Review: The Corporeal Imagination: Signifying the Holy in Late Ancient Christanity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009). Print, 272 pp., US$49.95, ISBM: 9780812241426

This book is not textual, but cultural, intellectual and historical on the public image of Christian saints. The study of late ancient Christianity is used to explore the philosophical or theological thoughts of early Christian leaders in the third and fifth centuries. The Corporeal Imagination: Signifying the Holy in Late Ancient Christianity, however, examines the saintly human bodies depicted in the hagiographical manuscripts and icons between the fourth and seventh centuries. The body of a saint was interpreted through architecture, art, events, people and places in the context of ekphrasis. In particular, amulets, bones, relics, statues, shrines, mosaics and pilgrimages were represented to denote a corporal imagination of saints. The purpose of Patricia Cox Millers work is to analyse pictorial strategies that draw on the power of discourse to materialise its effects in the world of the reader in the era of early Byzantine Christianity.