The Polemic of Individualized Appellation in Late Antiquity

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 180-214
Author(s):  
Paul Robertson
Keyword(s):  
Identity Construction ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Group Identity ◽  
Entire Group ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Identity Constructions ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Group Construction

This article describes rhetorical innovations in late antique Christian polemic around the construction of orthodoxy/heresy and Christianity more broadly. Late antique Christian polemicists label groups as heretical by using their founders' names as eponymous proxies for an entire group and set of ideas: Marcionism/ites, Valentinianism/ites, and so forth. This type of group construction, which I term the polemic of individualized appellation due to the pejorative labeling of a group after an individual founder, is an intentional and often artificial type of elite, literary polemic put to service in the wider creative mythmaking and boundary/identity construction by heresiologists such as Justin, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Eusebius, and Epiphanius. In identifying both precursor ingredients in various ancient Mediterranean comparanda and novel developments in the Christian heresiologists' discourse, I also engage with recent scholarship on heresy, orthodoxy, and identity constructions in Late Antiquity. I explain why the polemic of individualized appellation was especially effective in constructing difference, its role in this particular late antique context, and its function in effacing apparent similarities in widespread practices and beliefs. I conclude with a methodological discussion, arguing that scholars in religion and history should reject their sources' categories of group identity construction due to their inherent bias.

Ildar Garipzanov, Caroline Goodson, and Henry Maguire, ed., Graphic Signs of Identity, Faith, and Power in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. Cursor Mundi, 27, Turnhout: Brepols, 2017, xviii, 392 p., 141 ill.

Mediaevistik ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 377-379
Author(s):  
Kriszta Kotsis
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Interdisciplinary Research ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Visual Communication ◽  
Group Identity ◽  
Religious Affiliation ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
The Third ◽  
Cursor Mundi ◽  
Definition Of

Late antique and early medieval graphic signs have traditionally been studied by narrowly focused specialists leading to the fragmentation and decontextualization of this important body of material. Therefore, the volume aims “to deepen interdisciplinary research on graphic signs” (7) of the third through tenth centuries, with contributions from archaeologists, historians, art historians, a philologist, and a paleographer. Ildar Garipzanov’s introduction defines the central terms (sign, symbol, graphicacy), calls for supplanting the text-image binary with “the concept of the visual-written continuum” (15), and argues that graphicacy was central to visual communication in this period. He emphasizes the agency of graphic signs and notes that their study can amplify our understanding of the definition of personal and group identity, the articulation of power, authority, and religious affiliation, and communication with the supernatural sphere.

Let Them Eat Fish: Food for the Poor in Early Rabbinic Judaism

2014 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 250-270
Author(s):  
Gregg E. Gardner
Keyword(s):  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Fish Food ◽  
Rabbinic Judaism ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Tiered System ◽  
Social Separation ◽  
Material Requirements

Abstract Recent scholarship has shown how investigations into food and poverty contribute to our understanding of late-antique Judaism and Christianity. These areas of inquiry overlap in the study of charity, as providing food was the preeminent way to support the poor. What foods and foodways do the earliest texts of rabbinic Judaism prescribe for the poor? This article examines Tannaitic discussions of the foods that should be given as charity, reading these texts within their literary and historical contexts. I find that they prescribe a two-tiered system whereby foods for the week aim to meet the poor’s biological needs, while those for the Sabbath fulfill religious requirements. These rabbinic instructions, however, also reinforce social separation and deepen the poor’s sense of exclusion. This article contributes to scholarship on poverty and charity in late antiquity, the use of food in the construction of rabbinic identity, and the tensions that arise from establishing material requirements for religious observances.

Apollonia-Sozousa in late antiquity: some remarks on thecaput provinciaeof Libya Superior

2017 ◽  
Vol 48 ◽  
pp. 159-168
Author(s):  
Christian Barthel
Keyword(s):  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Historical Data ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Political Background ◽  
Roman Military ◽  
Failed Attempt ◽  
Late Roman

AbstractThis article examines the available archaeological and historical data on the Late Antique city of Apollonia-Sozousa, with a particular focus on the date of its elevation to the capital of Libya Superior. Contrary to recent scholarship that stressed intrinsic evidence in the form of a combination of Berber raids and a deficient Roman military infrastructure, this article seeks to reintegrate the local conflicts of late Roman Cyrenaica to the major historical events of the fifth century AD. It is argued that the failed attempt of AD 468 to conquer Vandal Africa and the subsequent retreat of the Roman forces out of Tripolitania in AD 470 serves as a more likely political background to date the relocation of the capital from Ptolemais to Apollonia-Sozousa.

