The Defense of Holy Images by John of Damascus stands as the archetypal exposition of the Christian theology of images. Written at the outbreak of the Iconoclastic Controversy, it has been mostly valued for its theological content and given scholarly short shrift as a narrowly focused polemic. The work is more than that. It presents a complex and profound explication of the nature of images and the phenomenon of representation, and is an important part of the “history of looking”in western culture. A long chain of visual conceptions connects classical Greek and Roman writers, such as Homer and Quintilian, to John: the living image, the interrelation of word and image, and image and memory, themes elaborated particularly in the Second Sophistic period of the early Common Era. For John to deploy this heritage so skillfully to the thorny problem of the place of images in Christianity, at the outbreak of a violent conflict that lasted a further 100 years after his writing, manifests an intellect and creativity that has not been sufficiently appreciated. The Defense of Holy Images , understood in this context, is another innovative synthesis of Christianity and classical culture produced by late antique Christian writers.

Two recently-published works involved in the representation of women in the Christian past show two contemporary but divergent historiographic modes. The following essay examines each study within a larger frame of inquiry as to how patriarchy continues to shape both the institutional and embodied orders within which feminist historiography of early Christianity and Late Antiquity takes place. Using Critical Race Theory as the best available perspective from which to engage with systems of oppression, I articulate certain revisions which should be made to current efforts towards equality and consider what it would mean to write feminist historiography as counter-narrative or counter-storytelling without that becoming a decorative or extra-curricular practice in the academy. When feminist historiography is treated simultaneously in institutional, embodied, and epistemic terms it becomes evident that the way we think about women is part of a high-stakes conflict around the use of the past.

While a considerable amount of scholarly energy has been devoted to the Latin versions of the Passion and Acts of the African martyrs Perpetua and Felicitas, by comparison rather little serious attention has been devoted to the Greek translation of the narrative of their martyrdom. Such an investigation requires a focus not just on technical problems of the similarities and differences between the Greek translation and a putative Latin original, but also attention to the more strategic problem of its place in the context of translations of Latin Christian texts. Although a Greek translation could have been made soon after the first appearance of the Latin narrative, this essay argues that a more likely context for the translation and for a heightened interest in the cult of Perpetua in Italy and in the East is a much later fifth- and sixth-century one. When we consider the cultural as much as the literary “translation” of Perpetua's martyrdom, we see that the drive to exploit the images and social power of a specific group of African martyrs explains the emphasis placed on them not only in Africa (specifically at Carthage) but also in a cluster of sites at the head of the Adriatic. These particular connections logically suggest concomitant ones with the eastern Mediterranean of the Byzantine state of the fifth and sixth centuries C.E.

This study examines the rhetorical structure of the Decem libri historiarum of Gregory of Tours. Whereas previous studies have drawn attention to Gregory's habit of pairing parallel narrative threads for the purpose of comparing what he considered to be appropriate and inappropriate behavior, the inconsistencies in that rhetorical strategy (e.g., lack of criticism for Clovis' parricidal policies of expansion and uncharacteristic moments of praise for Chilperic, the “Herod and Nero” of Gregory's lifetime) have been attributed to Gregory's penchant for the ironic or satirical. This study takes the view that Gregory purposefully constructed complicated, and at times contradictory, profiles for the dramatis personae of his history in order to generate a sense of suspended judgment for which he would become the ultimate arbiter at the end of an individual's life. This style of narrating the lives of individuals made Gregory himself a dramatis persona in his own history by investing him with absolute interpretative authority and authority over the construction of historical memory. Gregory's careful development of that authority was itself a strategy for survival in a very fluid, and often volatile, political environment.

In this article, I argue that the Collatio legum Mosaicarum et Romanarum is a persuasive legal text composed in the late antique aesthetic, “the Jeweled Style.” Though the Collatio has been strongly criticized for its apparent lack of sophistication, it represents a legal, textual practice in which the author created an intricate legal display by compiling quotations from the Pentateuch and from Roman legal material. The Jeweled Style, with its themes of juxtaposition, discontinuity, and referentiality, is a useful lens to view the Collatio because it helps us appreciate the aesthetic priorities of the author of the Collatio . Having acknowledged the Jeweled Style in the Collatio , I employ James Boyd White's notion of law as “constitutive rhetoric” to explain why an artistic aesthetic would appear in legal practice. In White's definition, law is an argumentative practice composed in culturally specific settings. These settings condition the practice of law so much so that, when we analyze legal texts, we should be sensitive to their cultural contexts.

This article investigates the characterization of women in Orosius' Historiae adversus paganos , a subject long overlooked. The Historiae enjoyed great popularity among medieval and renaissance scholars, and the way in which Orosius portrayed women had lasting literary influence. The representation of women as exempla is also intrinsically tied into the historiographical and biographical traditions of classical Latin literature, requiring examination of both Orosius' text and the classical influences that shape his work. This article begins by analyzing selected representations of women in Orosius' Historiae and then use these representations as a focus to explore his adaptation of the classical tradition.