This book analyzes the process by which class society developed in post-revolutionary France. Carol E. Harrison addresses the construction of class and gender identities, and shows how the sociable interaction of male citizens was the crucial bridge between the destruction of France's old regime and the development of a mature industrial class society.

This book is the first systematic attempt to consider the social and cultural context that shaped the life and thought of Augustine. Carol Harrison shows how his beliefs in both Christian truth and human fallenness effected a decisive break with classical ideals of perfection and shaped the distinctive theology of Western Christiandom.

Carol Harrison counters the assumption that Augustine of Hippo's (354-430) theology underwent a revolutionary transformation around the time he was consecrated Bishop in 396. Instead, she argues, there is a fundamental continuity in his thought and practice from the moment of his conversion in 386. The book thereby challenges the general scholarly trend to begin reading Augustine with his Confessions (396), which were begun ten years after his conversion, and refocuses attention on his earlier works, which undergird his whole theological system.

What do we mean when we talk about "being Christian" in Late Antiquity? This volume brings together sixteen world-leading scholars of ancient Judaism, Christianity, and Greco-Roman culture and society to explore this question, in honor of the ground-breaking scholarship of Professor Gillian Clark. After an introduction to the volume's dedicatee and themes by Averil Cameron, the papers in Section I, "Being Christian through Reading, Writing, and Hearing," analyze the roles that literary genre, writing, reading, hearing, and the literature of the past played in the formation of what it meant to...

How did people think about listening in the ancient world, and what evidence do we have of it in practice? The Christian faith came to the illiterate majority in the early Church through their ears. This proved problematic: the senses and the body had long been held in suspicion as all too temporal, mutable and distracting. Carol Harrison argues that despite profound ambivalence on these matters, in practice, the senses, and in particular the sense of hearing, were ultimately regarded as necessary - indeed salvific - constraints for fallen human beings. By examining early catechesis,...