Why did dreams matter to Jews, Byzantine Christians, and Muslims in the first millennium? Dreams and Divination from Byzantium to Baghdad, 400 - 1000 CE shows how the ability to interpret dreams universally attracted power and influence in the first millennium. In a time when prophetic dreamswere viewed as God's intervention in human history, male and female prophets wielded was unparalleled power in imperial courts, military camps, and religious gatherings. The three faiths drew on the ancient Near Eastern tradition of dream key manuals, which offer an insight into the hopes and fearsof ordinary people. They melded pagan dream divination with their own scriptural traditions to produce a novel and rich culture of dream interpretation. Prophetic dreams enabled communities to understand their past and present circumstances as divinely ordained and helped to bolster the spiritualauthority of dreamers and those who had the gift of interpreting their dreams. Bronwen Neil takes a gendered approach to the analysis of the common culture of dream interpretation across late antique Jewish, Byzantine, and Islamic sources to 1000 CE, in order to expose the ways in which dreamsoffered women a unique opportunity to exercise influence. The epilogue to the volume reveals why dreams still matter today to many men and women of the monotheist traditions.

Dreams and Divination from Byzantium to Baghdad, 400-1000 CE (Oxford Studies in the Abrahamic Religions)

History

Neil, Bronwen

World

Oxford University Press

Leo the Great (The Early Church Fathers)

Pope Leo I’s theological and political influence in his own time (440-461) and beyond far outweighs the amount of attention he has received in recent scholarship. That influence extended well beyond Rome to the Christian East through his contribution to preparations for the Council of Chalcedon and its outcome. For this he was alternately praised and vilified by the opposing parties at the Council. Leo made his views known through letters, and a vast number of homilies. While so many of these survive, Leo and his works have not been the subject of a major English-language socio-historical study in over fifty years.  In this brief introduction to the life and works of this important leader of the early church, we gain a more accurate picture of the circumstances and pressures which were brought to bear on his pontificate. A brief introduction surveys the scanty sources which document Leo’s early life, and sets his pontificate in its historical context, as the Western Roman Empire went into serious decline, and Rome lost its former status as the western capital. Annotated translations of various excerpts of Leo’s letters and homilies are organised around four themes dealing with specific aspects of Leo’s activity as bishop of Rome:   Leo as spiritual adviser on the life of the faithful   Leo as opponent of heresy   the bishop of Rome as civic and ecclesiastical administrator   Leo and the primacy of Rome.  Taking each of these key elements of Leo’s pontifical activities into account, we gain a more balanced picture of the context and contribution of his best-known writings on Christology. This volume offers an affordable introduction to the subject for both teachers and students of ancient and medieval Christianity.

Ancient Civilizations

Routledge

Pope Leo I’s theological and political influence in his own time (440-461) and beyond far outweighs the amount of attention he has received in recent scholarship. That influence extended well beyond Rome to the Christian East through his contribution to preparations for the Council of Chalcedon and its outcome. For this he was alternately praised and vilified by the opposing parties at the Council. Leo made his views known through letters, and a vast number of homilies. While so many of these survive, Leo and his works have not been the subject of a major English-language socio-historical study in over fifty years. In this brief introduction to the life and works of this important leader of the early church, we gain a more accurate picture of the circumstances and pressures which were brought to bear on his pontificate. A brief introduction surveys the scanty sources which document Leo’s early life, and sets his pontificate in its historical context, as the Western Roman Empire went into serious decline, and Rome lost its former status as the western capital. Annotated translations of various excerpts of Leo’s letters and homilies are organised around four themes dealing with specific aspects of Leo’s activity as bishop of Rome: <ul>
<li>Leo as spiritual adviser on the life of the faithful</li> <li>Leo as opponent of heresy</li> <li>the bishop of Rome as civic and ecclesiastical administrator</li> <li>Leo and the primacy of Rome.</li> </ul>
Taking each of these key elements of Leo’s pontifical activities into account, we gain a more balanced picture of the context and contribution of his best-known writings on Christology. This volume offers an affordable introduction to the subject for both teachers and students of ancient and medieval Christianity.

