One way of thinking about the last decades of scholarship on late ancient Christianity is to notice the effort to disentangle the historiographical project from the theological one. This effort has travelled alongside a series of overlapping intellectual (and political) turns within the humanities and qualitative social sciences: the feminist turn, the literary turn, the cultural turn, and most recently (ironically enough) the turn to religion. How do these interpretive transformations change the practice of reading ancient sources? By taking up The Life of Melania the Younger, this chapter explores the critical differences implied and imposed by this series of interpretive turns. The reading of the Life interweaves questions of gender, power, and the body; genre, rhetoric, and audience; materiality and social relations; the production of subjectivity through the repetitions of ritual and piety; and reflections on the future of feminist critique in the history of religion.
The Body of Faith: A Biological History of Religion in America. By Robert C. Fuller