Religion In Republican Italy

Download or read book Religion in Republican Italy written by Celia E. Schultz and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006-12-14 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores how recent findings and research provide a richer understanding of religious activities in Republican Rome and contemporary central Italic societies, including the Etruscans, during the period of the Middle and Late Republic. While much recent research has focused on the Romanization of areas outside Italy in later periods, this volume investigates religious aspects of the Romanization of the Italian peninsula itself. The essays strive to integrate literary evidence with archaeological and epigraphic material as they consider the nexus of religion and politics in early Italy; the impact of Roman institutions and practices on Italic society; the reciprocal impact of non-Roman practices and institutions on Roman custom; and the nature of 'Roman', as opposed to 'Latin', 'Italic', or 'Etruscan', religion in the period in question. The resulting volume illuminates many facets of religious praxis in Republican Italy, while at the same time complicating the categories we use to discuss it.

Download or read book Religion in Archaic and Republican Rome and Italy written by Edward Bispham and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-06-11 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As Rome extended its influence throughout Italy, gradually incorporating its various peoples in a process of Romanization and conquest, its religion was extensively influenced by the cults of religious practices of its new subjects and citizens. It was a period of intense religious ferment and creativity. Roman religion, controlled and determined by religious and political functionaries who mediated between humans, had centred on a select pantheon of gods with Jupiter at its head. It was a religion in the process of becoming the servant of the state, however genuine its priests and votaries might be. Understanding the dynamics of religious change is fundamental to understanding the changing culture and politics of Rome during the last five centuries B.C. Religion in Archaic and Republic Rome and Italy tells that story.

Download or read book Cult Places and Cultural Change in Republican Italy written by Tesse Dieder Stek and published by Amsterdam University Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Summary: This study throws new light on the Roman impact on Italic religious structures in the last four centuries BC and, more generally, on the complex processes of change and accommodation set in motion by the Roman expansion in Italy. Cult places had a pivotal function among the various 'Italic' tribes known to us from the ancient sources, which had been gradually conquered and subsequently controlled by Rome. Through an analysis of archaeological, literary and epigraphic evidence from rural cult places in Central and Southern Italy including a case study on the Samnite temple of San Giovanni in Galdo, the authors investigate the fluctuating function of cult places in among the non-Roman Italic communities, before and after the establishment of Roman rule.

Download or read book Religion in Republican Rome written by Jorg Rupke and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2012-05-28 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Roman religion as we know it is largely the product of the middle and late republic, the period falling roughly between the victory of Rome over its Latin allies in 338 B.C.E. and the attempt of the Italian peoples in the Social War to stop Roman domination, resulting in the victory of Rome over all of Italy in 89 B.C.E. This period witnessed the expansion and elaboration of large public rituals such as the games and the triumph as well as significant changes to Roman intellectual life, including the emergence of new media like the written calendar and new genres such as law, antiquarian writing, and philosophical discourse. In Religion in Republican Rome Jörg Rüpke argues that religious change in the period is best understood as a process of rationalization: rules and principles were abstracted from practice, then made the object of a specialized discourse with its own rules of argument and institutional loci. Thus codified and elaborated, these then guided future conduct and elaboration. Rüpke concentrates on figures both famous and less well known, including Gnaeus Flavius, Ennius, Accius, Varro, Cicero, and Julius Caesar. He contextualizes the development of rational argument about religion and antiquarian systematization of religious practices with respect to two complex processes: Roman expansion in its manifold dimensions on the one hand and cultural exchange between Greece and Rome on the other.

Download or read book Reassembling Religion in Roman Italy written by Emma-Jayne Graham and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-11-09 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the ways in which lived religion in Roman Italy involved personal and communal experiences of the religious agency generated when ritualised activities caused human and more-than-human things to become bundled together into relational assemblages. Drawing upon broadly posthumanist and new materialist theories concerning the thingliness of things, it sets out to re-evaluate the role of the material world within Roman religion and to offer new perspectives on the formation of multi-scalar forms of ancient religious knowledge. It explores what happens when a materially informed approach is systematically applied to the investigation of typical questions about Roman religion such as: What did Romans understand ‘religion’ to mean? What did religious experiences allow people to understand about the material world and their own place within it? How were experiences of ritual connected with shared beliefs or concepts about the relationship between the mortal and divine worlds? How was divinity constructed and perceived? To answer these questions, it gathers and evaluates archaeological evidence associated with a series of case studies. Each of these focuses on a key component of the ritualised assemblages shown to have produced Roman religious agency – place, objects, bodies, and divinity – and centres on an examination of experiences of lived religion as it related to the contexts of monumentalised sanctuaries, cult instruments used in public sacrifice, anatomical votive offerings, cult images and the qualities of divinity, and magic as a situationally specific form of religious knowledge. By breaking down and then reconstructing the ritualised assemblages that generated and sustained Roman religion, this book makes the case for adopting a material approach to the study of ancient lived religion.

Download or read book The Altars of Republican Rome and Latium written by Claudia Moser and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-17 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book reorients the study of sacrifice, examining the locus of ritual action - the altars of Republican Rome and Latium.

Download or read book As If God Existed written by Maurizio Viroli and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2012-09-09 with total page 375 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Religion and liberty are often thought to be mutual enemies: if religion has a natural ally, it is authoritarianism--not republicanism or democracy. But in this book, Maurizio Viroli, a leading historian of republican political thought, challenges this conventional wisdom. He argues that political emancipation and the defense of political liberty have always required the self-sacrifice of people with religious sentiments and a religious devotion to liberty. This is particularly the case when liberty is threatened by authoritarianism: the staunchest defenders of liberty are those who feel a deeply religious commitment to it. Viroli makes his case by reconstructing, for the first time, the history of the Italian "religion of liberty," covering its entire span but focusing on three key examples of political emancipation: the free republics of the late Middle Ages, the Risorgimento of the nineteenth century, and the antifascist Resistenza of the twentieth century. In each example, Viroli shows, a religious spirit that regarded moral and political liberty as the highest goods of human life was fundamental to establishing and preserving liberty. He also shows that when this religious sentiment has been corrupted or suffocated, Italians have lost their liberty. This book makes a powerful and provocative contribution to today's debates about the compatibility of religion and republicanism.