Böcker av Daniel Caner

"This book is a game-changer and will set the direction of everything that will come thereafter--and all the while it reads like a novel. I could not put it down!"--Susanna Elm, Sidney H. Ehrman Professor of History and Classics, Department of History, University of California, Berkeley "The result of decades of meticulous research across a vast array of sources, including archaeology, The Rich and the Pure offers new and nuanced perspectives on Christian attitudes toward wealth--its possession, and its circulation--against the very concrete background of the societal developments in the Eastern Mediterranean from the fourth to the seventh century."--Claudia Rapp, University of Vienna and Austrian Academy of Sciences "For now, and for any foreseeable time to come, this will be 'the' book on the roots of Christian wealth and charity. I expect it will be hailed as an instant classic."--Hal Drake, University of California, Santa Barbara

An apostolic lifestyle characterized by total material renunciation, homelessness, and begging was practiced by monks throughout the Roman Empire in the fourth and fifth centuries. Such monks often served as spiritual advisors to urban aristocrats whose patronage gave them considerable authority and independence from episcopal control. This book is the first comprehensive study of this type of Christian poverty and the challenge it posed for episcopal authority and the promotion of monasticism in late antiquity.Focusing on devotional practices, Daniel Caner draws together diverse testimony from Egypt, Syria, Asia Minor, and elsewhere-including the Pseudo-Clementine Letters to Virgins, Augustine's On the Work of Monks, John Chrysostom's homilies, legal codes-to reveal gospel-inspired patterns of ascetic dependency and teaching from the third to the fifth centuries. Throughout, his point of departure is social and cultural history, especially the urban social history of the late Roman empire. He also introduces many charismatic individuals whose struggle to persist against church suppression of their chosen way of imitating Christ was fought with defiant conviction, and the book includes the first annotated English translation of the biography of Alexander Akoimetos (Alexander the Sleepless). Wandering, Begging Monks allows us to understand these fascinating figures of early Christianity in the full context of late Roman society.