Virgin and the Bride: Idealized Womanhood in Late Antiquity (Hardcover)

Review
Boy meets girl, boy converts girl, soldiers torture and kill girl--texts about women from late antiquity tell us less about the women who populate them than about the men who wrote them. Cooper argues that the Christian claim to moral superiority via the rejection of marriage--and the replacement of the stock piles of ancient romance novels with Christian plots--were rhetorical rather than descriptive or prescriptive in nature. Yet rhetoric can shape experience. Cooper recognizes that by the fifth and sixth centuries 'the widespread adaptation of Christian literary forms to the uses of the leisured and literate classes resulted in a new, perhaps unprecedented, attention to the problem of how female readers might apprehend the Christian heroines,' but earlier writings too, whether or not intended for that purpose, did have an impact on 'the self-understanding and behavior of actual women.' -- Ruth Mazo Karras "Common Knowledge"

Product Description
During the last centuries of the Roman Empire, the prevailing ideal of feminine virtue was radically transformed: the pure but fertile heroines of Greek and Roman romance were replaced by a Christian heroine who ardently refused the marriage bed. How this new concept and figure of purity is connected with - indeed, how it abetted - social and religious change is the subject of Kate Cooper's book. The Romans saw marital concord as a symbol of social unity - one that was important to maintaining the vigour and political harmony of the empire itself. This is nowhere more clear than in the ancient novel, where the mutual desire of hero and heroine is directed toward marriage and social renewal. But early Christian romance subverted the main outline of the story: now the heroine abandond her marriage partner for an otherworldly union with a Christian holy man. Cooper traces the reception of this new ascetic literature across the Roman world. How did the ruling classes respond to the Christian claim to moral superiority, represented by the new ideal of sexual purity? How did women themselves react to the challenge to their traditional role as matrons and matriarchs? In addressing these questions, Cooper gives us a picture of dramatically changing ideas about sexuality, family and morality - a cultural revolution with far-reaching implications for religion and politics, women and men. "The Virgin and the Bride" offers a look at central aspects of the Christianization of the Roman world, and a discussion of the rhetoric of gender and the social meaning of idealized womanhood.

First Sentence
"The first without compunction violates his wife, his serving-women, and his attendants, whether young (paedagogia, capillati) or old (exoleti); the second, no longer having the power to give orders outside, in the wider society, no longer has the strength to give them at all: of necessity, he invents for himself a conjugal and sexual morality." Read the first page Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover

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