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The Sex Lives of Saints: An Erotics of Ancient Hagiography. By Virginia Burrus. [Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion.] (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2004. Pp. vi, 216. $22.50 paperback. ISBN 978-0-812-22020-9.)
Saving Shame: Martyrs, Saints, and Other Abject Subjects. By Virginia Burrus. [Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion.] (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2007. Pp. xii, 195. $45.00. ISBN 978-0-812-24044-3.)
With Saving Shame (2007) and Sex Lives of Saints (2004),Virginia Burrus has added two fascinating studies of early Christian Uterature to an aiïeady remarkable repertoiïe. Refusing the ascetic strictures of positivistic historiography, Burrus pursues the pleasure of texts and encourages readers to do the same. Drawing on psychoanalytic, literary, feminist, queer, and/or postcolonial theory, her newest monographs find in ancient Christianity rich sources for reflection on desiïe and shame. In Sex Lives, Burrus points to the lavishly erotic character of Christian ascetic writings: these Unger over honey-dipped youths, plunging swords, glowing brides, caressed feet, and bejeweled harlots, resisting desiïe, as she argues, only by repeatedly and ecstaticaUy pursuing it. "Seduction," in her estimation, is "the very wager of all theology," as saints romance God, and God romances the saint in return (p. 159). In Saving Shame, Burrus reconsiders the productive potentiaUties of shame, chief among them the "possibility of love" (p. xii). Never simply destructive, Burrus argues, shame provides opportunities for resistance, opening, vulnerability, and encounter, which lead ultimately to God. Recognizing the redemptive potential of shame, early Christians sought divine grace by courting disgrace: flaunting theiï marked, exposed, and feminized bodies, reveling in broken, torn, and penetrated flesh, and displaying their abject corporeality. Rather than refusing either desire or shame, Burrus avers, Christians enthusiasticaUy embraced both.
Burrus's already highly acclaimed Sex Lives of Saints begins with a reflection on Michel Foucault's description of "so-called Christian morality." Simultaneously undermining and reproducing a phallic subjectivity already in place, Foucault argued that late-antique Christians...