance of these expenses by historically contextualizing the evidence in reference to current debates on the issue of early Christian catacomb organization, early Christian social history, and managerial developments within the early church. The article concludes by highlighting how economic feasibility was a major factor that allowed the early Christian catacombs to develop into huge communal cemeteries and how this development, in turn, affected early Christian identity formation.

This article offers the argument that suffering ( yisurin ) in the Babylonian Talmud functions as a locus for the relationship between God and rabbinic Jews. Scholars of rabbinic martyrdom and asceticism have tended to claim that the Talmud's positive portrayal of suffering is a theodical apology for unexplained evil in the world. However, the article argues that the Talmud—in contrast to earlier rabbinic texts—presents suffering as spiritually relevant not primarily to justify preexisting suffering, but rather to develop a site at which to interpret information about an individual's spiritual status. The article draws on theories of sacrifice's structure and function, in conjunction with close analysis of rabbinic texts that relate suffering to sacrifice. The pericope at the core of the article's argument demonstrates a strikingly technical approach to the human experience of suffering, describing four examples of yisurin in which no real physical suffering occurs; in each instance the “victim” experiences extremely mild discomfort at most, and at the least barely registers an experience of inconvenience. Nonetheless, these experiences all qualify as “suffering,” and are thus still understood to bear indisputable soteriological import. Physical suffering in the Talmud is thus open for interpretation, yielding information about the status of the sufferer's spiritual self. Human suffering is viewed as religiously desirable in both late rabbinic and early Christian literatures. By developing an understanding of its hermeneutical function for the rabbis, this article helps to elucidate the value of suffering for rabbinic literature as a subset of late antique religious discourse.

The 20 th century saw intense change in theories of knowledge. How can we integrate such developments with our approach to knowledge (as represented in texts) in Late Antiquity? What happens if we apply the notion of knowledge as a product of specific acts and institutions with specific purposes and functions to late ancient texts which concern themselves with the production, collection or display of different grades of knowledge? How would such an approach change the way we frame research on theological, philosophical, and pedagogical texts? In this essay I argue that we should abandon debates about whether to categorize specific texts as esoteric, theological/Christian or philosophical/pagan, and turn our attention to culturally and historically particular features of the terrain of the late ancient episteme. I describe six features of knowledge production through textual practices and articulate the imagined epistemic world in which reading practices took place and which defined the conditions of the value or legitimacy of those practices. This essay is offered as a framework for the interpretation of texts concerned with the production of knowledge, whether on the quotidian level of grammatical education or in its more rarefied forms. This framework allows texts to be read together according to function rather than formal genre or the the religious identity of their authors, so that new conversations around late ancient knowledge production can emerge and models of influence or borrowing can be left behind. The six features I have identified are patrimony, curatorship, mimesis , oikonomia , cosmos, and the product of all of these, the object-subject.

This article explores the socio-economic aspects of medical care in Late Antiquity with a particular emphasis on how payments and medical costs shaped perceptions of physicians as fee-charging individuals. As it illustrates, criticisms of physicians for greed, hucksterism, and chilly indifference to the poor spanned the gamut of ancient literature, and the limited evidence for physicians’ incomes and fees under the Roman Empire does suggest that medical careers were quite profitable. For ethical and philanthropic purposes, though, many ancient physicians chose to forego payment or adjust their fees for patients of lesser means. This essay concludes with a challenge to a common scholarly assertion that the Christianization of Roman society placed greater pressure on physicians to assume more charitable practices. Christians did not differ appreciably from pagans in their criticisms of avaricious physicians; instead, I suggest, Christian leaders who inherited a tradition of censuring physicians for predatory behavior leveraged established Classical discourses about the greedy physicians and the exclusion of the poor from healthcare to persuade parishioners to support almsgiving, particularly the funding of hospitals. Clerics in this way erected a parallel healthcare economy that was explicitly outside of marketplace norms: volunteers, clerics, and paid physicians were to serve the ailing poor at hospitals, while the rich were to fund these operations by treating their diseased souls through the purgative act of almsgiving.