"A systematic study of the role of the bishop in negotiating conflict within the church in the Mediterranean world of the seventh century, based on letters translated from Latin, Greek, and Syriac"--

Conflict and Negotiation in the Early Church: Letters from Late Anquity, Translated from the Greek, Latin, and Syriac

Allen, Pauline

The Catholic University of America Press

The cult of the saints is a phenomenon that expanded rapidly in the fourth century, and John Chrysostom s homilies are important witnesses to its growth. Until now, the majority of John s homilies on the saints and martyrs have been ignored. However, in this volume,Wendy Mayer investigates the liturgical, topographical, and pastoral aspects that marked the martyr cult at Antioch and Constantinople in John s time. The cult s original point of focus was the Christian martyrs those followers of the Jesus-movement who died in confession of their faith, either at the hands of other Jews or at the hands of the Roman administration.Mayer pinpoints several conceptual shifts that identified and shaped this cult: the imitation of Christ s own death; the creedal declaration I am a Christian ; the sense of privilege bestowed upon martyrs; the ritual purity of relics; public veneration of the departed; and places made holy by martyrs blood. This rich collection includes homilies on martyrs Meletius, Eustathius, Lucian, Phocas, Juventinus and Maximinus, Ignatius, Eleazar (and the seven boys), Bernike, Prosdoke and Domnina, Barlaam, Drosis, and Romanus. It also includes encomia on Egyptian martyrs and on all the martyrs. To round out the volume, a letter written by John from exile concerning the use of martyr relics in a mission context and a letter in Latin in which Vigilius, Bishop of Tridentum, offers fresh Italian relics to John have been included. The cult of the saints is still very much alive in Roman Catholic and Eastern Christian piety. There are still parts of the world where the cult is observed in ways that differ little from those which were established at its very beginning. In this respect, the homilies that John Chrysostom preached on the feast days of his local saints and martyrs remain fresh and alive for us today.

The Cult of the Saints

Religion & Spirituality

Mayer, Wendy

John, Chrysostom, Saint

Christian Books & Bibles

St Vladimirs Seminary Pr

What did dreams mean to Egyptian Christians of the first to the sixth centuries? Alexandrian philosophers, starting with Philo, Clement and Origen, developed a new approach to dreams that was to have profound effects on the spirituality of the medieval West and Byzantium. Their approach, founded on the principles of Platonism, was based on the convictions that God could send prophetic dreams and that these could be interpreted by people of sufficient virtue. In the fourth century, the Alexandrian approach was expanded by Athanasius and Evagrius to include a more holistic psychological understanding of what dreams meant for spiritual progress. The ideas that God could be known in dreams and that dreams were linked to virtue flourished in the context of Egyptian desert monasticism. This volume traces that development and its influence on early Egyptian experiences of the divine in dreams.

Dreams, Virtue and Divine Knowledge in Early Christian Egypt

Costache, Doru

Wagner, Kevin

Cambridge University Press

Leo the Great

Greek and Latin Letters in Late Antiquity: The Christianisation of a Literary Form

This is the first general book on Greek and Latin letter-writing in Late Antiquity (300-600 CE). Allen and Neil examine early Christian Greek and Latin literary letters, their nature and function and the mechanics of their production and dissemination. They examine the exchange of Episcopal, monastic and imperial letters between men, and the gifts that accompanied them, and the rarer phenomenon of letter exchanges with imperial and aristocratic women. They also look at the transmission of letter-collections and what they can tell us about friendships and other social networks between the powerful elites who were the literary letter-writers of the fourth to sixth centuries. The volume gives a broad context to late-antique literary letter-writing in Greek and Latin in its various manifestations: political, ecclesiastical, practical and social. In the process, the differences between 'pagan' and Christian letter-writing are shown to be not as great as has previously been supposed.

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

This collection of Latin texts, published in a new edition with an English translation, draws on the rich hagiographical corpus of Anastasius, papal diplomat, secretary and translator in late ninth-century Rome. The texts concern two controversial figures: Pope Martin I (649-653), whose opposition to the imperially-sponsored doctrines of monenergism and monothelitism saw him exiled to Cherson where he died in 654, and Maximus the Confessor, an Eastern monk condemned to suffer amputation and exile to Lazica for similar reasons in 662. The author seeks to place these works in their political context, namely the growing hostility between the eastern and western churches in the late ninth century, and to assess Anastasius's contribution to the deteriorating relations between the two through his translations of hagiography.

Seventh-Century Popes and Martyrs: The Political Hagiography of Anastasius Bibliothecarius (Studia Antiqua Australiensia)

Brepols Publishers

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Neil, Bronwen. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Neil, Bronwen

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Neil, Bronwen. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Dreams and Divination from Byzantium to Baghdad, 400-1000 CE (Oxford Studies in the Abrahamic Religions)

Leo the Great (The Early Church Fathers)

Leo the Great (The Early Church Fathers)

Conflict and Negotiation in the Early Church: Letters from Late Anquity, Translated from the Greek, Latin, and Syriac

The Cult of the Saints

Dreams, Virtue and Divine Knowledge in Early Christian Egypt

Leo the Great

Greek and Latin Letters in Late Antiquity: The Christianisation of a Literary Form

Greek and Latin Letters in Late Antiquity: The Christianisation of a Literary Form

Seventh-Century Popes and Martyrs: The Political Hagiography of Anastasius Bibliothecarius (Studia Antiqua Australiensia)