scholarly journals To Be or Not to Be Part of the vita scaenica. Religious and Juridical Perspectives on the Status of Dancers and Performers in Late Antiquity

Mythos ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donatella Tronca
Keyword(s):  
Late Antiquity ◽  
The Status

Attitudes to the Use of Fire in Executions in Late Antiquity and Early Islam: The Burning of Heretics and Rebels in Late Umayyad Iraq

2015 ◽  
pp. 106-128 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Marsham
Keyword(s):  
Human Body ◽  
Capital Punishment ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Physical Change ◽  
Early Islam ◽  
The Status ◽  
Extreme Violence

Capital punishment can be understood as simultaneously an exercise of actual power – the ending of a human life – and an exertion of symbolic, or ritual, power.1 In this combination of symbolic transformation with real physical change, executions are unusual rituals. But the use of extreme violence against the human body certainly does have ritual characteristics, in that it has established rules (which may, of course, be deliberately challenged or broken) and in that these rules are used to make the drastic transformation in the status of the executed party seem legitimate and proper, to reassert more general ideas about the correct social order and to communicate threats and warnings to others who might seek to upset it. The victim of the execution is quite literally marked out as beyond reintegration into society. Their body becomes a kind of text, which can be read in a multitude of ways: the authorities carrying out the killing usually have one set of messages in mind, but the victim themselves, and those who witness or remember the act, may have very different ideas.

Altering Infamy

2014 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-30 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Bond
Keyword(s):  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Legal Status ◽  
The Status ◽  
Social Landscapes

This paper investigates the application of the legal stigma of infamia (disrepute) in Late Antiquity. The legal status is used as a lens through which to view the changing systemic, religious, and social landscapes between the reigns of Diocletian and Justinian, indicating the various uses and, ultimately, abuses of the status, as well as the marked consequences of expanding its definition. The use of the legal status to marginalize religious deviants in particular is inspected. This analysis reveals that the amendment of infamia to include heretics, apostates, and pagans signals the use of classical law to define orthodoxy and to articulate the anxiety over the pagan-Christian religious transition. The unforeseen consequences of infamia's expansion were the abetment of violence in the fourth and fifth centuries. Moreover, the disqualification of religious deviants from serving on curial councils had a noticeable impact on some municipalities in the later empire, and may have created a loophole with which to avoid curial service altogether.

Manumission

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henrik Mouritsen
Keyword(s):  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Legal Framework ◽  
Legal Issues ◽  
The Social ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Status ◽  
Legal Structures ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Almost All ◽  
State Functions

While manumission has been practised in almost all slave societies the Romans appear to have freed their slaves with unparalleled frequency. The chapter looks at three aspects of Roman manumission: the status of freedmen, the Augustan reforms of manumission and the legal discourse on freedmen under the Empire. It is suggested that the background for the Roman practice of enfranchising former slaves should be sought in the social and legal structures of early Rome, which delegated many “state” functions to the heads of households. The enfranchisement of freedmen was compatible with the political structures of the Republic, but in response to changes to the Roman citizenship the first emperor introduced a new legal framework, which remained until late Antiquity. The details of this framework were refined over the following centuries, as jurists explored a wide range of complex legal issues associated with manumission and the place of freedmen in society.

Voices and Bodies: The Afterlife of the Unborn

Numen ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 56 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 326-365 ◽  
Author(s):  
Danuta Shanzer
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Human Embryo ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Special Class ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Pelagian Controversy ◽  
The Status ◽  
Visible Body ◽  
The Middle Ages ◽  
Mizuko Kuyo

This article discuses the fate of a special class of child, the unborn, in the afterlife, as well as the gradual criminalization of abortion in Antiquity. Particular attention is paid to a possible prohibition of abortion in Orphism that may underpin the nekyiai in P. Bon. 4. and Vergil Aen . 6. Then it turns to depictions of the aborted in the Apocalypse of Peter and its late antique off spring to show how the aborted fetus gradually acquires a visible body and an articulate voice. At the same time, the theology of sentiment works out its solutions to mitigate the problem of the innocent in hell. The fate of the almost bodiless fetus in the Resurrection became a bone of contention by the early 5th C. The satirical questions posed Christians about the resurrection of the unborn may first have been raised by Porphyry. His interest in the embryo and its ensoulment in the Pros Gauron are adduced as evidence. Attention is drawn to Augustine's doubts about the status and fate of the human embryo, and some reasons are suggested about why he hesitated to adopt an unambiguous “human from conception” position. In the 5th C., after the Pelagian controversy, attention began to shift from the unborn to the unbaptized, who dominate the nekyiai of the Middle Ages. The rise of the Mizuko kuyō cult in Japan shows astonishing parallels to what happened in Late Antiquity.