Taxing Citizens: Socio-legal Constructions of Late Antique Muslim Identity

2016 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 333-367 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lena Salaymeh
Keyword(s):  
Identity Construction ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Legal Capacity ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Muslim Community ◽  
Muslim Identity ◽  
Economic Implications ◽  
Historical Process

The regulations pertaining to Islamic charity taxation illuminate underappreciated dimensions of how Muslims defined identity boundaries in late antiquity. To demarcate the contours of a historical process of Muslim identity construction, I analyze Islamic jurisprudential debates about who is and who is not obligated to pay the charity tax. Most late antique and medieval jurists made the charity tax incumbent on minors or others lacking full legal capacity, even though these groups were exempt from “for-thedivine” practices. I suggest Muslim citizenship as a framework for understanding late antique Muslim identity. Because charity tax liability had socio-political and economic implications, it functioned simultaneously as a gate into and out of a Muslim community. This article contributes to the discourse on Islamic beginnings by exploring the intricacies of Muslim self-conceptions in late antiquity.


Late Antique Letter Collections

2016 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Comprehensive Overview ◽  
Literary Genres ◽  
The Social ◽  
Letter Writer ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Letter Collection ◽  
Latin Letter

This volume provides the first comprehensive overview of the extant Greek and Latin letter collections of late antiquity (ca. 300-600 C.E.). Bringing together an international team of historians, classicists, and scholars of religion, it illustrates how letter collections advertised an image of the letter writer and introduces the social and textual histories of each collection. Nearly every chapter focuses on the letter collection of a different late ancient author—from the famous (or even infamous) to the obscure—and investigates its particular issues of content, arrangement, and publication context. On the whole, the volume reveals how late antique letter collections operated as a discrete literary genre with its own conventions, transmission processes, and self-presentational agendas while offering new approaches to interpret both larger letter collections and the individual letters contained within them. Each chapter contributes to a broad argument that scholars should read letter collections as they do representatives of other late antique literary genres, as single texts made up of individual components, with larger thematic and literary characteristics that are as important as those of their component parts.

Liturgical Poetry in the Late Antique Near East

2010 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 336-361 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ophir Münz-Manor
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Study ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Near East ◽  
The Other ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Biblical Poetry ◽  
Contemporary View ◽  
Cultural Dialogue ◽  
The One

The article presents a contemporary view of the study of piyyut, demonstrating that Jewish poetry of late antiquity (in Hebrew and Aramaic) was closely related to Christian liturgical poetry (both Syriac and Greek) and Samaritan liturgy. These relations were expressed primarily by common poetic and prosodic characteristics, derived on the one hand from ancient Semitic poetry (mainly biblical poetry), and on the other from innovations of the period. The significant connections of content between the different genres of poetry reveal the importance of comparative study. Thus the poetry composed in late antiquity provides additional evidence for the lively cultural dialogue that took place at that time.

Unearthing Houses in Porphyreon and Chhim. Structure, Spatial Development, and Decoration of Domestic Spaces in Late Antique Phoenicia

2020 ◽  
pp. 173-195
Author(s):  
Tomasz Waliszewski ◽  
Julia Burdajewicz
Keyword(s):  
Social Structure ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Research Team ◽  
Wall Painting ◽  
Domestic Architecture ◽  
Functional Study ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Rural Settlements ◽  
Domestic Spaces ◽  
Residential Architecture

Porphyreon (Jiyeh/Nebi Younis) and Chhim were large rural settlements situated on the coast of modernday Lebanon, north of the Phoenician city of Sidon. As attested by the remains of residential architecture, they were thriving during the Roman Period and late Antiquity (1st–7th centuries AD). This article presents the preliminary observations on the domestic architecture uncovered at both sites, their spatial and social structure, as well as their furnishing and decoration, based on the fieldwork carried out in recent years by the joint PolishLebanese research team. The focus will be put on the wall painting fragments found in considerable numbers in Porphyreon. The iconographical and functional study of the paintings betrays to what extent the inhabitants of rural settlements in the coastal zone of the Levant were inclined to imitate the decoration of the urban houses known to them from the nearby towns, such as Berytus, but also from religious contexts represented by churches.

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.

Urban Space and Aristocratic Power in Late Antique Rome

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carlos Machado
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
The Social ◽  
Traditional Elite ◽  
History Of ◽  
The City

This book analyses the physical, social, and cultural history of Rome in late antiquity. Between AD 270 and 535, the former capital of the Roman empire experienced a series of dramatic transformations in its size, appearance, political standing, and identity, as emperors moved to other cities and the Christian church slowly became its dominating institution. Urban Space and Aristocratic Power in Late Antique Rome provides a new picture of these developments, focusing on the extraordinary role played by members of the traditional elite, the senatorial aristocracy, in the redefinition of the city, its institutions, and spaces. During this period, Roman senators and their families became increasingly involved in the management of the city and its population, in building works, and in the performance of secular and religious ceremonies and rituals. As this study shows, for approximately three hundred years the houses of the Roman elite competed with imperial palaces and churches in shaping the political map and the social life of the city. Making use of modern theories of urban space, the book considers a vast array of archaeological, literary, and epigraphic documents to show how the former centre of the Mediterranean world was progressively redefined and controlled by its own elite.

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