Michael Stausberg, Steven Engler (edd.), The Routledge Handbook of Research Methods in the Study of Religion, 2nd, substantially rev. ed., London: Routledge, 2022
The historical approach is central to „Religion and urbanity“ and is brought into focus in this c... more The historical approach is central to „Religion and urbanity“ and is brought into focus in this contribution.The Routledge Handbook has established itself as an important tool for advanced students and researchers across the discipline of Religious Studies. Eleven years after its first appearance, the new edition features a number of new chapters and has dropped older ones. The engagement with text and historiographical accounts as an important element in any enterprise of historicizing religion has kept a central place and is now introducing new and more extended examples. History as presented here is a method of research that focuses on changes of the objects delineated by concepts and interests formulated by researchers. Such historicization is not necessarily an approach shared by the historical objects and the textual or material evidence employed as ‘sources’. The chapter explores the interaction between the researcher’s historical and historiographical praxis with notions of change, of the past, and historical narratives. It argues that such narratives might already frame the researchers’ definition of their research questions. The chapter addresses the genesis of historical narratives and other media typically employed as ‘sources’ and looks into the reasons why religious actors might historicize themselves or attribute a history to their gods. This leads to questions of source identification and source criticism, exemplified by a Christian ‘canonical’ text. Discourse analysis, hermeneutics, and philological methods come into play as well as network analysis and structuralism. Finally, the author discusses the interests that have informed historical research.
Uploads
Articles by Joerg Ruepke
Then and now, imperial expedition and internal treason, permanent and temporary absence, burying outside and loving inside, admission to and exclusion from sacralised and gendered space and finally the vertical dimension of life’s above and death’s below explore these limits and transfers and constitute the urbanity of the city as well as the urbanity of religion.
with analyzing characteristics of urban environments and their
impact on religious forms of communication. Yet this notion was
not necessarily designed to apply only to the city and related
phenomena exclusively observed in city spaces. Practices, beliefs,
even institutions developing as urban religion spread out beyond
the city. Thus, the geography of lived urban religion and of
agents of urbanity is different from what the same people
imagine and geographically locate as city space. This article
intends to develop the conceptual tools for analyzing this
blurring of boundaries produced by religious semantics,
discourses and practices interacting with implicit and explicit
border-constructions linked to practices of ‘urbanity’. The highly
debated ‘urban’ or ‘anti-urban’ character of ancient Christianities
serves as our point of departure for developing comparative tools.
emotional and explicitly sexual relationships with Venus in a
language mobilising towards radical ways to live. Criminal actions
from prayer attacks to the use of poisons were considered and
imagined as being performed in this literature. Whereas the
phenomenon of militia amoris – sexual relationships of men to
women framed as military service – has been studied extensively,
it has never been analysed in a framework of the History of
Religion. Given the widespread reception of such texts and the
rise of concepts of militia Christiana in the later Empire, a closer
look at these texts is necessary. Focusing on Horace, Odes 4.1,
this article inquires into his construction of the interplay of total
devotion and emotions, which lies at the basis of performances
of this text, and into the coherency of the religious framework
developed in the poetry.
the unpublished papers and the works of his doctoral students, the article is able to reconstruct a more nuanced image of his position beyond confessional priming and polemics.
The article suggests focusing on identifying strategies of religious action as are hidden behind, or lost through, the use of terminological shorthand and basing comparison on these strategies rather than on a typology of rituals grounded in a language that is part of these strategies, rather than their precondition.
be shown that such an entanglement has consequences for the neglect of the end of
religious practices or groups. Against this background an analytical grid for change and discontinuation of different dimensions of “religion” will be offered and exemplified in an analysis of the “end of Paganism” in the late ancient Roman Empire. The most problematic implications of such narratives, the article will argue, are assumptions about the coherence of the religious protagonists brought center-stage.
Abstract: Contrary to a concept of "belief" that seems too Christian, ancient religion has been understood in recent decades mainly as part of political identity and political strategies: a system of rules that regulates people's duties towards the gods and, at the same time, links them to their polity: "civic religion". The "votive", the "gift of consecration", seems to confirm this finding even for individual religious action. The article proposes a change of perspective: Focusing on the use of objects in communication between humans and gods shows that even ancient religious practice was above all "lived religion", which changed again and again.
