First published in 1988, Peter Brown's The Body and Society was a groundbreaking study of the marriage and sexual practices of early Christians in the ancient M

Looks at the development of celibacy in the Christian Church from the first to fifth centuries A.D., and compares marriage and sexuality in the Roman, Judaic, a

The transformation of the Roman world from polytheistic to Christian is one of the most sweeping ideological changes of premodern history. At the center was sex