City of Demons: Violence, Ritual, and Christian Power in Late Antiquity by Dayna S. Kalleres

Abstract

If we think that late ancient Christians who wanted fight demons had leave the city and head the desert wage such warfare, it may be because much of early monastic literature says so. According the Life of Antony, the hero's true combat with demons did not begin until he departed to the tombs, which happened lie far outside the village (v. Ant. 8). Kalleres attributes our neglect of urban demons both the weighty influence of monastic literature (and the influential scholarship based on it) and tendency of scholars who study the late ancient city and its bishops view demons reductively, as a language of alterity or an othering rhetoric, and thus present a disenchanted and secularized interpretation of both the city and the church in late antiquity (11).