Introduction: the violence of small worlds : rethinking small-scale social control in late antiquity
Part I. Women and children first : autonomy and social control in the late ancient household
Female crime and female confinement in late antiquity
Holy beatings : Emmelia, her son Gregory of Nyssa, and the forty martyrs of Sebasteia
Power, faith, and reciprocity in a slave society : domestic relationships in the preaching of John Chrysostom
A predator and a gentleman : Augustine, autobiography, and the ethics of Christian marriage
Part II. 'Slaves, be subject to your masters' : discipline and moral autonomy in a slave society
Modelling Msarrqūtā : humiliation, Christian monasticism, and the ascetic life of slavery in late antique Syria and Mesopotamia
Constructing complexity : slavery in the small worlds of early monasticism
Disciplining the slaves of God : monastic children in Egypt at the end of antiquity
Part III. Knowledge, power, and symbolic violence : the aesthetics of control in Christian pedagogy
John Chrysostom and the strategic use of fear
The fear of belonging : the violent training of elite males in the late fourth century
Words at war : textual violence in Eusebius of Caesarea
Of sojourners and soldiers : demonic violence in the letters of Antony and the life of Antony
Coercing the Catechists : Augustine's De Catechizandis Rudibus
Part IV. Vulnerability and power : Christian heroines and the small worlds of late antiquity
Reading Thecla in fourth-century Pontus : violence, virginity, and female autonomy in Gregory of Nyssa's Life of Macrina
Family heroines : female vulnerability in the writings of Ambrose of Milan
Women on the edge : violence, 'othering' and the limits of imperial power in Euphemia and the goth.