Virginia Burrus

The Sex Lives of Saints: An Erotics of Ancient Hagiography

Introduction: Hagiography and the History of SexualityCH. 1. FANCYING HERMITS: SUBLIMATION AND THE ARTS OF ROMANCEThe Queer Life of Paul the HermitThe Queer Marriage of Malchus the MonkHilarions Last LaughProlongations: Fantasies of a FaunReading (as) Another, WomanCH. 2. DYING FOR A LIFE: MARTYRDOM, MASOCHISM, AND FEMALE (AUTO)BIOGRAPHYPraising PaulaRemembering MacrinaConfessing MonicaTestimony to (Womans) SurvivalFragments of an AutobiographyCH. 3. HYBRID DESIRE: EMPIRE, SADISM, AND THE SOLDIER SAINTDomination and Submission in the Life of MartinSulpiciuss PassionThe Hagiographer, the Ethnographer, and the NativeWitnessing AmbivalenceCH. 4. SECRETS OF SEDUCTION: THE LIVES OF HOLY HARLOTSThe Lamb, the Wolf, and the Fool: Mary, Niece of AbrahamSeduction of the Eye: Pelagia of AntiochSacrifice in the Desert: Mary of EgyptThe Joy of HarlotryPostscript (Catching My Breath)NotesBibliographyIndexAcknowledgments

Mimicking Virgins: Colonial Ambivalence and the Ancient Romance

There is increasing awareness of the complexity of the processes of identityconstruction at work in the literature of the Roman empire, processes reflecting diverse intertextual strategies of appropriation, fragmentation, recombination, and parody that subtly interrogate both the hegemony of Greek paideia and the imperial dominion of Rome. Who is a “Greek”? Who is a “Roman”? (Who, for that matter, a “barbarian”?) Such questions, while answered with confidence by many ancient authors, raise particular challenges for the contemporary historian. From the perspective of a hindsight inevitably refracted through the lens of more recent experiences of empire and colonization, the ancient Mediterranean terrain unfurls as a scarred surface, layered with histories of conquest and traversed by passages between cultures only knowable as such retrospectively and problematically, in the moment of their mutual, agonistic differentiation—in the moment when purity is already “lost.” Some of us may want to pose the question: Are not all subjects unmasked—differently—as “mimic-men” in this “space of colonial encounters”? (We recall, for example, that both Justin Martyr, a

The Heretical Woman as Symbol in Alexander, Athanasius, Epiphanius, and Jerome

Some three decades ago Michel Foucault sought to reestablish communication between “madness” and “non-madness” by going back to what he called the “zero point” in history at which the distance between reason and madness was first established. In Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason , Foucault suggested that returning to this point of initial differentiation requires renouncing all that we as modern persons know to be true about madness and reason. If we are to locate “that realm in which the man of madness and the man of reason, moving apart, are not yet disjunct,” he wrote, we must speak of that initial dispute without assuming a victory, or the right to a victory; we must speak of those actions re-examined in history, leaving in abeyance all that may figure as a conclusion, as a refuge in truth. … Then, and then only, can we… begin the dialogue of their breach, testifying in a fugitive way that they still speak to each other.

UNSAFE SEX: FEMINISM, PORNOGRAPHY, AND THE SONG OF SONGS

How should the Song of Songs be read? As that rarest of biblical texts, one that gives voice to female desire in the context of a sexual relationship characterized by equality and mutuality rather than domination and submission? Or as yet another vehicle for male pornographic fantasy and sexual aggression? Attempting to shift the (dualistic) terms of this burgeoning debate on the Song, this article explicitly situates itself at the intersection of feminist and queer theories, focusing especially on s/m eroticism as a site where these theories forcefully collide and delicately collude, and arguing that feminist and queer politics can ill-afford to exclude each other.

Queer Lives of Saints: Jerome's Hagiography

“H O W O F T E N, when I was living in the desert, in the vast solitude which gives to hermits a savage dwelling-place, parched by the flames of the sun, how often did I fancy myself among the pleasures of Rome [putavi me Romanis interesse deliciis]!” (Epistula 22.7). Thus begins Jerome’s account of his own brief career as a hermit, intruded into a letter written to the Roman virgin Eustochium circa 384, some eight years after Jerome had decisively fled the Syrian desert. In this passage, ascetic “fancy” quickly overwhelms historical description. Still inventing himself in the present, Jerome’s interest in his own past lies largely with the power of fantasy to shape—and reshape—a human life.1 His autobiographical confession unfolds in a series of dreamily shifting scenes, as vibrant in emotional tone as they are rich in sensory detail. The remembered landscape conveys the tenor of the former life, even as the terrain of memory itself buckles and folds: Jerome’s vivid depictions of locale, written with the eyes of his imagination wide open, dramatically undermine the stability of place and time. In the desert he once fancied Roman allurements; in Rome he now fancies

Carnal Excess: Flesh at the Limits of Imagination

This essay explores representations of fleshly excess in Christian and Jewish texts of the late fourth and fifth centuries, from the cosmically-scaled figures of Adam and the resurrected Christ in Genesis Rabbah and Augustines City of God, on the one hand, to the hagiographical portraits of fat rabbis and monks in the tractate Baba Metsia of the Babylonian Talmud and the Lausiac History of Palladius, on the other. The Platonic figure of the khora is initially invoked to frame two main arguments: first, that these late ancient texts discover transcendence within, rather than outside of, the boundlessness of materiality; and, second, that this incarnational tendency has intriguing implications for practices and theories of representation and imagination.

Performing sadomasochism in the song of songs

Preface: Writing Under the Influence Imet Lynda only once, not long after the publication of her Between the Body and the Flesh: Performing Sadomasochism. The occasion was a New Years party at the home of our mutual friend Catherine Keller. That evening Lynda listened with goodhumored patience and gentle encouragement as I (a historian of early Christianity under the influence of a few glasses of wine) enthusastically shared my own long-standing fascination with the performances of pleasurable suffering embodied in ancient literatures of martyrdom and asceticism. Soon thereafter I read her book, and if I feel I have come to know her a bit better since that evening it is because I have for the past few years been writing under the influence, having imbibed more than a little of Lyndas subtle and complex text. In the following essay, I have partnered with colleague and biblical critic Stephen Moore to stage a sadomasochistic performance of the Song of Songs.