Derek Krueger

... Christentum', Ostkirchliche Studien 33 (1984) 281-301; R.Markus, 'Trinitarian Theology and theEconomy', Journal of ... by not Disclosed: Gregory of Nyssa as Deconstructionist', ... correspondence, 19 December 2000) explains current usage: 'The prologue and the first oikos of the ...

... classic query, "What is an author?"45 Far from conceiving of the hagiographer as a mere observer, Theodoret and Cyril expected that ... Robert Browning, "The 'Low Level' Saint's Life in the Early Byzantine World," in The Byzantine Saint, ed. Sergei Hackel (San Bernardino, Calif ...

... Tpd?to; agvy6tvro;] do not merely consist of studying divinity; not only of thinking on an elevated plain about things as they are here and now. ... Greek text edited by Lennart Ryden in Liontios de Niapolis: Vie de Symion le Fou et Vie de Jean de Chypre, ed. A.-J. Festugiere, Biblio ...

Vigiliae Christianae 47 (1993), 29-49, EJ Brill, Leiden ... in the Epistles of Heraclitus (Missoula, Montana, 1976); I. Nachov, "Der Mensch in der Philosophie der Kyniker ... Laerce VI: 70-71 (Paris, 1986); Margarethe Billerbeck, Epiktet, Vom Kynismus, Philosophia Antiqua 34 (Leiden ...

Byzantine practices of establishing and celebrating fictive kinship bonds through a ritual called adelphopoiesis or "brother-making" have inspired a great deal of interest for more than two decades. Claudia Rapp has spent much of that time assembling a remarkable dossier of literary, documentary, and material evidence. She has conducted pioneering philological and detective work on the wide variety of blessings for these rites contained in Byzantine euchologia, or prayer books. She has assimilated the relevant studies of the sources with the goal of a broad synthesis. Her volume presents her results with admirable clarity and prudence. She has pondered this material long and wisely enough to see both the general patterns in the evidence and to be honest about the disjunctures. The result is a masterful and cautious contribution to Byzantine social, cultural, and religious history. Rapp offers her study, in part, as a corrective to John Boswell's Same-Sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe (New York: Villard, 1994), and in this respect she provides a compassionate and necessary intervention (see esp. 41-43, 72-75). Some of this argument expands her fine 1997 essay for Traditio, but much leads in new directions. Given the persistent and mistaken notion in the popular press that in the middle ages Orthodox Christian clergy performed same-sex marriages, professional historians must hope that Rapp's nuanced work gets wider exposure. That said, much of Rapp's book contributes directly to queer history, as she addresses affective bonds between (mostly) men, including lifelong commitments of mutual support, arrangements for cohabitation, and vows to bury one's companion upon his death. She attends to the rhetoric that idealizes such relationships, especially in monastic literature. Rapp is not herself explicit about the ways in which the rise of queer theory has reshaped scholars' question about same-sex relations in the past, but it is this conversation above all that I hope will assimilate her conclusions. She also places brother-making within a variety of social settings where its meaning and function vary significantly. By the end of the book, it becomes clear that brother-making was not in fact one thing, but a range of practices, not necessarily closely related. The book's argument and organization proposes that brother-making emerged among Christian monastics in late antiquity as some monks desired to solemnize their commitments to remain together and share their asceticism. These practices generated prayer formulas now extant in Byzantine prayer books dating from the late-eighth century onward. From the seventh century this practice was adapted to bond monks with lay people-upon which the hierarchy generally frowned-and to join pairs of lay people at all levels of society, including members of the aristocracy and the imperial household. The chapters take up the elements of this narrative in turn, although Rapp admits that some of the links are not entirely certain.