Ever since I traveled to Ethiopia as a child and saw its forms of Christianity, I’ve been fascinated with the ways that a religion that seems to be “pure” and ethereal actually gets mixed with folk traditions. I came to specialize in the ways that Egyptian Christianity became Egyptian. But I have also noted this phenomenon throughout religions: Buddhism, Judaism, and Islam all assimilated themselves to particular regions and village expressions. This dynamic exchange between the “great tradition” and resilient local traditions is fascinating to trace even today when many leaders claim that nothing exists except for pure religious teaching. But historians of religions know that every religion is constantly “syncretizing.”
This engaging and delightfully written little book considers how we, as readers and “observers” of the changing Roman world, should think about the changes that came with Christian domination.
How do historians of the time—both Christian and non-Christian—try to “control the narrative” with literary motifs? How, on the other hand, can we be sure that the religion spread across the countryside? And what were those strange holy men doing?
The Christianisation of the Roman world lies at the root of modern Europe, yet at the time it was a tentative and piecemeal process. Peter Brown's study examines the factors which proved decisive and the compromises which made the emergence of the Christian 'thought world' possible. He shows how contemporary narratives wavered between declarations of definitive victory and a sombre sense of the strength of the pre-Christian past, reflecting the hopes and fears of different generations faced with different social and political situations. He examines the social factors which muted the sharp intolerance which pervades the contemporary literary evidence, and…
This rich book lays out the vivid (and extensive) evidence for mixtures of Christianity and village traditions all over the post-Constantinian world (feasts and sacrifices, local saints and spirits, sacred trees and fountains).
Clearly, the notion of “the conversion of the Empire” is a vast overstatement since the Christianities we discover in early Christian literature and archaeology are highly idiosyncratic.
The slaughter of animals for religious feasts, the tinkling of bells to ward off evil during holy rites, the custom of dancing in religious services-these and many other pagan practices persisted in the Christian church for hundreds of years after Constantine proclaimed Christianity the one official religion of Rome. In this book, Ramsay MacMullen investigates the transition from paganism to Christianity between the fourth and eighth centuries. He reassesses the triumph of Christianity, contending that it was neither tidy nor quick, and he shows that the two religious systems were both vital during an interactive period that lasted far longer…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
Where most people imagine Christian belief and experience as something that takes place in the heart and mind, Cox Miller looks at the many ways that early Christianity worked through the senses.
Touch and taste, the visual experience of spectacle and image, the scents of churches and tombs, and the powerful presence of material “things” like relics all rendered Christianity a religion of physical experience more than mindful faith.
With few exceptions, the scholarship on religion in late antiquity has emphasized its tendencies toward transcendence, abstraction, and spirit at the expense of matter. In The Corporeal Imagination, Patricia Cox Miller argues instead that ancient Christianity took a material turn between the fourth and seventh centuries. During this period, Miller contends, there occurred a major shift in the ways in which the human being was oriented in relation to the divine, a shift that reconfigured the relationship between materiality and meaning in a positive direction.
The Corporeal Imagination is a groundbreaking investigation into the theological poetics of material substance in…
Frank discusses the experiential world of Christian laity (rather than the literate elite) during the late Antique and Byzantine periods. What constituted the Christian religion for them? What were the key Christian experiences?
What sorts of things stimulated the senses—smells, sounds, touches? I love this book because it is beautifully written and prompts me to consider aspects of the early Christian experience I might not have considered, such as what it’s like to participate in a nocturnal (all-night) vigil or to carry a lamp in a procession.
What can we know about the everyday experiences of Christians during the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries? How did non-elite men and women, enslaved, freed, and free persons, who did not renounce sex or choose voluntary poverty become Christian? They neither led a religious community nor did they live in entirely Christian settings. In this period, an age marked by "extraordinary" Christians-wonderworking saints, household ascetics, hermits, monks, nuns, pious aristocrats, pilgrims, and bishops-ordinary Christians went about their daily lives, in various occupations, raising families, sharing households, kitchens, and baths in religiously diverse cities. Occasionally they attended church liturgies, sought out…
As a Veteran, I once dismissed Christianity, viewing it as outdated and irrelevant.
But as I witness the West sliding into chaos, I realize how wrong I was. It is no accident that Christianity is under assault while the West is being overwhelmed by a cultural virus that sows discord…
A vast amount of amulets come from the early Christian period in which the potent deeds and names of Christ, angels, apostles, and even Scripture passages were inscribed on papyri to be rolled up and worn or slipped in some part of the house.
These materials essentially made the stories and the scripture of Christianity into components of healing or protective magic (and some scholars have indeed suggested that such magical services constituted the actual context for the spread of Christianity). But who was responsible for these materials—for repurposing scripture and names as materials with concrete efficacy?
In this book, De Bruyn develops a picture of scribes dedicated not so much to the spread of the Gospel as the mediation of Christian scripture for material needs like health and fear.
Making Amulets Christian: Artefacts, Scribes, and Contexts examines Greek amulets with Christian elements from late antique Egypt in order to discern the processes whereby a customary practice--the writing of incantations on amulets--changed in an increasingly Christian context. It considers how the formulation of incantations and amulets changed as the Christian church became the prevailing religious institution in Egypt in the last centuries of the Roman empire. Theodore de Bruyn investigates what we can learn from incantations and amulets containing Christian elements about the cultural and social location of the people who wrote them. He shows how incantations and amulets were…
My book looks at Christianity as something that communities around the Near East, Europe, and the Mediterranean drew into their own cultures and traditions, adjusting the religion and making it fit into their own landscapes. I describe Christianities of the house, the workshop, and the mortuary practice. But in late antiquity, the two main “faces” of Christianity were holy men and the shrines of saints.
While both of these institutions brought people into contact with some Christian teachings, both holy men and saint shrines also appropriated local traditions of dreaming, amulet-making, animal sacrifice, or divination and augury. In such ways, Christianity was situated, localized, and rendered familiar to people.
