Religious Dissent In Late Antiquity 350 450

Download or read book Religious Dissent in Late Antiquity, 350-450 written by Maijastina Kahlos and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Religious Dissent in Late Antiquity reconsiders the Christianization of the late Roman Empire. The focus is on the shifting position of dissenting religious groups ('pagans' and 'heretics'). The book shows that the narrative is more nuanced than the simple Christian triumph over the classical world.

Download or read book Constructions of Gender in Religious Traditions of Late Antiquity written by Shayna Sheinfeld and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2024-03-26 with total page 405 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume examines questions concerning the construction of gender and identity in the earliest days of what is now Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Methodologically explicit, the contributions analyze textual and material sources related to these religious traditions in their cultural contexts. The sources examined are predominantly products of patriarchal elite discourses requiring innovative approaches to unveil aspects of gender otherwise hidden. This volume extends the discussion represented in the volume Gender and Second-Temple Judaism (2020) and highlights the fruitfulness of interdisciplinary research beyond anachronistic discipline distinctions.

Download or read book Religious Violence in the Ancient World written by Jitse H. F. Dijkstra and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-10 with total page 447 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comparative examination and interpretation of religious violence in the Graeco-Roman world and Late Antiquity.

Download or read book Christians in Conversation written by Alberto Rigolio and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-02-13 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book addresses a particular and little-known form of writing, the prose dialogue, during the Late Antique period, when Christian authors adopted and transformed the dialogue form to suit the new needs of religious debate. Connected to, but departing from, the dialogues of Classical Antiquity, these new forms staged encounters between Christians and pagans, Jews, Manichaeans, and "heretical" fellow Christians. At times fiction, at others records of, or scripts for, actual debates, the dialogues give us a glimpse of Late Antique rhetoric as it was practiced and tell us about the theological arguments underpinning religious differences. By offering the first comprehensive analysis of Christian dialogues in Greek and Syriac from the earliest examples to the end of the sixth century CE, the present volume shows that Christian authors saw the dialogue form as a suitable vehicle for argument and apologetic in the context of religious controversy and argues that dialogues were intended as effective tools of opinion formation in Late Antique society. Most Christian dialogues are little studied, and often in isolation, but they vividly evoke the religious debates of the time and they embody the cultural conventions and refinements that Late Antique men and women expected from such debates.

Download or read book Being Pagan, Being Christian in Late Antiquity and Early Middle Ages written by Katja Ritari and published by Helsinki University Press. This book was released on 2023-12-28 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What does it mean to identify oneself as pagan or Christian in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages? How are religious identities constructed, negotiated, and represented in oral and written discourse? How is identity performed in rituals, how is it visible in material remains? Antiquity and the Middle Ages are usually regarded as two separate fields of scholarship. However, the period between the fourth and tenth centuries remains a time of transformations in which the process of religious change and identity building reached beyond the chronological boundary and the Roman, the Christian and ‘the barbarian’ traditions were merged in multiple ways. Being Pagan, Being Christian in Late Antiquity and Early Middle Ages brings together researchers from various fields, including archaeology, history, classical studies, and theology, to enhance discussion of this period of change as one continuum across the artificial borders of the different scholarly disciplines. With new archaeological data and contributions from scholars specializing on both textual and material remains, these different fields of study shed light on how religious identities of the people of the past are defined and identified. The contributions reassess the interplay of diversity and homogenising tendencies in a shifting religious landscape. Beyond the diversity of traditions, this book highlights the growing capacity of Christianity to hold together, under its control, the different dimensions – identity, cultural, ethical and emotional – of individual and collective religious experience.

Download or read book Christian Emperors and Roman Elites in Late Antiquity written by Rita Lizzi Testa and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-04-28 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book brings together a number of case studies to show some of the ways in which, as soon as the Roman Senate gained new political authority under Constantine and his successors, its members crowded the political scene in the West. In these chapters, Rita Lizzi Testa makes much of her work – the fruit of decades of research –available in English for the first time. The focus is on the aristocratics' passion for aruspical science, the political use of exphrastic poems, and even their control of the hagiographic genre in the late sixth century. She demonstrates how Roman senators were chosen as legates to establish proactive relations with Christian emperors, their ministers and military commanders, and Eastern and Western provincial elites. Senators wove a web of relations in the Eastern and Western empires, sewing and stitching the empire's fabric with their diplomatic skills, wealth, and influence, while lively and highly litigious assembly activity still required of them a cultured rhetoric. Through employing astute political strategies, they maintained their privileges, including their own beliefs in ancient cults. Christian Emperors and Roman Elites in Late Antiquity provides a crucial collection for students and scholars of Late Antique history and religion, and of politics in the Late Roman Empire.

Download or read book Worshippers of the Gods written by Mattias P. Gassman and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-05-29 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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, actually arose as a Christian response to the eclectic, philosophical polytheism in vogue at Rome.