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Jovinian's accusations against ascetic extremists had a precedent in earlier Christian tradition. Ascetic elitism was opposed by a number of early Christian writers, including 1 Clement, Ignatius, and the author of the Pastoral Epistles. By the early third century, this opposition had hardened into the polarities of ‘orthodoxy’ and ‘heresy’. This anti‐heretical effort culminated in the writings of Irenaeus and Clement of Alexandria against the ‘encratite’ heresy, which anticipated the polemics of Jovinian. In the third century we also see the development of a ‘moderate encratism’ in the writings of Tertullian, Cyprian, and Origen, which later inspired the opponents of Jovinian, e.g. Ambrose and Jerome.

This chapter starts from the description of Cyprian, the 3rd-century bishop of Carthage, to sum up the principal conclusions of the book: recognition of the pre-eminent place of episcopal almsgiving amongst other distinct forms of Christian poor relief; its centrality to the construction of a bishop's moral standing in life and literature; and also the degree to which the bishop enabled others to share in the honourable care of the poor through the discourse of Christian generosity. Attention to the discourse surrounding the practices of almsgiving is essential to their proper evaluation.

The letters and tracts of Cyprian, bishop of Carthage, are one of the main sources for the history of the Church in the mid‐third century, when the problems of the Roman Empire provoked popular hostility towards Christians. Cyprian describes Church organization and liturgy at Carthage and presents an analysis of what he considered the ills of society. A period of peace was followed by harsh persecution under the emperor Decius (249–51), which led to disputes about the readmission of lapsed believers to the Church. The church in Rome split over this issue, causing Cyprian to write ‘On the Unity of the Catholic Church’, the first Christian treatise on the Church, and a quarrel between Carthage and Pope Stephen in Rome over the issue of baptism and re‐baptism. In fresh persecution under the emperor Valerian (253–60), both Cyprian and Pope Sixtus suffered martyrdom. Cyprian did not deal with theology as such, but his strictness about Church membership, heresy, and schism kept the Carthage church together. The arguments about baptism remained a point of cleavage between the Latin west and the Greek east.

The seventh chapter documents how and why Augustine of Hippo came to reject all the forms of posthumous salvation outlined in the earlier chapters of this study. His influence over theology in the west on this issue cannot be understated. First, some of the antecedents to Augustine's thought are examined, including Cyprian and Ambrose. Next, the chapter traces the gradual development of Augustine's thought up to the year 419. In that year Augustine encountered an opponent named Vincentius Victor, who argued that unbaptized infants could be saved and prayers for the non‐Christian dead could be efficacious. Victor's interpretation of Perpetua's prayer for Dinocrates was crucial to his argument. Augustine insisted on the absolute necessity of infant baptism (as he had earlier in the Pelagianism debate), and he began to outline a notion of what would become purgatory by stating that prayers are only effective for baptized Christians who died with light sins. Central to Augustine's reasoning was a defense of the power and authority of the church on earth as the sole vehicle for salvation.

This chapter focuses on two of Elyot’s later dialogues: his translation of a sermon of St. Cyprian counselling the faithful in times of persecution and his collection of adagia, The Banquet of Sapience, each of which seems designed to reflect upon the increasing pressures placed upon the regular religious and critics of the royal supremacy and break with Rome in these years.

Cavarero explores the bellicose rhetoric and ideology of the Hebrew scriptures which advocate the bloody annihilation of the enemies of Israel and its God. In the Christian tradition, pacifism, the absolute prohibition of homicide, made a brief appearance in early Christianity (with authors such as Saint Cyprian) but was soon supplanted by the concept of just war transposed from Roman law into Christian doctrine by Saint Augustine. The concept of just wars was further refined and elaborated by Saint Thomas Aquinas, who tried to elaborate acceptable homicide in the light of Christian ethics. The concept of just war remains debated among contemporary philosophers such as Michael Walzer (Just and Unjust Wars).

This chapter opens by observing that late medieval clergymen had another source available to them as they ministered to sick and suffering Christians: consolation literature. The chapter examines the history of consolation in the Christian West in order to show the ancient origins—both pagan and Christian—of the wisdom contained in late medieval works of consolation. The discussion proceeds chronologically, focusing first on ancient pagan consolation literature, then on ancient Christian sources, and finally on medieval and late medieval works of consolation. Key figures include Cicero, Seneca, Cyprian, Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine, Gregory the Great, Boethius, Isidore of Seville, Johannes von Dambach, and Jean Gerson. The chapter also demonstrates how the Christian consolation literature consistently offered numerous explanations for suffering, only one of which was divine punishment for sin.

This chapter analyzes Christian positions on sacrifice from Paul (ca. 50 CE) to Cyprian of Carthage (mid 3^rd century). This analysis shows that a rejection of animal sacrifice is not present in the earliest Christian texts (Paul and the New Testament Gospels). Furthermore, a sacrificial interpretation of the death of Jesus is not present in these early texts. Christian positions on sacrifice were slow to develop and developed in various directions simultaneously. The early Christian evidence is compared to the evidence from chapter three in order to show that early Christian cultural producers were engaged in the same competition to define the meaning and purpose of sacrifice. Christian debate over animal sacrifice was part of ongoing cultural competition that long predated Christianity.

