Beyond intolerance. The Milan meeting in AD 313 and the evolution of imperial religious policy from the age of the Tetrarchs to Julian the Apostate. Edited by Davide Dainese and Viola Gheller. (Studi e Testi Tardoantichi. Profane and Christian Culture in Late Antiquity.) Pp. 307. Turnhout: Brepols, 2018. €100 (paper). 978 2 503 57449 3; 2565 9030

2020 ◽  
Vol 71 (3) ◽  
pp. 609-611
Author(s):  
Thomas Langley
Keyword(s):  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Religious Policy ◽  
Christian Culture

Civilizations of the Supernatural: Witchcraft, Ritual, and Religious Experience in Late Antique, Medieval, and Renaissance Traditions

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Religious Experience ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Erotic Love ◽  
Cultural Traditions ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Christian Culture ◽  
The Relationship

Civilizations of the Supernatural: Witchcraft, Ritual, and Religious Experience in Late Antique, Medieval, and Renaissance Traditions brings together thirteen scholars of late-antique, medieval, and renaissance traditions who discuss magic, religious experience, ritual, and witch-beliefs with the aim of reflecting on the relationship between man and the supernatural. The content of the volume is intriguingly diverse and includes late antique traditions covering erotic love magic, Hellenistic-Egyptian astrology, apotropaic rituals, early Christian amulets, and astrological amulets; medieval traditions focusing on the relationships between magic and disbelief, pagan magic and Christian culture, as well as witchcraft and magic in Britain, Scandinavian sympathetic graphophagy, superstition in sermon literature; and finally Renaissance traditions revolving around Agrippan magic, witchcraft in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and a Biblical toponym related to the Friulan Benandanti’s visionary experiences. These varied topics reflect the multifaceted ways through which men aimed to establish relationships with the supernatural in diverse cultural traditions, and for different purposes, between Late Antiquity and the Renaissance. These ways eventually contributed to shaping the civilizations of the supernatural or those peculiar patterns which helped men look at themselves through the mirror of their own amazement of being in this world.

Religious Policy

2021 ◽  
pp. 90-108
Author(s):  
Jan Willem Drijvers
Keyword(s):  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Religious Tolerance ◽  
Roman Emperor ◽  
Religious Policy ◽  
Religious Conflicts ◽  
Constantius Ii ◽  
Clean Break

A Roman emperor in late antiquity had to deal not only with military, administrative, and communicative matters, but also with the complex religious affairs of the time. Jovian was a Christian, and he made a clean break with Julian’s pro-pagan measures and returned to the religious policy of Constantine and Constantius II. He did not, however, issue anti-pagan measures. Jovian may have been in favor of Nicene Christianity if we can believe Athanasius’s letter addressed to him, as well as the Petitiones Arianorum. This set of four petitions to Jovian have been preserved among the apologetical writings of Athanasius and should therefore be treated with caution. In general, Jovian seems to have taken no sides in the various christological conflicts and debates of his time. He propagated religious tolerance as is evident from Themistius’s consular oration. Whether he issued a law of religious tolerance, as Themistius seems to suggest, remains in doubt. Regulating religion, dealing with dogmatic issues, or taking a position himself in religious conflicts seem not to have been among Jovian’s primary concerns.

scholarly journals FROM PAGAN TO CHRISTIAN: RELIGIOUS ICONOGRAPHY IN MATERIAL CULTURE FROM SAGALASSOS

2011 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 573-607
Author(s):  
Peter Talloen
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
South West ◽  
Christian Culture ◽  
Christian Iconography ◽  
Religious Iconography

The evidence of domestic artefacts bearing religiously inspired imagery from Sagalassos (south-west Turkey) is used here to trace how the religious revolution of Late Antiquity affected daily life and how that evidence may reflect wider patterns in the shift from a pagan to a Christian culture in Late Antiquity. After a period characterised by a common iconographic repertoire shared by pagans and Christians alike, in which the Christian impact on material culture was limited, the material expression of the changing religious atmosphere became more visible from the second half of the 4th c. onwards and eventually resulted in a canonic Christian iconography.

Religion, Language and Community in the Roman Near East

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fergus Millar
Keyword(s):  
Ethnic Group ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Near East ◽  
Fourth Century ◽  
Greek Language ◽  
Religious Literature ◽  
The Public ◽  
Christian Culture ◽  
The Church ◽  
Roman Near East

This book explores the way in which different ethnic, religious and linguistic communities co-existed and conflicted in the Roman Near East in the three centuries between the conversion of the Emperor Constantine to Christianity in 312 and the beginning of Muhammad's preaching in about 610. In the fourth century, a major role was played by Greek-speaking pagans, most notably the great orator, Libanius, from Antioch in Syria. After about 400, however, the public observance of pagan rituals died away under the pressure of Christianity. But the Greek language, as used in the Church, remained dominant. Pagan Aramaic is curiously invisible in this period, but the dialect of Aramaic used by Jews in Palestine is found in very extensive use, along with Hebrew, in a mass of religious literature. Outside Palestine, the most notable development in the culture of the region was the emergence of Syriac (a particular dialect and script of Aramaic) as a language of Christian culture and belief. ‘Syrians’ however were not a distinct ethnic group. The group which was most distinct from the others was made up of the unsettled and warlike peoples on the fringes of the Empire whom almost invariably, call ‘Arabs’, but who in Late Antiquity were far more often referred to as ‘Saracens’. By the end of the period, many of them had converted to Christianity. The major puzzle which the book poses is what is the relation between this process of conversion and the rise of Islam.

