This collection explores how the body became a touchstone for late antique religious practice and imagination. When we read the stories and testimonies of late ancient Christians, what different types of bodies stand before us? How do we understand the range of bodily experiences—solitary and social, private and public—that clothed ancient Christians? How can bodily experience help us explore matters of gender, religious identity, class, and ethnicity? The Garb of Being investigat...

Three scholars of religion explore literature and the literary as sites of critical transformation.We are living in a time of radical uncertainty, faced with serious political, ecological, economic, epidemiological, and social problems. Scholars of religion Constance M. Furey, Sarah Hammerschlag, and Amy Hollywood come together in this volume with a shared conviction that what and how we read opens new ways of imagining our political futures and our lives.E...

What is the relationship between our isolated and our social selves, between aloneness and interconnection? Constance M. Furey probes this question through a suggestive literary tradition: early Protestant poems in which a single speaker describes a solitary search for God.As Furey demonstrates, John Donne, George Herbert, Anne Bradstreet, and others describe inner lives that are surprisingly crowded, teeming with human as well as divine companions. The same early modern writers wh...