Violated and Transcended Bodies: Gender, Martyrdom, and Asceticism in Early Christianity [Paperback]

This Element covers social construction of the ideas of body and gender in Late Antiquity and Early Christianity.This Element covers social construction of the ideas of body and gender in Late Antiquity and Early Christianity, Martyrdom and asceticism as Christian performances that overcome human limitations, and analyses the relationship of gender to status in martyrologies, hagiographies, and apocryphal early Christian literature.This Element covers social construction of the ideas of body and gender in Late Antiquity and Early Christianity, Martyrdom and asceticism as Christian performances that overcome human limitations, and analyses the relationship of gender to status in martyrologies, hagiographies, and apocryphal early Christian literature.Given its eschatological orientation and its marginal position in the Roman Empire, emergent Christianity found embodiment, as an aspect of being in the world, problematic. Those identified and identifying as Christians developed two broad responses to that world as they embraced the idea of being in, yet not of it. The first response, martyrdom, was witness to the strength their faith gave to fragile bodies, particularly those of women, and the ability by suffering to overcome bodily limitation and attain the resurrection life. The second, asceticism, complemented and later continued martyrdom as a means of bodily transcendence and participation in the spiritual world.1. About Bodies, Gender, and Identity; 2. Equal Opportunity: Martyrs and Ascetics; 3. Martyrdom as Asceticism: Thecla and the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles; 4. Bodies that Save the World; Abbreviations; Bibliography.