New Books in Late Antiquity
Episodes
Philip Abbott, "Sounds for a New World: The Christianizing Soundscapes of Late Antiquity" (Oxford UP, 2026)
29 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
In the Greco-Roman world, gods were known to tame soundscapes, or acoustic landscapes. Zeus, Apollo, Orpheus, and other Classical deities demonstrated...
Susanna Elm and Kristina Sessa, "War and Community in Late Antiquity" (Cambridge UP, 2026)
27 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Susanna Elm and Kristina Sessa, War and Community in Late Antiquity (Cambridge UP, 2026) Late Antiquity (ca. 250–600 CE) was a world at war: barb...
Michael L. Satlow, "An Enchanted World: The Shared Religious Landscape of Late Antiquity" (Princeton UP, 2026)
13 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
In Late Antiquity (ca. 200–600 CE), the world was alive with unseen forces—divine agents who influenced every aspect of daily life. For most ordin...
Derek Krueger "Monastic Desires: Homoeroticism, Homophobia, and the Love of God in Medieval Constantinople" (Cambridge UP, 2026)
30 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Derek Krueger Monastic Desires: Homoeroticism, Homophobia, and Love of God in Medieval Constantinople (Cambridge UP, 2026) The Byzantine Abbot Syme...
Jake Nabel, "The Arsacids of Rome: Misunderstanding in Roman-Parthian Relations" (U California Press, 2025)
16 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
At the beginning of the common era, the two major imperial powers of the ancient Mediterranean and Near East were Rome and Parthia. In this (open...
The Augustan Revolution: On Ancient Rome with Reece Edmends
11 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
In this second episode of Season 5, I interview Dr. Reece Edmends, a graduate of King’s College, Cambridge, and a junior faculty member in the Clas...
Moulie Vidas, "The Rise of Talmud" (Princeton UP, 2025)
02 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
The rabbinic sages of antiquity are known for their sophisticated and creative reading of Scripture. But beginning in the third century CE, these sage...
Beth A. Berkowitz, "What Animals Teach us About Families: Kinship and Species in the Bible and Rabbinic Literature" (U California Press, 2026)
16 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Reading the Bible and rabbinic literature to reimagine the bonds between animals. Moving beyond debates about the ethics of animal consumption to focu...
Felege-Selam Solomon Yirga, "The Chronicle of John of Nikiu: Coping with Crisis in Post-Roman Egypt" (U California Press, 2025)
02 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
In the midst of profound political changes in late seventh-century Egypt, after the end of Roman hegemony and during Islamic rule, a bishop named John...
Christopher J. Bonura, "A Prophecy of Empire: The Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius from Late Antique Mesopotamia to the Global Medieval Imagination" (U California Press, 2025)
19 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
The Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius was one of the medieval world’s most popular and widely translated texts. Composed in Syriac in Mesopotamia in th...
Susanna Elm, "The Importance of Being Gorgeous: Gender and Christian Imperial Rule in Late Antiquity" (U California Press, 2025)
05 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
In this (open-access) book, Susanna Elm radically changes our understanding of imperial rule in the later Roman Empire. As she shows, the so-called ea...
Johannes Zachhuber, "Gregory of Nyssa: on the Hexaemeron: Text, Translation, and Essays" (Oxford UP, 2025)
22 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Johannes Zachhuber and Anna Marmodoro, eds., Gregory of Nyssa: On the Hexaemeron: Text, Translation, and Essays (Oxford UP, 2025) This book present...
Daniel K. Falk and Rodney A. Werline, "Prayer in the Ancient World Vol.1" (Brill, 2027)
17 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Prayer in the Ancient World is the resource on prayer in the ancient Near East and Mediterranean. With over 350 entries it showcases a robust selecti...
Susan Ashbrook Harvey, "Ministries of Song: Women’s Voices in Ancient Syriac Christianity" (U California Press, 2025)
09 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Ministries of Song: Women’s Voices in Ancient Syriac Christianity (U California Press, 2025) is an open access tour-de-force study of the power of...
Maia Kotrosits, "After Transformation: Rewriting Time, Christian Late Antiquity, and the Present" (Duke UP, 2025)
24 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In After Transformation, Maia Kotrosits offers a lyrical history of Christian late antiquity as it lives on in and with the present. Recasting the...
Ellen Muehlberger, "Things Unseen: Essays on Evidence, Knowledge, and the Late Ancient World" (U California Press, 2025)
10 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
How do you know the nature of another person: who she is, or what she is capable of? In four exploratory essays, a seasoned historian examines the ...
