Bøker av Virginia Burrus

Silenced for 1,600 years, the "heretics" speak for themselves in this account of the Priscillianist controversy that began in fourth-century Spain. In a close examination of rediscovered texts, Virginia Burrus provides an unusual opportunity to explore heresy from the point of view of the followers of Priscillian and to reevaluate the reliability of the historical record. Her analysis takes into account the concepts of gender, authority, and public and private space that informed established religion's response to this early Christian movement. Priscillian, who began his career as a lay teacher with particular influence among women, faced charges of heresy along with accusations of sorcery and sexual immorality following his ordination to the episcopacy. He was executed along with several of his followers circa 386. His purportedly "gnostic" doctrines produced controversy and division within the churches of Spain, dissension that continued into the early decades of the fifth century. Burrus's thorough and wide-ranging study enlarges upon previous scholarship, particularly in bringing a feminist perspective to bear on the gendered constructions of religious orthodoxies, making a valuable contribution to the recent commentary that explores new ways of looking at early Christian controversies. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1996.

These pages tap into the current attention paid to plants in a wide range of scholarship, an attention that involves the philosophy of plant life as well as scientific discoveries of how communicative trees may be, and how they defend themselves.

Virginia Burrus argues that the early accounts of the lives of saints are not anti-erotic but rather convey a sublimely transgressive "counter-eroticism" that resists the marital, procreative ethic of sexuality found in other strands of Christian tradition.

In Ancient Christian Ecopoetics, Virginia Burrus facilitates a provocative encounter between ancient Christian theology and contemporary ecological thought.

"Augustine's Confessions" is a text that seduces. But how often do its readers respond in kind? In this book, three scholars who share a long-standing fascination with sexuality and Christian discourse attempt just that. It also offers a multivocal literary-philosophical meditation on the seductive elusiveness of desire, bodies, language, and God.

This book interprets fourth-century theological discourse as an incident in the history of masculine gender, arguing that Nicene trinitarian doctrine is a crucial site not only for theological innovation but also for reimagining and reproducing manhood in the late Roman empire.