Religion 258BD - Body/Sex/Early Christanity

An introduction to early Christian understandings of the body and sex that aims at familiarizing students with a culturally and geographically diverse range of relevant primary sources and at equipping students with the critical-theoretical methodologies necessary to analyze, interpret, and assess these sources in their historical context. Students will read sources penned between the first and seventh centuries CE within the geopolitical limits of the Roman and Persian Empires and originally written in Greek, Latin, Syriac, and Coptic. The course will be supplemented with theoretical literature, including feminist, gender, and postcolonial theory, discourse analysis, and so on.