Hagiography and the Reconstruction of Local Religion in Late Antique Egypt: Memories, Inventions, and Landscapes

2006 ◽  
Vol 86 (1) ◽  
pp. 13-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Frankfurter
Keyword(s):  
Religious Practices ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Traditional Religion ◽  
Historical Evidence ◽  
Historical Interpretation ◽  
Local Religion ◽  
Mediterranean World ◽  
Historical Authenticity

AbstractScholars interested in the continuing vitality or decline of traditional religion in the late antique Mediterranean world often find themselves dependent on hagiographical texts, which inevitably depict traditional heathenism as a foil to their Christian heroes and thus cannot be used as simple documentation for historical realia. This paper proposes ways of drawing historical evidence for real, continuing local religion from hagiographical texts from late antique Egypt. After a discussion of the specific ways in which hagiography imposes literary and biblical themes on its representation of traditional religious practices, two points of authentic memory are presented: topographical traditions and traditions about expressive gesture. In contrast, the hagiographical image of the Egyptian priest, for example, carries little historical authenticity. A concluding section of the paper defends and outlines the use of anthropological models for the historical interpretation of hagiography.

THE RHETORIC OF RELIGIOUS CONFLICT IN ARNOBIUS’ADVERSVS NATIONES

2019 ◽  
Vol 69 (1) ◽  
pp. 402-416
Author(s):  
Konstantine Panegyres
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
Religious Conflict ◽  
Religious Practices ◽  
Historical Evidence ◽  
Historical Source ◽  
Local Religion ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Christian Writer

In this paper I discuss the ways in which the early Christian writer Arnobius of Sicca used rhetoric to shape religious identity inAduersus nationes. I raise questions about the reliability of his rhetorical work as a historical source for understanding conflict between Christians and pagans. The paper is intended as an addition to the growing literature in the following current areas of study: (i) the role of local religion and identity in the Roman Empire; (ii) the presence of pagan elements in Christian religious practices; (iii) the question of how to approach rhetorical works as historical evidence.

scholarly journals Bishops and People: Looking for Local Religious Life in Late Antiquity

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Maijastina Kahlos
Keyword(s):  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Local Population ◽  
Religious Life ◽  
Western Mediterranean ◽  
Lived Religion ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Augustine Of Hippo ◽  
Local Religion ◽  
The North ◽  
Mediterranean World

The religiosity of late antique and early medieval communities in the Mediterranean world has been vigorously examined and debated. This religious life has been called (among many other terms) ‘popular Christianity,’ ‘local Christianity,’ the ‘second church,’ ‘Religion zweiter Ordnung,’ and ‘the third paganism.’ In my article, I analyse late antique religious life from the viewpoint of encounters—between the ideals of the ecclesiastical elite and the people’s local cultic practices. These practices, embedded in the local communities, varied by regions but we can see similarities in the interaction of bishops with their local population. I will show how the ecclesiastical writers portrayed local cultic practices in negative terms as another religion (‘paganism,’ ‘idolatry,’ ‘demonic/ diabolic practices’), divergent from their own (‘Christianity’), or even as a distortion beyond ‘proper’ religion (‘magic’, ‘superstition’, ‘sacrilege’). In my analysis, I discuss and test various approaches that scholars have developed to understand the tensions between the bishops and the local people: David Frankfurter (local religion), Rubina Raja and Jörg Rüpke (local lived religion), and Nicola Denzey Lewis (magic as lived religion), Lisa Kaaren Bailey (lay religion) and Lucy Grig (popular culture). My focus is on the western Mediterranean world from the fourth to sixth centuries, and the cases of polemical encounters I analyse come from the writings of North Italian, Gallic and Hispanic bishops (Paulinus of Nola, Maximus of Turin, Philaster of Brescia, Caesarius of Arles, and Martin of Braga). I also compare the North Italian, Gallic and Hispanic situations with those in North Africa depicted by Augustine of Hippo.

Aspects of ‘Religious Experience’ among the Hellenistic Mystery Religions

2005 ◽  
Vol 12 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 349-369 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luther H. Martin
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Development ◽  
Religious Experience ◽  
Cognitive Processes ◽  
Religious Practices ◽  
Historical Evidence ◽  
Group Solidarity ◽  
Mystery Religions ◽  
Rites Of Initiation ◽  
Ideas And Institutions

AbstractThe claim that religious experience is the basis for religious practices, ideas and institutions seems to be grounded more in theological (Protestant) bias than in historical evidence. From the example of the Graeco-Roman mystery religions, it would seem that it is religious practices, specifically, their rites of initiation that produced experiences that were interpreted by initiates as ‘religious.’ Nor was the production of such experiences considered to be an end in itself. Rather, they accomplished specific goals through an exploitation of tacit cognitive processes: (1) the promotion of group solidarity and transgenerational continuity, and (2) the triggering of a potential for cognitive development among individual members of the group.

scholarly journals A Nameless but Active Religion: An Anthropologist's View of Local Religion in Hong Kong and Macau

2003 ◽  
Vol 174 ◽  
pp. 373-394 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tik-sang Liu
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
Local People ◽  
Religious Practices ◽  
Local Society ◽  
Social Organizations ◽  
Local Religion

Tik-sang Liu examines local religious practices in Hong Kong and Macau. He states that these constitute the foundation of local social organizations; they are the means with which local society is organized, local people are mobilized, communal activities are co-ordinated and people are prepared for their various stages in life.