Each volume will consist of three issues a year, each of approximately 130 pages in length. It will include an editorial, five to seven main articles, and book reviews. All articles and contributions that exceed 8 pages in length will be double-blind peer-reviewed. All articles and contributions will be in English.
The first issues will deal with "Lived Religion: Appropriations of Religion and Meanings in Situations" (1.1, March 2015) "Understanding Objects in Religious Contexts" (1.2, October 2015) and with "Practices and Groups," bringing together studies on textual and archaeological material from all areas of the Mediterranean.
Co-editors are Reinhard Feldmeier (Göttingen), Karen L. King (Harvard, MA), Rubina Raja (Aarhus), Annette Yoshiko Reed (Philadelphia, PA), Christoph Riedweg (Zürich), Jörg Rüpke (Erfurt), Seth Schwartz (New York, NY), Christopher Smith (Rome), Markus Vinzent (London)
The advisory board is formed by Nicole Belayche (Paris), Kimberly Bowes (Rome), Richard Gordon (Erfurt), Gesine Manuwald (London), Volker Menze (Budapest), Maren Niehoff (Jerusalem), George H. van Kooten (Groningen), Moulie Vidas (Princeton, NJ), Greg Woolf (St Andrews)
Then and now, imperial expedition and internal treason, permanent and temporary absence, burying outside and loving inside, admission to and exclusion from sacralised and gendered space and finally the vertical dimension of life’s above and death’s below explore these limits and transfers and constitute the urbanity of the city as well as the urbanity of religion.
with analyzing characteristics of urban environments and their
impact on religious forms of communication. Yet this notion was
not necessarily designed to apply only to the city and related
phenomena exclusively observed in city spaces. Practices, beliefs,
even institutions developing as urban religion spread out beyond
the city. Thus, the geography of lived urban religion and of
agents of urbanity is different from what the same people
imagine and geographically locate as city space. This article
intends to develop the conceptual tools for analyzing this
blurring of boundaries produced by religious semantics,
discourses and practices interacting with implicit and explicit
border-constructions linked to practices of ‘urbanity’. The highly
debated ‘urban’ or ‘anti-urban’ character of ancient Christianities
serves as our point of departure for developing comparative tools.
emotional and explicitly sexual relationships with Venus in a
language mobilising towards radical ways to live. Criminal actions
from prayer attacks to the use of poisons were considered and
imagined as being performed in this literature. Whereas the
phenomenon of militia amoris – sexual relationships of men to
women framed as military service – has been studied extensively,
it has never been analysed in a framework of the History of
Religion. Given the widespread reception of such texts and the
rise of concepts of militia Christiana in the later Empire, a closer
look at these texts is necessary. Focusing on Horace, Odes 4.1,
this article inquires into his construction of the interplay of total
devotion and emotions, which lies at the basis of performances
of this text, and into the coherency of the religious framework
developed in the poetry.
the unpublished papers and the works of his doctoral students, the article is able to reconstruct a more nuanced image of his position beyond confessional priming and polemics.
The article suggests focusing on identifying strategies of religious action as are hidden behind, or lost through, the use of terminological shorthand and basing comparison on these strategies rather than on a typology of rituals grounded in a language that is part of these strategies, rather than their precondition.
be shown that such an entanglement has consequences for the neglect of the end of
religious practices or groups. Against this background an analytical grid for change and discontinuation of different dimensions of “religion” will be offered and exemplified in an analysis of the “end of Paganism” in the late ancient Roman Empire. The most problematic implications of such narratives, the article will argue, are assumptions about the coherence of the religious protagonists brought center-stage.
Abstract: Contrary to a concept of "belief" that seems too Christian, ancient religion has been understood in recent decades mainly as part of political identity and political strategies: a system of rules that regulates people's duties towards the gods and, at the same time, links them to their polity: "civic religion". The "votive", the "gift of consecration", seems to confirm this finding even for individual religious action. The article proposes a change of perspective: Focusing on the use of objects in communication between humans and gods shows that even ancient religious practice was above all "lived religion", which changed again and again.
