The Visual Rhetoric of the Married Laity in Late Antiquity: Iconography, the Christianization of Marriage, and Alternatives to the Ascetic Ideal

This study examines third- and fourth-century portraits of married Christians and associated images, reading them as visual rhetoric in early Christian conversations about marriage and celibacy, and recovering lay perspectives underrepresented or missing in literary sources.

Historians of early Christianity have grown increasingly aware that written sources display an enthusiasm for asceticism and sexual renunciation that was far from representative of the lives of most early Christians. Oft...