Meghan R. Henning is associate professor of Christian origins at the University of Dayton. She is the author of Educating Early Christians Through the Rhetoric of Hell.
“This groundbreaking study provides the most erudite introduction
to Christian hell to date, even as it elevates the scholarly
conversation about the underworld to new heights of sophistication.
Lucid, impeccably researched, and theoretically informed, this book
is not only essential reading for anyone interested in the
afterlife; it revolutionizes our understanding of Christian
theories of punishment and embodiment from antiquity to the present
day.”—Candida Moss, University of Birmingham
“Meghan Henning immerses the reader in the depths of early
Christians’ hell, in the company of sinners, saints, and most
notably Christ’s mother. The tormented bodies on display show a
remarkable resemblance to the world Christians inhabited and their
judgments about bodies, male and female, able and disabled.
Provocative and engrossing.”—Harold Attridge, Yale Divinity
School
“Meghan Henning’s analysis of early Christian hellscapes breaks
entirely new ground. This is a fascinating read for anyone
interested in the imaginations of the afterlife, then and now.”—Jan
N. Bremmer, University of Groningen
“In this original, subtle, and stunning monograph, Henning
demonstrates that early Christian apocalypses conceptualized
tortured, disabled individuals in hell as female. These seemingly
obscure texts still echo in today’s concepts of
punishment.”—Bernadette J. Brooten, author of Love Between Women:
Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism
“Troubling the line between the literary and the real, Henning
decisively shows the interplay in ancient thinking between imagined
bodies in hell and non-normative bodies on earth—a formidable
advance in our understanding of early Christian speculation on what
it means to be human.”—Ben Dunning, Fordham University
“In this crucial and compelling book, Meghan Henning offers a
powerful account of hell in early Christian literature—showing how
gender, disability, and bodily normativity become inextricably
intertwined with ancient fantasies of punishment and moral
order.”—Julia Watts Belser, author of Rabbinic Tales of
Destruction: Gender, Sex, and Disability in the Ruins of
Jerusalem
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