What do we know in our bodies? Jennifer A. Glancy uses this fundamental question to illuminate the cultural history of early Christianity. Studying representations in sources from Paul to Augustine, she traces the centrality of bodies to early Christian social dynamics and discourse.
Glancy offers in-depth analyses of important texts, historical problems, and theological questions. How did Paul present his suspiciously marked body as a source of knowledge and power? How did the corporal conditioning of the Roman slaveholding system infiltrate-and deform-articulations of Christian sexual ethics, and create parallel systems of virtue for elite Christians and enslaved Christians? Early Christians imagined Mary's body at the moment she gave birth; what do these primitive images and narratives suggest about ancient-and modern-understandings of maternal epistemology?
In an approach to cultural history informed by the writings of philosophical and sociological theorists of corporeality, including Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Pierre Bourdieu, and Linda MartA-n Alcoff, Glancy shows that the cultural habituation of bodies caused Christians of the first centuries to replicate hierarchical patterns of social relations prevalent in the Roman Empire. These embodied patterns of relations are seemingly at odds with the good news of Christian preaching.
Corporal Knowledge sheds light on the many ways in which social location is known in the body, and shows the significance of that insight for a cultural history of Christian origins. By framing questions about the function of corporal epistemology, Glancy offers new insights into bodies, identities, and early Christian understandings of what it means to be human.
Industry Reviews
"This is a stunning and original contribution to studies of the body in religion and culture, encompassing an array of early Christian texts from Paul to Augustine. Utilizing a range of theorists who show how the body figures in the construction of identity, Glancy analyzes 'storytelling bodies.' This study of the traces left by bodiesDLfrom St. Paul's whippable back to the Virgin Mary's birthing bodyDLopens an insightful approach to discourse and social
location."
--Patricia Cox Miller, W. Earl Ledden Professor of Religion, Syracuse University
"In Corporal Knowledge, Jennifer Glancy presents an entirely convincing set of close readings of ancient Christian texts, and also a sustained, deeply moving reflection on what can be known by and through bodies. Tracing narratives of bodies in pain and under torture, marked by battle scars and the degradations of slavery, and stretched open during childbirth, this stunning book plumbs the truths of flesh with rare insight and courage. An essential
contribution that must not be overlooked."
--Jennifer Wright Knust, School of Theology and Department of Religion, Boston University
"What did it mean to be an early Christian body? Moving and beautifully written, Corporal Knowledge helps us understand why most Christian communities did not challenge slaveholding or the association of childbirth with filth and beatings with low status. In this startlingly insightful study, Glancy compellingly traces the presence and persistence of social location on ancient bodies, enabling new ways to reimagine early Christians and reckon with
their legacies."
--Denise Kimber Buell, author of Why This New Race: Ethnic Reasoning in Early Christianity
"This insightful and well-written book is an essential reading for those interested in the shaping of the body in antiquity"--Candida Moss, University of Notre Dame
"Even if I do not agree with the argument in all its details, there is much of value to take away from the work."--Interpretation:A Journal of Bible and Theology
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