After Transformation: A Lyrical History of Christian Late Antiquity [Paperback]

InAfter Transformation, Maia Kotrosits offers a lyrical history of Christian late antiquity as it lives on in and with the present. Recasting the monumental changes that occurred between the second and fourth centuries, when Rome transitioned from pagan to Christian worship, Kotrosits presents a condensed and evocative meditation on the profound effects of Christian imperialism across time and geography. She employs a collection of forms ranging from micro-essay and vignette to poem and fragment to capture human struggles with time and change, showing how the mundane and intimate details of our lives can themselves be conduits of historical knowing. Arguing for lyricism as a method, Kotrosits reclaims vulnerability, urgency, and storytelling in historical work to model new ways of writing the past and experiencing ourselves more fully in time. Above all,After Transformationis about the ironies of the ways that history is written against the reality of the ways that history is lived.USModeling a new way of writing the past while experiencing ourselves more fully in time, Maia Kotrosits offers a lyrical history of Christian late antiquity as it lives on in and with the present.Maia Kotrosits is Visiting Scholar at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School and author ofTheory, History, and the Study of Religion in Late Antiquity: Speculative Worlds."Modeling with care and rigor how to travel across the watershed of late antiquity to the present,After Transformationis one of the most original and imaginative ventures into and through ancient Mediterranean studies that I have read. There is simply so much to savor in these pages. It will draw in even those readers who may not be initially primed for its message. I was transformed by this book."Dan-El Padilla Peralta, author of,Divine Institutions: Religions and Community in the Middle Roman Republic

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