Jennifer Barry, "Gender Violence in Late Antiquity: Male Fantasies and the Christian Imagination" (U California Press, 2025)
27 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Gender Violence in Late Antiquity: Male Fantasies and the Christian Imagination (University of California Press, 2025) by Dr. Jennifer Barry confront...
Jeremy Swist, "Julian Augustus: Platonism, Myth and the Refounding of Rome" (Oxford UP, 2025)
27 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The Roman emperor Julian (r. 361-363 CE) was a man of action and of letters, which he employed in an effort to return the Empire to the light of the p...
Justin Stover and George Woudhuysen, "The Lost History of Sextus Aurelius Victor" (Edinburgh UP, 2023)
13 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
This book rediscovers a lost history of the Roman Empire, written by Sextus Aurelius Victor (ca. 320-390) and demonstrates for the first time both the...
Adam Bremer-McCollum, "The Pearlsong" (Harvard UP, 2025)
10 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The Pearlsong (Harvard University Press, 2025) offers the reader a beautifully translated story of a young child who goes on a journey to far away pl...
Jennifer Barry, "Gender Violence in Late Antiquity: Male Fantasies and the Christian Imagination" (U California Press, 2025)
29 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Gender Violence in Late Antiquity confronts the violent ideological frameworks underpinning the early Christian imagination, arguing that gender-based...
Christine Shepardson, "A Memory of Violence: Syriac Christianity and the Radicalization of Religious Difference in Late Antiquity" (U California Press, 2025)
15 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
A Memory of Violence: Syriac Christianity and the Radicalization of Religious Difference in Late Antiquity (U California Press, 2025) traces the rh...
Markus Vinzent, "Christ's Torah: The Making of the New Testament in the Second Century" (Routledge, 2023)
06 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
This volume explores the creation of the collection now known as the New Testament. While it is generally accepted that it did not emerge as a collect...
Matthew D. C. Larsen and Mark Letteney, "Ancient Mediterranean Incarceration" (U California Press, 2025)
01 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Ancient Mediterranean Incarceration (open access) examines spaces, practices, and ideologies of incarceration in the ancient Mediterranean basin from...
Walter Scheidel, "What Is Ancient History?" (Princeton UP, 2025)
25 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
It’s easy to think that ancient history is, well, ancient history—obsolete, irrelevant, unjustifiably focused on Greece and Rome, and at risk o...
Mariam F. Ayad ed., "Coptic Culture and Community: Daily Lives, Changing Times" (American University in Cairo Press, 2024)
19 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Coptic Culture and Community: Daily Lives, Changing Times (American University in Cairo Press 2024) brings together fourteen contributions from globa...
Tatiana Bur, "Technologies of the Marvellous in Ancient Greek Religion" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
11 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Tatiana Bur, Technologies of the Marvellous in Ancient Greek Religion (Cambridge UP, 2025) This open-access book investigates the ways that techno...
Caroline Johnson Hodge, "The God of This House: Christian Domestic Cult Before Constantine" (Penn State UP, 2025)
28 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Christianity is often thought of as a tradition of belief, interpretation, teachings, and texts. However, a scholarly focus on ideas overlooks how ear...
Andrew Tobolowsky, "Israel and its Heirs in Late Antiquity" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
07 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Andrew Tobolowsky's Israel and Its Heirs in Late Antiquity (Cambridge UP, 2025) explores constructions of Israelite identity among Jewish, Samarita...
Jonathan Teubner, "Charity After Augustine: Solidarity, Conflict, and the Practices of Charity in the Latin West" (Oxford UP, 2025)
23 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Jonathan Teubner, Charity After Augustine: Solidarity, Conflict, and the Practices of Charity in the Latin West (Oxford UP, 2025) Through a unique ...
Stefanie Lenk, "Roman Identity and Lived Religion: Baptismal Art in Late Antiquity" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
09 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Christianity is often considered prevalent when it comes to defining the key values of late antique society, whereas 'feeling connected to the Roman p...
Krista N. Dalton, "How Rabbis Became Experts: Social Circles and Donor Networks in Jewish Late Antiquity" (Princeton UP, 2025)
28 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
At the turn of the common era, the Jewish communities of Roman Palestine saw the organization of a small group of literate Jewish men who devoted thei...