Islands in the stream

1986 ◽  
Vol 13 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 323-342
Author(s):  
Robert A. Kaster
Keyword(s):  
Late Antiquity ◽  
First Century ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Rational Analysis ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Status ◽  
Personal Qualities ◽  
The Stability ◽  
Conceptual Foundations ◽  
Do So

Summary The Latin grammarians of late antiquity seem to personify the cultural stagnation and decline that have commonly been thought to typify the age. Resting upon conceptual foundations that had been laid centuries earlier and repeating the same doctrine from generation to generation, their texts appear by and large to be wholly untouched by originality. This paper addresses the question: why was this so? To suggest one answer to this question, the argument begins from the premise that the tradition remained as stable as it did because it continued to satisfy certain needs; the paper then goes on to consider these needs and their interaction. First, there are the needs of the grammarians themselves. From the beginnings of the profession’s history in the first century B.C. and first century A.D., when the grammarians’ schools first emerged as distinct institutions at Rome, the grammarians’ doctrine, with its emphasis on the rational analysis of the language’s ‘nature’, provided them with the authority they needed to prescribe correct speech for the social and cultural elite that they served. Once this exercise of reason had made a place for the grammarians as relative newcomers to the world of liberal letters, the doctrine was something to be prized and defended: the vivid instruction of the late antique grammarian Pompeius shows us a man fortified and buoyed up by his profession’s tradition, eager to assert its soundness or to add an improving touch here or there – and without the least wish or incentive to attempt some fundamental innovation; for to do so would be to tamper with the honorable social position that the profession provided. At the same time, the mainstream of the educated elite – the second group whose needs must be considered – would themselves have had little reason to encourage innovation: since a liberal education, based of course on grammar, had come to be one of the most important marks of social – and even moral – status, the honorable position of the elite was as much tied as the grammarians’ to the maintenance of the traditional doctrine. As a result, when the interests of the grammarians and the educated elite met in the institution of patronage, on which all teachers depended, the stability of the tradition was reinforced: for patrons did not seek innovative brilliance in their dependents, nor did they even look primarily for technical competence; they rather looked first for traditionally valued personal qualities like modesty and diligence, and other such qualities that would tend to preserve the status quo.

The Status of Dor in Late Antiquity: A Maritime Perspective

1991 ◽  
Vol 54 (4) ◽  
pp. 198-207 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kurt Raveh ◽  
Sean A. Kingsley
Keyword(s):  
Late Antiquity ◽  
The Status

Visual Gods: From Exorcism to Complexity in Renaissance Studies Sichtbare Götter: Komplexitát statt Exorzismus in der Renaissanceforschung

Aries ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-85 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kocku von Stuckrad
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Belief Systems ◽  
Academic Research ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Cultural Changes ◽  
Public Spheres ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Academic Study