Chapter Five examines how the law is represented and deployed in Cyprian Ekwensi’s Jagua Nana and People of the City and in a selection of Nigerian market fiction. The law and its transgression permeated a range of publications in the years immediately preceding and after independence. Fiction and non-fiction alike repeatedly engaged with questions of crime and punishment, and even invoked legal paradigms to explore sexual and emotional relationships. This chapter demonstrates how market literature sought to generate through its own imagined communities discussion about and regulation of the apparent lawlessness of modern urban life. In attending to the larger presence of the law in both high- and lowbrow literature of the period, this chapter shows how the law was shaped in the popular imagination at independence.

London’s port was abandoned in the mid-third century and its waterfront quays dismantled in changes that cast important new light on the problems of the third century. This chapter sets out the detail of the redundancy of London’s port and reviews arguments that might explain it. It does so by establishing a chronology that suggests that the port ceased to function effectively c. AD 255, and that the waterfront was crudely refashioned into a bank at some point in the 260s. This redundancy followed a rapid decline in the volume of goods being traded over longer-distances, and is argued to have been the consequence of a revised policy with regard to annona. The Thames may also have ceased to be tidal at this time, contributing to the redundancy of the port but not explaining the speed of its dereliction and destruction. Further light obtains from a study of the failure and abandonment of sites associated with Wealden iron production. An explanation is proposed: involving a loss of military manpower and naval capacity, possibly provoked by the epidemic of the 250s known as the plague of Cyprian and compounded by military failure and barbarian threat. Rome’s loss of control over its coastal waters and rising Frankish piracy at the time of the Gallic Empire might explain why ships ceased to dock at London’s quays, which were dismantled to defend the riverside.

This chapter examines the reception of martyrdom traditions in elite Christian writers (catechists, bishops, and theologians) in the fourth and fifth centuries. These traditions transformed as theologians adopted the cross to portray the martyrs as models of discipline and faith. These writers emphasized the suffering and death of the martyrs. They drew on the popular belief that the martyrs could give excess merit to those who interceded to them and applied it to the sacramental power of the bishop and, ultimately, Christ. Thus, the martyr traditions and the “merit trade” are the origins of the cross as the locus of forgiveness of sins. The chapter’s main figures are Ambrose, Origen, Cyprian, Augustine, and Prudentius.

Here Cavarero reflects on “Crime and Punishment,” a 2010 exhibition at the D’Orsay Museum, which focuses largely on homicide as murder, deflecting any consideration of mass homicide such as war or state violence such as capital punishment as possibly criminal acts. She invokes the third-century Saint Cyprian, who pointed out that murder of an individual is considered a crime but that killing of individuals wholesale is permitted under the rubric of “war.” She contemplates Adorno’s reflections on Auschwitz. Has modern warfare—and accompanying phenomena such as Auschwitz—which involves slaughter of countless innocents complicated the distinctions between permissible and impermissible killing?

This chapter considers the variety of Latin letter collections that the late antique reader would have inherited. These range from letters by scholars, poets, statesmen, philosophers, orators, military officials, and Christian leaders. The chapter also considers how these letter collections were formed and circulated among late antique readers.

The majority of the officers of the Press and of the university were theologians, and although they were often widely read and actively involved in the research and teaching of other subjects, divinity remained a primary interest of the Delegates and theological works featured prominently in the publications of the Learned Press. These works included collections of sermons, systematic theology, polemic theology, some devotional material, polyglot and variorum texts and a few editions of the church fathers. Many of these works proved difficult to sell, and some were complicated by difficulties of production due to the unusual types required for printing and specialized readers needed for proofing. Throughout, the Press maintained a conservative Anglican outlook, upholding both theological and ecclesiastical orthodoxy in the midst of religious conflict.

This chapter argues that the sizeable body of fiction which constitutes the novels of the Nigerian Civil War articulates a vital argument about democracy. The fiction maps various divides of privilege, religion and ethnicity, but returns persistently to reflect on the divides of class privilege. The widespread suffering during war revitalizes an awareness of bonds across class and educational divides, and creates solidarity against those who either profit from war or manage to escape the brunt of its consequences. The chapter focuses on works by Chinua Achebe, Buchi Emecheta, Cyprian Ekwensi and Ken Saro-Wiwa among others and pays particular attention to their depiction of bare life as theorized by Giorgio Agamben. The broad survey offered in this chapter is used as the foundation for a reading of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie novel of the war in Chapter 4.

This chapter considers three texts that expand the sense of the black stories located in and even told from within antebellum St. Louis: John Berry Meachum’s 1846 Address to All the Colored Citizens of the United States, Cyprian Clamorgan’s 1858 The Colored Aristocracy of St. Louis, and the St. Louis freedom suit case file of Polly Wash. The discussion here considers how African Americans negotiated the boundaries that both authorized and limited their voices. The chapter focuses here on how their texts begin to articulate stories of a black St. Louis that is, at times, very different from the city in Lovejoy/Brown abolitionism, even as these stories share Brown’s attention to mobility, location, domestic ideals, and black personhood. Though it is not suggested that these texts represent a literary renaissance in antebellum St. Louis, their presence demonstrates the complexity, the black textual lives, and the black stories possible in even the most surprising of places, Brown’s locus and location of brutality.