Book description
'Perpetua shouted out with joy as the sword pierced her, for she
wanted to taste some of the pain and she even guided the hesitant
hand of the trainee gladiator towards her own throat'
Lives of Roman Christian Women is a unique collection of
letters and documents from the third to the fifth centuries,
celebrating Christian women from across the Roman Empire. During a
crucial period in which Christianity transformed from a persecuted
faith to the official religion of the Empire, these writings reveal
the women who chose to dedicate their lives to Christ, by embracing
martyrdom or by adopting a life of poverty and prayer, renouncing not
only wealth but also their duties as wives and mothers.
Carolinne White was born in London and read Classics and Modern
Languages at St. Hugh's College, Oxford. She wrote a doctoral thesis on
Christian ideas of friendship in the fourth century,published in 1992.
After two years spent teaching Latin at the University of South Africa
in Pretoria, she returned to Oxford where she worked on the supplement
to the Liddell and Scott Greek Lexicon and taught Patristic and Medieval
Latin. She now divides her time between work as an assistant editor on
the
Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources
, translation work and her four children. Her publications include a
translation of the correspondence between Jerome and Augustine (1990),
Early Christian Lives
(Penguin, 1998), an anthology of
Early Christian Latin Poets
in translation (2000) and
The Rule of Benedict
(Penguin, 2008).
