IMC 2024: Sessions

Session 204: Being Wrong in Late Antiquity, II: Being 'Wrong'

Monday 1 July 2024, 14:15-15:45

Sponsor:	Postgraduate & Early-Career Late Antiquity Network
Organiser:	Henry Anderson, Department of Classics, Ancient History, Religion & Theology, University of Exeter
Moderator/Chair:	Ella Kirsh, Department of Classics, Brown University
Paper 204-a	The Moral Crisis of Trade: Merchants and Overcoming a Reputation for Sin (Language: English) Rowan Munnery, School of Classics, University of St Andrews Index terms: Economics - Trade, Maritime and Naval Studies and Social History
Paper 204-b	Gender and Symbolic Blackness: Internal Crisis in The Writing of Female Holy Figures (Language: English) Isabella Winton, School of Culture & Communication, Swansea University Index terms: Gender Studies, Hagiography, Monasticism and Sexuality
Paper 204-c	Burning with the Wrong Love: Whispers of Queer Women in Late Antiquity (Language: English) Phoebe Hancock, Department of Classics & Religious Studies, University of Ottawa Index terms: Monasticism, Religious Life, Sexuality and Women's Studies
Abstract	This panel explores the experience of “being wrong” in late antiquity, and studies strategies of tolerance and intolerance towards marginalized groups. Paper 1 (Munnery) explores how late antique citizens, awash in religious rhetoric of the sins of the marketplace, evolved new ways to imagine the ‘good’ merchant which could be accommodated within the framework of shifting Christian moral sensibilities. Paper 2 (Winton) uses three case studies from late antique monastic literature to compare the different functions of symbolic blackness when applied to male and female holy figures. Finally, paper 3 (Hancock) argues that patristic sources display an increasingly censorious rhetoric about women-loving women, reflecting broader social trends in late antique societies, and tries to gauge the responses of women-loving women themselves.