Asceticism

Vincent L. Wimbush and Richard Valantasis edited this Oxford University Press volume, an academic collection drawn from a 1993 New York conference bringing together scholars of Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Indian and Zoroastrian ascetic practice. Its strength is the influence of its collective argument, the volume is widely credited with displacing the older reading of asceticism as simple world denial in favor of understanding ascetic practice as the active formation of a self, a reframing that has shaped subsequent scholarship across these traditions. Its limit, as with any large edited volume, is that individual chapters vary in depth and approach by contributor and tradition, so a claim about asceticism within one specific tradition covered here is best checked against that chapter directly rather than the volume's general thesis alone.