Saving Shame: Martyrs, Saints, and Other Abject Subjects. By Virginia Burrus. Divinations. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. xxii + 193 pp. $45.00 cloth.

摘要

The early Christian fascinated anxiety about (or anxious fascination with) thenbody has provoked much analysis over the last twenty years with questionsnof its gendered representation increasingly exercising a controlling voice.nAlthough the cover illustration of The Nude Eve demonstrates that suchnconcerns are hardly to be avoided, Virginia Burrus adopts the lens of shamenboth to scrutinize a thread that runs through this material in a range of earlynChristian texts and to explore its potential for contemporary society. Therenare four substantive chapters, each adopting a different starting point,ndeveloped through the re-reading of key texts: first, the exposure of thenmartyr’s body; second, the incarnation and the capacity of flesh to conveynthe divine; third, the deliberate embracing of chastisement or humiliationnwithin asceticism; fourth, the verbalization of such in confession and in thenrelentless search for something to confess. These four chapters are prefacednby a brief introduction, emphasizing the early Christian shameless adoptionnof shame, and concluded by what is labeled an “afterword” but which bearsna manifesto-like quality. Whereas many studies of early Christian attitudes ofnthe body tend toward the lachrymose, Burrus traces their sorry after-effectsnand argues for a willingness to name and to embrace shame as a creativenresponse in a world divided by the politics of difference. This combinationnof an acceptance of the insights of recent scholarship with a challenge tonmove toward a positive retrieval is to be welcomed.