Early Christian Bodies

This course examines the history of the human body and the experience of bodily change in its cultural and religious contexts in the ancient Mediterranean and early Christian world. It focuses on how ancient writers and thinkers imagined what a body was, what a body could turn into, how a body should be treated, and what a body should be taught to do. These thinkers had very different ideas about bodies than contemporary humans do, and yet their ideas were also critical in shaping many of the ideas about bodies that we still have.