TECHNOLOGY AND IDEAS: ARCHITECTS AND MASTER-BUILDERS IN THE EARLY BYZANTINE WORLD

2008 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 379-405
Author(s):  
Enrico Zanini
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Eastern Mediterranean ◽  
Local Context ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Technical Expertise ◽  
Imperial Court ◽  
Mediterranean World ◽  
Written Sources ◽  
Master Builders

Eastern literary and epigraphic sources from the 5th and 6th centuries A.D. mention several architects/engineers in the service of the imperial court at Constantinople. They give us an idea of the scientific knowledge, technical expertise and social status of these men. A larger group of architects and master-builders are also attested. They operated mainly in a lower-key, local context, but they also moved abroad to answer the requests of patrons. A comparison between the written sources and archaeology allows us to reconstruct some examples of the mobility of people and ideas, and to advance some hypotheses about the development of building material culture in the late antique eastern Mediterranean world.

scholarly journals Blurred Boundaries and Novel Normativities

2021 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael E. Pregill
Keyword(s):  
Paradigm Shift ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Historical Evidence ◽  
Critical Issues ◽  
Previous Scholarship

This article discusses critical issues surrounding the Jewish-Muslim encounter, framed as an evaluation of the approach and conclusions of two recent publications by Aaron W. Hughes: Shared Identities: Medieval and Modern Imaginings of Judeo-Islam (2017) and Muslim and Jew (2019). Hughes’s works present a critique of the established historiography on Jewish-Muslim relations and exchanges, examining such subjects as the Jews of late antique Arabia, the Jewish matrix of the Quran and formative Islam, and the Judeo-Islamic synthesis of subsequent centuries. I interrogate Hughes’s use of sources, treatment of previous scholarship, and privileging of the specific lens of the “religionist” in approaching the historical evidence. Both of the works under consideration here exhibit numerous problems of conception and argumentation that undermine their value for broadening current horizons of research or refining prevailing pedagogies. Ultimately, although they provoke numerous important questions and deftly expose the conceptual and ideological underpinnings of older scholarship, the books fail to offer a constructive path forward for specialists or stimulate a meaningful paradigm shift in the field.

Worshippers of the Gods

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mattias P. Gassman
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Fourth Century ◽  
Religious History ◽  
The Political ◽  
Christian Identity ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Traditional Religion ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Changing Attitudes

Worshippers of the Gods Worshippers of the Gods tells how the Latin writers who witnessed the political and social rise of Christianity rethought the role of traditional religion in the empire and city of Rome. In parallel with the empire’s legal Christianisation, it traces changing attitudes toward paganism from the last empire-wide persecution of Christians under the Tetrarchy to the removal of state funds from the Roman cults in the early 380s. Influential recent scholarship has seen Christian polemical literature—a crucial body of evidence for late antique polytheism—as an exercise in Christian identity-making. In response, Worshippers of the Gods argues that Lactantius, Firmicus Maternus, Ambrosiaster, and Ambrose offered substantive critiques of traditional religion shaped to their political circumstances and to the preoccupations of contemporary polytheists. By bringing together this polemical literature with imperial laws, pagan inscriptions, and the letters and papers of the senator Symmachus, Worshippers of the Gods reveals the changing horizons of Roman thought on traditional religion in the fourth century. Through its five interlocking case studies, it shows how key episodes in the Empire’s religious history—the Tetrarchic persecution, Constantine’s adoption of Christianity, the altar of Victory affair, and the ‘disestablishment’ of the Roman cults—shaped contemporary conceptions of polytheism. It also argues that the idea of a unified ‘paganism’, often seen as a capricious invention by Christian polemicists, actually arose as a Christian response to the eclectic, philosophical polytheism in vogue at Rome.

African Traditional Religion and Pentecostal Churches in Lusaka, Zambia: An Assessment

2012 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 260-277
Author(s):  
Jerry M. Ireland
Keyword(s):  
Religious Practices ◽  
Traditional Religion ◽  
Convenience Sample ◽  
Survey Tool ◽  
Pentecostal Churches ◽  
African Traditional Religion ◽  
Christian Discipleship ◽  
Practical Theological ◽  
Theological Understanding ◽  
The City

This study seeks to discover how African Traditional Religion (ATR) is viewed by Pentecostal church leaders in Lusaka, Zambia. The convenience sample focused on fourteen Pentecostal churches of various denominational affiliations within the city of Lusaka, Zambia. A thirty-one-item survey tool, the Assessment of Traditional Religious Practices (ATRP), was developed and administered to 128 leaders regarding the prevalence of traditional religious practices among their congregants. The ATRP also assessed how these leaders typically respond to concerns related to ATR within their ministerial context. Findings indicated that traditional beliefs and practices continue to persist, though at nominal levels, within these churches. More importantly, a majority of these leaders feel adequately equipped to handle issues related to ATR because they understand their ministerial calling in terms of spiritual empowerment. The study concludes that the challenges presented by ATR regarding Christian discipleship continue to persist in local Pentecostal churches. However, leaders have employed a practical theological understanding of Pentecostalism, allowing them to overcome many of these same challenges.

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