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9781478032762 Academic Inspection Copy

After Transformation

Rewriting Time, Christian Late Antiquity, and the Present
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In After Transformation, Maia Kotrosits offers a lyrical history of Christian late antiquity as it lives on in and with the present. Recasting the monumental changes that occurred between the second and fourth centuries, when Rome transitioned from pagan to Christian worship, Kotrosits presents a condensed and evocative meditation on the profound effects of Christian imperialism across time and geography. She employs a collection of forms ranging from micro-essay and vignette to poem and fragment to capture human struggles with time and change, showing how the mundane and intimate details of our lives can themselves be conduits of historical knowing. Arguing for lyricism as a method, Kotrosits reclaims vulnerability, urgency, and storytelling in historical work to model new ways of writing the past and experiencing ourselves more fully in time. Above all, After Transformation is about the ironies of the ways that history is written against the reality of the ways that history is lived.
Maia Kotrosits is Visiting Scholar at the Center for the Study of World Religion at Harvard Divinity School and author of Theory, History, and the Study of Religion in Late Antiquity: Speculative Worlds.
"Modeling with care and rigor how to travel across the watershed of late antiquity to the present, After Transformation is one of the most original and imaginative ventures into and through ancient Mediterranean studies that I have read. There is simply so much to savor in these pages. It will draw in even those readers who may not be initially primed for its message. I was transformed by this book." - Dan-El Padilla Peralta, author of Divine Institutions: Religions and Community in the Middle Roman Republic "In this playful and lyrical history, Maia Kotrosits draws out the transhistorical salience of Christian late antiquity. A remarkable humanistic achievement by a leading steward of the next generation of scholarly thought, After Transformation will provoke and empower the scholarship of all those invested in early Christianity." - Kathryn Lofton, author of Consuming Religion
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