Things Unseen: Essays on Evidence, Knowledge, and the Late Ancient World

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How do you know the nature of another person: who she is, or what she is capable of? In four exploratory essays, a seasoned historian examines the mechanisms by which ancient people came to have knowledge--not of the world and its myriad processes but about something more intimate, namely the individuals they encountered in close quarters, those they knew in everyday life. Tracing previously unfathomed structures beneath the surface of late ancient Christianity, Ellen Muehlberger reveals surprising insights about the ancient world and, by extension, the modern. Things Unseen holds treasures for scholars of early Christian studies, for historians in general, and for all those who wonder about how we know what we seem to know.

Ellen Muehlberger is Professor of History at the University of Michigan. She is author of Angels in Late Ancient Christianity and Moment of Reckoning: Imagined Death and Its Consequences in Late Ancient Christianity, and serves as editor for the Journal of Early Christian Studies.