scholarly journals Erindring og glemsel. Seminar i København 12. marts 2008

1970 ◽  
pp. 183
Author(s):  
Line Suhr Marschner
Keyword(s):  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Cultural Identities ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Cultural Transition ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Christian Culture ◽  
Late Renaissance ◽  
With Memory

The concepts of memory and oblivion and their historical changeability were in focus at a seminar that took place in Copenhagen in March 2008. Through seven different presentations of this theme, it was shown how the acts of remembering and forgetting are active in the formation of new norms and of new cultural identities in periods of cultural transition such as late Antiquity and in the Reformation period. The four keynote speakers were Paul Connerton, who spoke on three types of forgetting; James M. Bradburne, who dealt with memory in action in Italian late- Renaissance gardens; Charles Hedrick Jr., whose presentation was on transformations of the damnatio memoriae practice between late Antique and early Christian culture; and finally Andrew Spicer, who considered the process of erasing the Catholic past in post-Reformation Scotland. 

Moment of Reckoning

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ellen Muehlberger
Keyword(s):  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Public Square ◽  
Christian Culture ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Ancient Christianity ◽  
At Home

Late antiquity saw a proliferation of Christian texts dwelling on the emotions and physical sensations of dying—not as a heroic martyr in a public square or a judge’s court but as an individual, at home in a bed or in a private room. In sermons, letters, and ascetic traditions, late ancient Christians imagined the last minutes of life and the events that followed death in elaborate detail. This book traces how, in late ancient Christianity, death came to be thought of as a moment of reckoning: a physical ordeal whose pain is followed by an immediate judgment of one’s actions by angels and demons and, after that, fitting punishment. This emphasis on the experience of death ushered in a new ethical sensibility among Christians, in which one’s death was to be imagined frequently and anticipated in detail. This was initially meant as a tool for individuals: preachers counted on the fact that becoming aware of a judgment arriving at the end of one’s life tends to sharpen one’s scruples. But, as this book argues, the change in Christian sensibility toward death did not just affect individuals. Death imagined as the moment of reckoning created a fund of images and ideas within late ancient Christian culture about just what constituted a human being and how variances in human morality should be treated. This had significant effects on the Christian adoption of power in late antiquity, especially in the case of power’s heaviest baggage: the capacity to authorize violence against others.

Conclusion

2019 ◽  
pp. 217-224
Author(s):  
Ellen Muehlberger
Keyword(s):  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Know How ◽  
Christian Culture ◽  
The Future ◽  
Visual Landscape ◽  
Self Examination ◽  
Art And Architecture

In the study of late antiquity, the rise of Christianity has most often been tracked through material changes: the number of churches built; the art and architecture that constituted the visual landscape of cities; the laws enacted to support Christian practice or criminalize other pieties; the number of Christians writing, serving in imperial offices, and leading communities. There is another metric by which we could also measure the dominance of Christianity, and that is by the depth of its involvement in the expectations for the future that Christians held. At a level similar to the practices of self-examination and confession popularized by monastic movements in late antiquity, thinking of death as a moment of reckoning claimed the intimate attention of Christians and shaped it in a forceful way. To participate in late ancient Christian culture was to know how death would be not only for oneself, but also and more importantly, for others. Their coming tragedies afforded all manner of intervention, because the terrible prospects that were imagined for others were also imagined to be mutable, if only these others could also be brought to see from the perspective of their deaths.

“The Reign of God Has Come”: Eschatology and Empire in Late Antiquity and Early Islam

Arabica ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 61 (5) ◽  
pp. 514-558 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen J. Shoemaker
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
Religious Policy ◽  
Early Islam ◽  
The World ◽  
Reign Of God ◽  
The One

For much of the 20th century, scholarship on Muḥammad and the beginnings of Islam has shown a reluctance to acknowledge the importance of imminent eschatology in earliest Islam. One of the main reasons for this resistance to eschatology would appear to be the undeniable importance of conquest and political expansion in early Islam: if Muḥammad and his followers believed that the world would soon come to an end, why then did they seek to conquer and rule over so much of it? Nevertheless, there is no real contradiction between the urgent eschatology revealed by the Qurʾān and other early sources on the one hand, and the determination of Muḥammad and his followers to expand their religious policy and establish an empire on the other. To the contrary, the political eschatology of the Byzantine Christians during the sixth and early seventh centuries indicates that these two beliefs went hand in hand, offering important contemporary precedent for the imperial eschatology that seems to have fueled the rise of Islam.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document