AbstractAcademic research into the cultural changes that took place in Europe between 1400 and 1650 is notoriously fraught with terminological difficulties. With regard to the place of paganism and polytheism in Western culture, three questions in particular stand in the foreground: Most generally, is it adequate to isolate a period as "Renaissance" or "early modernity" and what is gained by doing so? Is the period called "Renaissance" characterized by a continuity of pagan and polytheistic elements or do we have to address the presence of pagan semantics as reception, revival, or, rather, invention? And finally, in terms of concepts of "religion", is the presence of pagan deities in public spheres an expression of "lived religion" or of a Renaissance "dream" of a pagan past that is syncretistically built into Christian "religion"?After a survey of influential contributions to this discussion, the article approaches the problem of Renaissance polytheism and paganism from a different point of view. Under the headline of material and visual culture, cultural studies have recently broken grounds for a new understanding of religious dynamics in public spheres. Major contributions to medieval and early modern visual culture are presented and subsequently applied to examples of what can be called a Renaissance pagan discourse. Arguing mainly methodologically, the article aims at introducing visual and material aspects into the study of Western esotericism and reflecting on the underlying discourses of inclusion and exclusion that so often have characterized academic study of religion.Focusing on the visual presence of pagan deities challenges common notions of a "Christian occident" with a monotheistic creed that in late antiquity won the upper hand over a pagan past. This narrative is dependent on a conceptualization of "religion" that is based on "faith", inner states of mind, belief-systems, and (holy) texts. On a deeper level of analysis, these conceptualizations correspond to two strong currents in the academic study of religion: a religionist conviction and a philological orientation. It is argued that both currents reflect strategies of distancing or even purgation and exorcism. If we take seriously the notion that religious ideas, convictions, and traditions are "acted out" in the public sphere, that they form part of people's identities in a unity of image, message, and body, and that the materiality of religion is something to move to the center of scrutiny, we will perhaps arrive at a better understanding of the status of paganism in post-ancient Europe. From the perspective of visual culture, the pagan gods are not a "dream", nor do they belong to a system outside "religion". They form a crucial element of people's identities. It is precisely the strategies of distancing, singularization, and exorcism that academic study of religion has to engage. Die wissenschaftliche Erforschung der kulturellen Veränderungen in Europa zwischen 1400 und 1650 ist bekanntermaßen mit terminologischen Schwierigkeiten behaftet. Was den Ort von Paganismus und Polytheismus in der westlichen Kultur betrifft, kommt drei Fragen besondere Bedeutung zu: Ist es überhaupt angemessen, eine Periode als ,,Renaissance" oder ,,Frühe Neuzeit" zu isolieren, und was ist damit gewonnen? Ist die Epoche der ,,Renaissance" durch eine Kontinuität paganer und polytheistischer Elemente gekennzeichnet oder ist die Präsenz paganer Semantiken als Rezeption, Revitalisierung oder gar als Erfindung anzusprechen? Und schließlich lässt sich im Hinblick auf den wissenschaftlichen Religionsbegriff fragen, ob die Präsenz paganer Gottheiten im öffentlichen Raum Ausdruck einer ,,lebenden Religion" ist oder eines ,,Traums" von einer paganen Vergangenheit, den die Renaissance synkretistisch in die christliche ,,Religion" integrierte?Nach einer Übersicht über einflussreiche Beiträge zu dieser Diskussion bringt der Artikel eine neue Sicht auf das Problem von Polytheismus und Paganismus in der Renaissance ins Spiel. Unter den Stichworten Materialität und Visualität haben die Kulturwissenschaften in jüngster Zeit neue Analyseinstrumente zum Verständnis religiöser Dynamiken im öffentlichen Raum entwickelt. Wichtige Deutungsansätze mittelalterlicher und frühneuzeitlicher visueller Kultur werden vorgestellt und anschließend auf Beispiele für einen ,,paganen Diskurs" der Renaissance angewandt. Die Ausrichtung des Artikels ist in erster Linie methodisch: er möchte die Elemente Visualität und Materialität in die Esoterikforschung einführen; damit ist eine kritische Reflexion auf die Diskurse von Inklusion und Exklusion verbunden, die über lange Zeit die Religionswissenschaft geprägt haben.Die methodische Ausrichtung auf die visuelle Präsenz paganer Gottheiten stellt überkommene Auffassungen eines ,,Christlichen Abendlands" in Frage, mit einer monotheistischen Überzeugung, die in der Spätantike die pagane Vergangenheit überwunden habe. Ein solches Narrativ ist eng verbunden mit einem Religionskonzept, welches auf ,,Glauben", inneren Bewusstseinszuständen und (heiligen) Texten beruht. Hinter solchen Konzepten stehen wiederum zwei einflussreiche Tendenzen der Religionswissenschaft: eine religionistische Überzeugung und eine philologische Orientierung. Der Beitrag argumentiert, dass beide Strömungen Ausdruck von Strategien der Distanzierung oder gar der Purifizierung und des Exorzismus sind. Wenn wir jedoch davon ausgehen, dass religiöse Ideen, Überzeugungen und Traditionen im öffentlichen Raum ,,ausagiert" und kommuniziert werden, dass sie Ausdruck von Identitäten in einer Einheit von Bild, Botschaft und Körper sind, und dass die Materialität von Religion vom Rand ins Zentrum der Aufmerksamkeit zu rücken ist, werden wir den Status des Paganismus im nachantiken Europa besser bestimmen können. Aus Sicht von visual culture sind die paganen Gottheiten weder ein ,,Traum", noch gehören sie einem System jenseits der ,,Religion" an. Sie sind ein zentrales Element von Identitäten. Es ist die Aufgabe der Religionswissenschaft, eben jene Strategien der Distanzierung, der Singularisierung und des Exorzismus zum Gegenstand ihrer Analyse zu machen.