Korshi Dosoo and Markéta Preininger, "Papyri Copticae Magicae: Coptic Magical Texts, Volume 1: Formularies" (de Gruyter, 2023)
23 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Papyri Copticae Magicae: Coptic Magical Texts, Volume 1: Formularies (de Gruyter, 2023) offers an accessible repository of edited Coptic magical tex...
Andrew Griebeler, "Botanical Icons: Critical Practices of Illustration in the Premodern Mediterranean" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
12 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
A richly illustrated account of how premodern botanical illustrations document evolving knowledge about plants and the ways they were studied in the p...
Christy Cobb and Katherine A. Shaner, "Ancient Slavery and Its New Testament Contexts" (Eerdmans, 2025)
30 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The institution of slavery permeated the ancient world, such that the realities of slavery and its long shadows pervade the New Testament and other ea...
Monika Amsler, "The Babylonian Talmud and Late Antique Book Culture" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
30 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The Babylonian Talmud and Late Antique Book Culture (Cambridge UP, 2023) argues that the Talmud must be read and understood in the broader context of...
Cam Grey, "Living with Risk in the Late Roman World" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2025)
28 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Living With Risk in the Late Roman World (U Pennsylvania Press, 2025)explores the ever-present experiences of risk that characterized the daily exist...
Shushma Malik, "The Nero-Antichrist: Founding and Fashioning a Paradigm" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
21 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In The Nero-Antichrist: Founding and Fashioning a Paradigm (Cambridge UP, 2020), Shushma Malik reconstructs the means by which the emperor Nero cam...
Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, "The Idea of the City in Late Antiquity: A Study in Resilience" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
16 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The city was one of the central and defining features of the world of the Greek and Roman Mediterranean. Challenging the idea that the ancient city 'd...
Mara Nicosia, "Syriac Lexis and Lexica: Compiling Ancient and Modern Vocabularies" (Gorgias Press, 2024)
14 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Syriac Lexis and Lexica: Compiling Ancient and Modern Vocabularies (Gorgias Press, 2024) publishes the papers presented at the round table on Syriac...
Sarah Bassett, "Style and Meaning in Late Antique Art" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
31 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
How do we best see and understand the art of late antiquity? One of the perceived challenges of so doing is that this is a period whose visual product...
Chance E. Bonar, "The Author in Early Christian Literature" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
17 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
While scholars of ancient Mediterranean literature have focused their efforts heavily on explaining why authors would write pseudonymously or anonymou...
Isabel Moreira, "Balthild of Francia: Anglo-Saxon Slave, Merovingian Queen, and Abolitionist Saint" (Oxford UP, 2024)
03 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
This book tells the remarkable life of Balthild of Francia (c. 633-80), a seventh-century Anglo-Saxon slave who became a queen of France. Described in...
Shane Bobrycki, "The Crowd in the Early Middle Ages" (Princeton UP, 2024)
17 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
By the fifth and sixth centuries, the bread and circuses and triumphal processions of the Roman Empire had given way to a quieter world. And yet, as S...
Sarah E. Bond, "Strike: Labor, Unions, and Resistance in the Roman Empire" (Yale UP, 2024)
04 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Historian Sarah E. Bond retells the traditional story of Ancient Rome, revealing how groups of ancient workers unified, connected, and protested as th...
Rafael Rachel Neis, "When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven: Rabbis and the Reproduction of Species" (U California Press, 2023)
20 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven: Rabbis and the Reproduction of Species (U California Press, 2023) investigates rabbinic treatises relating to an...
Catherine Hezser, "Rabbinic Scholarship in the Context of Late Antique Scholasticism: The Development of the Talmud Yerushalmi" (Bloomsbury, 2024)
06 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Based on an understanding of scholasticism as a cross-cultural phenomenon, undertaken by rabbinic, Graeco-Roman, and Christian scholars in late antiqu...
Blake Leyerle, "Christians at Home: John Chrysostom and Domestic Rituals in Fourth-Century Antioch" (Penn State UP, 2024)
23 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
What did it mean for ordinary believers to live a Christian life in late antiquity? In Christians at Home: John Chrysostom and Domestic Rituals in Fo...
A. J. Berkovitz, "A Life of Psalms in Jewish Late Antiquity" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2023)
09 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The Bible shaped nearly every aspect of Jewish life in the ancient world, from activities as obvious as attending synagogue to those which have lost t...
Julia Kelto Lillis, "Virgin Territory: Configuring Female Virginity in Early Christianity" (U California Press, 2022)
25 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Women's virginity held tremendous significance in early Christianity and the Mediterranean world. Early Christian thinkers developed diverse definitio...
