Review: From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity, by Kyle Harper

Abstract

Kyle Harper. From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity . Revealing Antiquity 20. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016 (pb). 304 pp. ISBN 9780674660014. $18.95. Four years on from its original publication in 2013, Kyle Harper's From Shame to Sin , now released in paperback, is a book that provokes reflection. This is a book that won an American Academy of Religion award in 2014 and that has been reviewed multiple times since, attracting some criticism, but largely enthusiasm. His is an argument drawn in broad strokes, as Harper admits in his introduction. It is a book that rode the momentum of a growing wave of research on gender and desire in the ancient to late-ancient world, while appealing to public interest in these topics currently being aroused in Western nations by debates around gender identity and same-sex marriage.1 The question we address in this review is thus only tangentially the quality of Harper's scholarship or the validity of his argument—what he seeks to do he, to a large extent, does well. Consequently we will not discuss its argument except in broad terms. There already exist any number of reviews by well-informed scholars that provide full synopses of the book's chapters and thoughtful assessment of their contents.2 What we are interested in rather is what this book and the reactions to it have to say about current approaches to the study of Late Antiquity. This is a book that consciously follows in Peter Brown's footsteps. Taking its cue from The Body and Society (1988), it lays claim to a fundamental shift in the morality of sex ( eros ) within and across the Roman world. Initially sexual morality was social in its …