Orthodoxy

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Flower
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Holy Spirit ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Religious Community ◽  
Core Beliefs ◽  
Christian Communities ◽  
The Holy Spirit ◽  
The Status ◽  
Canonical Texts ◽  
The Relationship

The concept of orthodoxy denotes a central set of doctrines, often specified by a recognised authoritative body or set of individuals, to which any person must subscribe in order to be accepted by others as a fellow member of a religious community. Despite some possible precedents among ancient philosophers, the concept of orthodoxy developed in a distinct manner within Christianity in tandem with the notion of heresy, especially from the 2nd century onward. This involved defining an identity around certain core beliefs, alongside particular practices, apostolic traditions, and canonical texts, thereby gradually restricting the boundaries of theological speculation and acceptable difference of opinion. This was partly in response to disagreements with people who regarded themselves, or were most regarded by others, as forming part of the religious community, but also partly in response to criticisms from non-Christians. These arguments were, therefore, focused on the establishment of identity for a group through the establishment of boundaries, particularly in a context of a diversity of scattered Christian communities in which there was no recognised central authority to which adherents could appeal. Some of these earliest disputes were centred on the status of the Creator God and other cosmological issues, but also included Christological disagreements concerning Jesus Christ himself, which would go on to be the most prominent sources of controversy in the attempts to define orthodoxy during late antiquity. In the 4th century, the central issues concerned Trinitarian doctrine and the question of how to define the relationship between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. From the early 5th century onward, the problem of the humanity and divinity of Christ came to the fore. Bishops and other authors sought to define orthodoxy and persuade other Christians through a range of methods including preaching, the writing of theological treatises, often citing relevant passages of Scripture, the exchanging of letters, the composition of lists of heresies (known as heresiologies), and the calling of local ecclesiastical councils. From the reign of Constantine I onward, the situation changed substantially, since imperial support for Christianity and the institution of the Church created new opportunities, rewards, and dangers for those involved in arguments concerning orthodoxy. Emperors were often directly involved in seeking solutions to these disputes, including through the calling of larger councils attended by bishops from across the empire. Those held at Nicaea in 325, Constantinople in 381, Ephesus in 431, Chalcedon in 451, and Constantinople in 553 have come to have the status of ecumenical councils for many Christians, meaning that they included representatives from both the “eastern” and “western” parts of the Roman empire and that their decisions applied to the whole oikoumene and had universal validity. Nonetheless, other large gatherings also took place, including the dual council of Seleucia-Ariminum in 359, which are not celebrated because they proposed theological definitions that did not go on to be accepted as orthodox. The decisions reached at these events were often supported by imperial actions, such as the exiling of those who had been deposed and excommunicated. From the later 4th century onward, statements of orthodoxy increasingly came to be enshrined in laws, as emperors sought to enforce their preferred definitions of faith on their subjects. Dialogue literature also become more popular as a means of articulating theological positions and arguments, while at the same time disputants made increasing use of collections of statements by authoritative churchmen known as florilegia. By the end of antiquity, a clear concept of orthodoxy had emerged, but there continued to be significant disagreements about how it should be defined, especially with the fracturing of Roman imperial territory.

The Golden Calf between Bible and Qur'an

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael E. Pregill
Keyword(s):  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Golden Calf ◽  
Self And Other ◽  
Ancient Israel ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Relationship

This book explores the story of the Israelites’ worship of the Golden Calf in its Jewish, Christian, and Muslim contexts, from ancient Israel to the emergence of Islam. It focuses in particular on the Qur’an’s presentation of the narrative and its background in Jewish and Christian retellings of the episode from Late Antiquity. Across the centuries, the interpretation of the Calf episode underwent major changes reflecting the varying cultural, religious, and ideological contexts in which various communities used the story to legitimate their own tradition, challenge the claims of others, and delineate the boundaries between self and other. The book contributes to the ongoing re-evaluation of the relationship between Bible and Qur’an, arguing for the necessity of understanding the Qur’an and Islamic interpretations of the history and narratives of ancient Israel as part of the broader biblical tradition. The Calf narrative in the Qur’an, central to the qur’anic conception of the legacy of Israel and the status of the Jews of its own time, reflects a profound engagement with the biblical account in Exodus, as well as being informed by exegetical and parascriptural traditions in circulation in the Qur’an’s milieu in Late Antiquity. The book also addresses the issue of Western approaches to the Qur’an, arguing that the historical reliance of scholars and translators on classical Muslim exegesis of scripture has led to misleading conclusions about the meaning of qur’anic episodes.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document