Reading Renunciation

Elizabeth A. Clark

Published by Princeton University Press

Clark, Elizabeth A.
Reading Renunciation: Asceticism and Scripture in Early Christianity.
Core Textbook ed. Princeton University Press, 1999.
Project MUSE.muse.jhu.edu/book/29802.

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Acknowledgments

T his book has been a long time in

the making—so long, in fact, that I fear I no longer remember all those
who should be thanked for their various forms of assistance.
The National Endowment for the Humanities and Duke University pro-
vided a year of fellowship support in 1996, and the Arts and Sciences
Research Council of Duke University kept me well supplied with graduate
research assistants during the summer months. I thank NEH and Duke
for their continuing support.
In addition to astute comments on my manuscript supplied by the two
readers for Princeton University Press, Bart Ehrman, Dale Martin, Halvor
Moxnes, and Randall Styers heroically read the entire manuscript at an
earlier stage; Kalman Bland and James Goehring offered expert advice
on particular sections. In addition, the Introduction received extensive
comments from Daniel Boyarin, Jonathan Dollimore, Gail Hamner, Pa-
tricia Cox Miller, Mark Vessey, and Annabel Wharton. Many colleagues
contributed help and suggestions on various points: Dyan Elliott, Sidney
Griffith, Carol Meyers, Paul Strohm, Joseph W. Trigg, Robin Darling
Young, and L. Michael White, among others. I thank them, and apologize
to those whose comments and critiques have been incorporated into the
manuscript without proper acknowledgment. All the remaining defects of
the manuscript I must, of course, accept as my own responsibility.
Portions of some chapters were given as lectures at Austin Presbyterian
Theological Seminary (Thomas Currie Lectures), Oberlin College (Has-
kell Lectures), St. John’s Seminary, New Zealand (Selwyn Lectures),
Washington University (Weltin Lecture), University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill (Christine de Pisan Lecture), the University of Michigan,
Cambridge University, Boston University, Drake University, Union Theo-
logical Seminary, Amherst College, Australian Catholic University, the
University of Oslo, as well as at annual conferences of the American Acad-
emy of Religion and the North American Patristics Society, and the Ox-
ford International Patristic Conference in 1995. I thank these institutions
and groups, as well as the audiences whose questions, criticisms, and com-
ments helped me to formulate this book.
I have also been assisted by many fine research assistants in the Graduate
Program in Religion at Duke University during the years I have worked
xii Acknowledgments
on this book. I would especially like to thank Catherine Chin, who pre-
pared the bibliography, and John Lamoreaux, who compiled the index.
Julian Sheffield helped me with material at Union Theological Seminary
(New York). I am very grateful for their intelligent assistance.
I have had many excellent talking partners in Durham and Chapel Hill
during the years in which this book was being researched and written.
Their cheerful company and intelligent conversation have made the hours
of labor less onerous. I would especially like to mention my friends Sarah
Beckwith, Kalman Bland, Stanley Chojnacki, Miriam Cooke, Bart Ehr-
man, Valeria Finucci, Gail Hamner, Barbara Harris, Bruce Lawrence,
Donald Lopez, Dale Martin, Tomoko Masuzawa, Randall Styers, Kenneth
Surin, and Annabel Wharton, in addition to the cadre of excellent gradu-
ate students who add much to the reading groups and academic life of
this area. Having Dyan Elliott and Paul Strohm as visitors at the National
Humanities Center for parts of 1996–98 enriched these years. I also wish
to thank William and Carmela Franklin for the use of their marvelous
home at General Theological Seminary (New York) during several of the
summers when I was writing this book.
Some material in Reading Renunciation has appeared in earlier and dif-
ferent form in various journals, books, and conference volumes. Sections
of chapters 5 and 7 were included in “Contesting Abraham: The Ascetic
Reader and the Politics of Intertextuality,” in The Social World of the First
Christians: Essays in Honor of Wayne A. Meeks, ed. L. Michael White and
O. Larry Yarbrough (Minneapolis: Augsburg/Fortress, 1995), pp. 353–
65. Some portions of chapter 9 appeared in “Constraining the Body, Ex-
panding the Text: The Exegesis of Divorce in the Later Latin Fathers,” in
The Limits of Ancient Christianity: Essays on Late Antique Thought in
Honor of R. A. Markus, ed. William Klingshirn and Mark Vessey (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, forthcoming 1999). Most of chapter
6 saw its first light as “Reading Asceticism: Exegetical Strategies in the
Early Christian Rhetoric of Renunciation,” Biblical Interpretation 5
(1997): 82–105. Some of chapter 4 appeared as “Perilous Readings: Je-
rome, Asceticism, and Heresy,” in Proceedings of the Villanova Patristic,
Medieval, and Renaissance Conference 19/20 (Villanova: Augustinian
Historical Institute, 1996), pp. 15–33, and in “Spiritual Reading: The
Profit and Peril of Figurative Exegesis in Early Christian Asceticism,” in
Prayer and Spirituality in the Early Church 1996, ed. Peter Ackroyd and
Pauline Allen (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 1998), pp.
154–67. I thank these editors and publishers for granting me permission
to publish this material in fuller form.
Acknowledgments xiii
Gay Trotter, Staff Assistant of Duke’s Graduate Program in Religion,
saw the manuscript through too many revisions; her skill, efficiency, and
patience made the technical side of the process much easier for me.
Last, Reading Renunciation is dedicated to my colleague and neighbor
Dale Martin, whose critical intelligence, theoretical sophistication, schol-
arly acumen, and capacity for (non-renunciatory) fun both at home and
abroad have greatly enhanced the last eleven years of my life in Durham.
Durham, North Carolina
June 1998