© Columbia University Press
Abandoned to Lust: Sexual Slander and Ancient Christianity
December, 2005
Cloth, 304 pages,
ISBN: 978-0-231-13662-4
$48.50
/ £33.50
"An original and provocative contribution to the ongoing study of rhetoric, identity, and power in the early Christian tradition." — David M. Reis, Bryn Mawr Classical Review
"Jennifer Wright Knust has written a thoughtful and well-argued book... It deserves to be read." — Review of Biblical Literature
"I highly recommend Knust’s book." — Gene G. James, Dialogue & AllianceUniversity of Memphis
"A careful and detailed study that deftly navigates a sizable number of early Christian texts." — Benjamin Dunning, Journal of Religion
"Accusations of sexual excess or deviance are a commonplace in political invective. Abandoned to Lust shows engagingly and in detail how such accusations were a mainstay in the early-Christian rhetorical toolbox, allowing Christian polemicists to create vivid and damning portraits of their opponents as slaves to their appetites and passions. Knust's book is a very important rhetorical analysis and cultural history of early Christianity, with critical implications for the study of religiously motivated polemics more broadly." — Elizabeth Castelli
, Barnard College at Columbia University, author of Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture Making
"Abandoned to Lust is a provocative and important book. It is so not simply because it is a marvelous example of historical-interpretive research and writing—although it certainly is that. It is so because of its refusal to be just another example of a narrow antiquarian focus upon the writings and exploits of elites of an invented antiquity. Knust’s work is layered, engaged, and multifocal, with (self-) critical, sensitive, disciplined and careful attention paid to our several pasts and to our present and to the different positionalities and power dynamics in them." — Vincent L. Wimbush, Claremont Graduate University, author of African Americans and the Bible
"Jennifer Knust's study of sexual polemics in early Christianity is a groundbreaking and compelling treatment of a culturally significant and unusually intriguing topic. The analysis is superb in every way: lively, learned, theoretically informed, and insightful. Many of my colleagues in early-Christian studies will no doubt have my reaction to the book—wishing that they would have, or rather could have, written it." — Bart Ehrman, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, author of Lost Christianities: The Battles For Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew