© Columbia University Press
Dying to Be Men: Gender and Language in Early Christian Martyr Texts
September, 2008
Cloth, 224 pages,
ISBN: 978-0-231-14498-8
$50.00
/ £34.50
"Dying to Be Men successfully conveys the surprising and subversive ways early Christian martyrologies appropriated the notion of masculinity . . . Recommended." — Choice
"Dying to Be Men is exemplary of the kind of work sex/gender theory can do in historical research." — Amy Hollywood, Harvard University
"In Dying to Be Men, gendered language is neither incidental nor metaphorical. Rather, claims to masculinity and reinscriptions of femininity form the bedrock of Roman identity and, in a move both imitative and subversive, the foundations of Christian communal subjectivity. At the center of the study lie the powerful texts of Christian martyrdom, but L. Stephanie Cobb also draws on a variety of sources—philosophical, medical, Christian, Jewish, 'classical,' and 'postclassical'—to articulate an entire world and make clear the way that gender as an analytical category and site of contestation permeated Roman life and Christian textuality." — Andrew S. Jacobs, University of California, Riverside