Corporal Knowledge: Early Christian Bodies

by Jennifer A. Glancy

What do we know in our bodies? Jennifer A. Glancy uses this fundamental question to illuminate the cultural history of early Christianity. Studying representations in sources from Paul to Augustine, she traces the centrality of bodies to early Christian social dynamics and discourse.

Glancy offers in-depth analyses of important texts, historical problems, and theological questions. How did Paul present his suspiciously marked body as a source of knowledge and power? How did the corporal conditioning of the Roman slaveholding system infiltrate-and deform-articulations of Christian sexual ethics, and create parallel systems of virtue for elite Christians and enslaved Christians? Early Christians imagined Mary's body at the moment she gave birth; what do these primitive images and narratives suggest about ancient-and modern-understandings of maternal epistemology?

In an approach to cultural history informed by the writings of philosophical and sociological theorists of corporeality, including Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Pierre Bourdieu, and Linda Mart?n Alcoff, Glancy shows that the cultural habituation of bodies caused Christians of the first centuries to replicate hierarchical patterns of social relations prevalent in the Roman Empire. These embodied patterns of relations are seemingly at odds with the good news of Christian preaching.

Corporal Knowledge sheds light on the many ways in which social location is known in the body, and shows the significance of that insight for a cultural history of Christian origins. By framing questions about the function of corporal epistemology, Glancy offers new insights into bodies, identities, and early Christian understandings of what it means to be human.

208 pages, Hardcover

First published December 31, 2010

About the author

Jennifer A. Glancy's research interests include the cultural history of early Christianity, corporeality and Christian anthropology, women’s history in antiquity, gender theory, and comparative slavery studies. She has received funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities Enduring Questions grant program to develop an interdisciplinary Core course, “What does prayer do?” In all her courses, she encourages students to ask their own enduring questions. After completing an Honors degree in Philosophy and English Literature at Swarthmore College, Glancy joined the Jesuit Volunteer Corps (1982-1983) before undertaking doctoral studies in New Testament at Columbia University, which she completed under the direction of the late Rev. Raymond E. Brown, S.S.