Kate Cooper

'A brilliant new take' Janina Ramirez, author of Femina 'A masterpiece of the historian's art' Peter Brown, author of Augustine of Hippo The powerful and surprising story of the four remarkable women who changed Augustine's life - and history - forever. While many know of St Augustine and the Confessions, few know of the women whose hopes and dreams shaped his early life: his mother, Monnica of Thagaste; his lover; his fiancée; and Justina, the troubled empress of ancient Rome. Drawing upon their depictions in the Confessions, historian Kate Cooper skilfully reconstructs their lives against the backdrop of the late Roman Empire to paint a vivid portrait of the turbulent society they and Augustine moved through. She shows how despite their often precarious position, these women tried in their different ways to influence the world around them and argues that Augustine did not end his engagement because he was called by God, but because he considered the potential marriage to be an unforgiveable betrayal of his lover. Vividly written and drawing on extensive new research, Queens of a Fallen World is essential reading for those looking for a new understanding not only of Augustine, but also of the women who shaped his life with consequences that were to change Christianity for centuries to come.

The Lost Women of Augustine’s Confessions

Queens of a Fallen World

Conrad Leyser

Examines the fundamental question of what held the societies of the post-Roman world together.

Making Early Medieval Societies

Hannah Black

A first-time publication for fast-moving British collaborative artist Kate Cooper (b. 1984) accompanies her solo exhibition at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, 2015the result of receiving the 2014 Schering Stiftung Art Award. Cooper is co-founder of artist collective Auto Italia South East, and moves between solo and collaborative works addressing issues of capitalism and commercialism. For the KW Institute, Cooper focused around a fictional space titled Look Book. Through digital videos, installations and digitally altered photographic works, she explores the role of gender and the agency of images. For Cooper, producing images is akin to building infrastructure. Her computer-generated bodies are imbued with power and put to work. The oversized catalog designed to accentuate Coopers re-appropriation of female ad images, captures the essence of glossy fashion and lifestyle magazines. Included is a new short story by Hannah Black, texts by Ellen Blumenstein and Christina Weiss, plus subtitles and slogans by Catherine Wood.

Look Book

Catherine Fales Cooper

Rejecting Roman feminine virtue in its pure form, Christianity claimed a moral superiority in its ideals of romance, and portrayed women seeking more spiritual goals. Cooper studies how this connected with social and religious change.

Idealized Womanhood in Late Antiquity

The Virgin and the Bride

In Band of Angels, Kate Cooper tells the surprising story of early Christianity from the woman's point of view. Though they are often forgotten, women from all walks of life played an invaluable role in Christianity's growth to become a world religion. Peasants, empresses, and independent businesswomen contributed what they could to an emotional revolution unlike anything the ancient world had ever seen. By mobilizing friends and family to spread the word from household to household, they created a wave of change not unlike modern 'viral' marketing. For the most part, women in the ancient world lived out their lives almost invisibly in a man's world. Piecing together their history from the few contemporary accounts that have survived requires painstaking detective work. Yet a careful re-reading of ancient sources yields a vivid picture, and shows how daily life and the larger currents of history shaped one another. This remarkable book tells the story of how a new way of understanding relationships took root in the ancient world. By sharing the ideas that had inspired them, ancient women changed their own lives. But they did something more: they changed the world around them, and in doing so, they created an enduring legacy. Their story is a testament to what invisible people can achieve, and to how the power of ideas can change history.

The Forgotten World of Early Christian Women

Band of Angels

Jamie Wood

Social Control in Late Antiquity: The Violence of Small Worlds explores the small-scale communities of late antiquity - households, monasteries, and schools - where power was a question of personal relationships. When fathers, husbands, teachers, abbots, and slave-owners asserted their own will, they saw themselves as maintaining the social order, and expected law and government to reinforce their rule. Naturally, the members of these communities had their own ideas, and teaching them to 'obey their betters' was not always a straightforward business. Drawing on a wide variety of sources from across the late Roman Mediterranean, from law codes and inscriptions to monastic rules and hagiography, the book considers the sometimes conflicting identities of women, slaves, and children, and documents how they found opportunities for agency and recognition within a system built on the unremitting assertion of the rights of the powerful.

Kate Cooper

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