Inscribing Faith in Late Antiquity

Inscribing Faith in Late Antiquity
Author: Sean V. Leatherbury
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 424
Release: 2019-07-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 1000023338

Inscribing Faith in Late Antiquity considers the Greek and Latin texts inscribed in churches and chapels in the late antique Mediterranean (c. 300–800 CE), compares them to similar texts from pagan, Jewish, and Muslim spaces of worship, and explores how they functioned both textually and visually. These texts not only recorded the names and prayers of the faithful, but were powerful verbal and visual statements of cultural values and religious beliefs, conveying meaning through their words as well as through their appearances. In fact, the two were intimately connected. All of these texts – Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and pagan – acted visually, embracing their own materiality as mosaic, paint, or carved stone. Colourful and artfully arranged, the inscriptions framed human relationships with the divine, encouraged responses from readers, and made prayers material. In the first in-depth examination of the inscriptions as words and as images, the author reimagines the range of aesthetic, cultural, and religious experiences that were possible in spaces of worship. Inscribing Faith in Late Antiquity is essential reading for those interested in Roman, late antique, and Byzantine material and visual culture, inscriptions and other texts, and religious life in the ancient Mediterranean.

Early Christianity in Asia Minor and Cyprus

Early Christianity in Asia Minor and Cyprus
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2019-09-02
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9004410805

This volume is part of the Berlin Topoi project re-examing the early Christian history of Asia Minor, Greece and the South Balkans, and is concerned with the emergence of Christianity in Asia Minor and in Cyprus. Five essays focus on the east Anatolian provinces, including a comprehensive evaluation of early Christianity in Cappadocia, a comparative study of the Christian poetry of Gregory of Nazianzus and his anonymous epigraphic contemporaries and three essays which pay special attention to the hagiography of Cappadocia and Armenia Minor. The remaining essays include a new analysis of the role of Constantinople in episcopal elections across Asia Minor, a detailed appraisal of the archaeological evidence from Sagalassus in Pisidia, a discussion of the significance of inscriptions in Carian sanctuaries through late antiquity, and a survey of Christian inscriptions from Cyprus.

Review of Biblical Literature, 2021

Review of Biblical Literature, 2021
Author: Alicia J. Batten
Publisher: SBL Press
Total Pages: 564
Release: 2022-03-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0884145530

The annual Review of Biblical Literature presents a selection of reviews of the most recent books in biblical studies and related fields, including topical monographs, multi-author volumes, reference works, commentaries, and dictionaries. RBL reviews German, French, Italian, and English books and offers reviews in those languages.

The Routledge Handbook of Jews and Judaism in Late Antiquity

The Routledge Handbook of Jews and Judaism in Late Antiquity
Author: Catherine Hezser
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 746
Release: 2024-01-24
Genre: History
ISBN: 1315280957

This volume focuses on the major issues and debates in the study of Jews and Judaism in late antiquity (third to seventh century C.E.), providing cutting-edge surveys of the state of scholarship, main topics and research questions, methodological approaches, and avenues for future research. Based on both Jewish and non-Jewish literary and material sources, this volume takes an interdisciplinary approach involving historians of ancient Judaism, scholars of rabbinic literature, archaeologists, epigraphers, art historians, and Byzantinists. Developments within Jewish society and culture are viewed within the respective regional, political, cultural, and socioeconomic contexts in which they took place. Special focus is given to the impact of the Christianization of the Roman Empire on Jews, from administrative, legal, social, and cultural points of view. The contributors examine how the confrontation with Christianity changed Jewish practices, perceptions, and organizational structures, such as, for example, the emergence of local Jewish communities around synagogues as central religious spaces. Special chapters are devoted to the eastern and western Jewish Diaspora in Late Antiquity, especially Sasanian Persia but also Roman Italy, Egypt, Syria and Arabia, North Africa, and Asia Minor, to provide a comprehensive assessment of the situation and life experiences of Jews and Judaism during this period. The Routledge Handbook of Jews and Judaism in Late Antiquity is a critical and methodologically sophisticated survey of current scholarship aimed primarily at students and scholars of Jewish Studies, Study of Religions, Patristics, Classics, Roman and Byzantine Studies, Iranology, History of Art, and Archaeology. It is a valuable resource for anyone interested in Judaism and Jewish history.