Matthew Elia, "The Problem of the Christian Master: Augustine in the Afterlife of Slavery" (Yale UP, 2024)
11 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The Problem of the Christian Master: Augustine in the Afterlife of Slavery (Yale UP, 2024) offers a bold rereading of Augustinian thought for a worl...
Toni Alimi, "Slaves of God: Augustine and Other Romans on Religion and Politics" (Princeton UP, 2024)
28 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Augustine believed that slavery is permissible, but to understand why, we must situate him in his late antique Roman intellectual context. Slaves of ...
Simcha Gross, "Babylonian Jews and Sasanian Imperialism in Late Antiquity" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
15 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
From the image offered by the Babylonian Talmud, Jewish elites were deeply embedded within the Sasanian Empire (224-651 CE). The Talmud is replete wit...
Darlene L. Brooks Hedstrom, "Desert Ascetics of Egypt" (ARC Humanities Press, 2020)
30 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Egypt is revered as the home of the famous Desert Ascetics, who first embraced a monastic life and established homosocial communities on the borders o...
Philip Freeman, "Julian: Rome's Last Pagan Emperor" (Yale UP, 2023)
16 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Today I talked to Philip Freeman about his new book Julian: Rome’s Last Pagan Emperor (Yale UP, 2023). Flavius Claudius Julianus, or Julian the Ap...
Martha Rampton, "Trafficking with Demons: Magic, Ritual, and Gender from Late Antiquity to 1000" (Cornell UP, 2021)
09 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Martha Rampton, Trafficking with Demons: Magic, Ritual, and Gender from Late Antiquity to 1000 (Cornell University Press, 2021) explores how magic ...
Laura Salah Nasrallah, "Ancient Christians and the Power of Curses: Magic, Aesthetics, and Justice" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
02 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Ancient Christians and their non-Christian contemporaries lived in a world of 'magic.' Sometimes, they used curses as ritual objects to seek justice f...
Laura S. Lieber, "Staging the Sacred: Performance in Late Ancient Liturgical Poetry" (Oxford UP, 2023)
19 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Staging the Sacred: Performance in Late Ancient Liturgical Poetry (Oxford UP, 2023) examines the importance of Christian, Jewish, and Samaritan litu...
Anna Bonnell Freidin, "Birthing Romans: Childbearing and Its Risks in Imperial Rome" (Princeton UP, 2024)
05 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Across the vast expanse of the Roman Empire, anxieties about childbirth tied individuals to one another, to the highest levels of imperial politics, e...
Robin Darling Young et al, "Evagrius of Pontus: The Gnostic Trilogy" (Oxford UP, 2024)
28 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The Gnostic Trilogy is the best-known and most important work by the ascetic philosopher and teacher Evagrius of Pontus. Among the writers of his age,...
Mark Letteney, "The Christianization of Knowledge in Late Antiquity: Intellectual and Material Transformations" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
22 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The Christianization of Knowledge in Late Antiquity: Intellectual and Material Transformations (Cambridge UP, 2023) traces the beginning of Late Ant...
Anthony Kaldellis, "The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium" (Oxford UP, 2024)
20 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In recent decades, the study of the Eastern Roman Empire, also known as Byzantium, has been revolutionized by new approaches and more sophisticated mo...
Jeremiah Coogan, "Eusebius the Evangelist: Rewriting the Fourfold Gospel in Late Antiquity" (Oxford UP, 2023)
18 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The development of Christian scriptures did not terminate once, for example, following Irenaeus and other influential patristic figures, the four gosp...
Andrew S. Jacobs, "Gospel Thrillers: Conspiracy, Fiction, and the Vulnerable Bible" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
08 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
What if the original teachings of Jesus were different from the Bible's sanitized 'orthodox' version? What covert motivations might inspire those who ...
Catherine Michael Chin, "Life: The Natural History of an Early Christian Universe" (U California Press, 2024)
09 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
A vivid and intimate glimpse of ancient life under the sway of cosmic and spiritual forces that the modern world has forgotten. Life: The Natural Hist...
Jae Hee Han, "Prophets and Prophecy in the Late Antique Near East" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
13 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In Prophets and Prophecy in the Late Antique Near East (Cambridge UP, 2023), Jae Han investigates how various Late Antique Near Eastern communities—...
Anthony Kaldellis, "The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium" (Oxford UP, 2024)
07 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In recent decades, the study of the Eastern Roman Empire, also known as Byzantium, has been revolutionized by new approaches and more sophisticated mo...