Corporal Knowledge

At the heart of the Christian proclamation is the problematic body of Jesus: problematic because His crucified form conveyed shame rather than glory, problematic because Christian communities argued about whether Jesus' body shared in the corruptible and tactile qualities of other human bodies. Jennifer Glancy argues that ordinary Christians, like others in the Roman Empire, saw all human bodies as expressing such things as social status and gender, honor andabjection. All human bodies were matrices of communication. Glancy draws on a variety of theoretical approaches to explore what early Christians understood bodies to communicate.