This title was first published in 2001. These collected essays by Patricia Cox Miller identify new possibilities of meaning in the study of religion in late antiquity. The book addresses the topic of the imaginative mindset of late ancient authors from a variety of Greco-Roman religious traditions.

Contents: Introduction; Poetic images and nature: Preface; Adam ate from the animal tree?: a bestial poetry of soul; Origen on the bestial soul: a poetics of nature; The Physiologus: A Poetics of Nature; Jerome's centuar: a hyper-icon of the desert; Poetic images and the body: Preface; Plenty sleeps there?: the myth of Eros and Psyche in Plotinus and Gnosticism; Pleasure of the text, text of pleasure?: Eros and language. Origen's Commentary on the Song of Song; The blazing body: ascetic desire in Jerome's Letter to Eustochium; Desert ascetism and The body from nowhere?; Poetic images and theology: Preface; In my Father's house are many dwelling places?: Origen's De principiis; Origen and the witch of Endor: toward an iconoclastic typology; Poetic words, abysmal words: reflections on Origen's hermeneutics; In praise of nonsense: a piety of the alphabet in ancient magic; Words with an alien voice?: gnostics, scripture and canon; Bibliography.