Empires of Faith in Late Antiquity

Empires of Faith in Late Antiquity
Author: Jaś Elsner
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 533
Release: 2020-03-19
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1108473075

Explores the problems for studying art and religion in Eurasia arising from ancestral, colonial and post-colonial biases in historiography.

Ecphrastic Shields in Graeco-Roman Literature

Ecphrastic Shields in Graeco-Roman Literature
Author: Karel Thein
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 373
Release: 2021-09-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 1000457419

This volume takes a fresh look at ekphrasis as a textual practice closely connected to our embodied imagination and its verbal dimension; it offers the first detailed study of a large family of ancient ecphrastic shields, often studied separately, but never as an ensemble with its own development. The main objective consists of establishing a theoretical and historical framework that is applied to a series of famous ecphrastic shields starting with the Homeric shield of Achilles. The latter is reinterpreted as a paradigmatic "thing" whose echoing down the centuries is reinforced by the fundamental connection between ekphrasis and artefacts as its primary objects. The book demonstrates that although the ancient sources do not limit ekphrasis to artificial creations, the latter are most efficient in bringing out the intimate affinity between artefacts and vivid mental images as two kind of entities that lack a natural scale and are rightly understood as ontologically unstable. Ecphrastic Shields in Graeco-Roman Literature: The World’s Forge should be read by those interested in ancient culture, art and philosophy, but also by those fascinated by the broader issue of imagination and by the interplay between the natural and the artificial.

Inscribing Texts in Byzantium

Inscribing Texts in Byzantium
Author: Marc D. Lauxtermann
Publisher: Publications of the Society for the Promotion of Byzantine Studies
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2020
Genre: Inscriptions, Byzantine
ISBN: 9780367246136

Topics in this volume of the Proceedings of the 49th SPBS Spring Symposium include: Byzantine attitudes towards the inscribed word, the context and function of epigraphic evidence, the levels of formality and authority, the material aspect of writing, and the verbal, visual and symbolic meaning of inscribed texts.

Shaping Letters, Shaping Communities: Multilingualism and Linguistic Practice in the Late Antique Near East and Egypt

Shaping Letters, Shaping Communities: Multilingualism and Linguistic Practice in the Late Antique Near East and Egypt
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 378
Release: 2023-12-11
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9004682333

The volume explores linguistic practices and choices in the late antique Eastern Mediterranean. It investigates how linguistic diversity and change influenced the social dimension of human interaction, affected group dynamics, the expression and negotiation of various communal identities, such as professional groups of mosaic-makers, stonecutters, or their supervisors in North Syria, bilingual monastic communities in Palestine, elusive producers of Coptic ritual texts in Egypt, or Jewish communities in Dura Europos and Palmyra. The key question is: what do we learn about social groups and human individuals by studying their multilingualism and language practices reflected in epigraphic and other written sources?

The Oxford Handbook of Roman Epigraphy

The Oxford Handbook of Roman Epigraphy
Author: Christer Bruun
Publisher:
Total Pages: 929
Release: 2015
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 0195336461

The study of inscriptions is critical for anyone seeking to understand the Roman world, whether they regard themselves as literary scholars, historians, archaeologists, anthropologists, or religious scholars. The Oxford Handbook of Roman Epigraphy is the fullest collection of scholarship on the study and history of Latin epigraphy produced to date.

Stories between Christianity and Islam

Stories between Christianity and Islam
Author: Reyhan Durmaz
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 277
Release: 2022-10-25
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0520386477

Stories between Christianity and Islam offers an original and nuanced understanding of Christian–Muslim relations that shifts focus from discussions of superiority, conflict, and appropriation to the living world of connectivity and creativity. Here, the late antique and medieval Near East is viewed as a world of stories shared by Christians and Muslims. Public storytelling was a key feature for these late antique Christian and early Islamic communities, where stories of saints were used to interpret the past, comment on the present, and envision the future. In this book, Reyhan Durmaz uses these stories to demonstrate and analyze the mutually constitutive relationship between these two religions in the Middle Ages. With an in-depth study of storytelling in Late Antiquity and the mechanisms of hagiographic transmission between Christianity and Islam in the Middle Ages, Durmaz develops a nuanced understanding of saints’ stories as a tool for building identity, memory, and authority across confessional boundaries.