Each volume will consist of three issues a year, each of approximately 130 pages in length. It will include an editorial, five to seven main articles, and book reviews. All articles and contributions that exceed 8 pages in length will be double-blind peer-reviewed. All articles and contributions will be in English.
The first issues will deal with "Lived Religion: Appropriations of Religion and Meanings in Situations" (1.1, March 2015) "Understanding Objects in Religious Contexts" (1.2, October 2015) and with "Practices and Groups," bringing together studies on textual and archaeological material from all areas of the Mediterranean.
Co-editors are Reinhard Feldmeier (Göttingen), Karen L. King (Harvard, MA), Rubina Raja (Aarhus), Annette Yoshiko Reed (Philadelphia, PA), Christoph Riedweg (Zürich), Jörg Rüpke (Erfurt), Seth Schwartz (New York, NY), Christopher Smith (Rome), Markus Vinzent (London)
The advisory board is formed by Nicole Belayche (Paris), Kimberly Bowes (Rome), Richard Gordon (Erfurt), Gesine Manuwald (London), Volker Menze (Budapest), Maren Niehoff (Jerusalem), George H. van Kooten (Groningen), Moulie Vidas (Princeton, NJ), Greg Woolf (St Andrews)
at the University Library of Halle/Saale. It is an important document of
his view of religious changes in the Roman Empire. Not new in substance,
but important in the selection of data and accents made, it could also serve as an introduction for a non-German speaking audience to his work "Religion und Kultus der Römer" (Munich 1902/1912), the
translation into English of which was planned but stopped short by World
War I and subsequent developments.
This volume provides a compelling view of central aspects of cult and religion in the Roman Empire, among them the distinction between public and private cult, the complex interrelations between different religious traditions, their mutually entangled developments and expansions, and the diversity of regional differences, rituals, religious texts and artefacts.
This book radically rethinks and critically engages with these biases. It does so by offering neither an abridged global history of religion nor a small handbook of methodology. Instead, this book presents concepts and methods that allow the analysis of contemporary and past religious practices, ideas, and institutions within a shared framework.
The starting point is still today's "many-towered Erfurt", as it was called in the Middle Ages. In seven short chapters, it becomes clear how much fun it is to dive into the city's history as a story of religious and urbanistic change. To put oneself in the living worlds of past epochs on the basis of what one sees today. The common thread for the selection is the colour blue, which stands for the water of the Gera, Mary's cloak, woad and more: The book also wants to surprise with unusual perspectives.
Die blaue Stadt (The Blue City) was produced in the Kolleg research group "Religion and Urbanity: Mutual Formations", which is based at the Max Weber Kolleg of the University of Erfurt and has been funded by the German Research Foundation since 2018. How urbanity and religion influence each other is being investigated here comparatively, especially for Europe and South Asia. The question is also discussed in the context of regular "City Walks" in Erfurt, in which sociologists, historians, archaeologists, urban researchers and religious scholars participate. -
Erfurt, die Blaue Stadt lädt ein zu Ausflügen, zu Fuß oder – dank der vielen Bilder - im Kopf. Nicht einen weiteren touristischen oder historischen Führer haben die Autorinnen und Autoren am Max-Weber-Kolleg der Universität Erfurt hier in Deutsch und Englisch vorgelegt. Vielmehr einen Versuch, Stadt und diese Stadt zu verstehen. Was schafft städtische Atmosphäre seit über tausend Jahren, was hält sie trotz aller Herausforderungen, trotz aller Unterschiede zusammen? Und: wie sieht man das im heutigen Stadtbild?
Ausgangspunkt ist das noch heute „vieltürmige Erfurt“, wie es im Mittelalter genannt wurde. In sieben kurzen Kapiteln wird deutlich, wieviel Spaß es macht, in die Stadtgeschichte als eine Geschichte religiöser und urbanistischer Veränderungen einzutauchen. Sich anhand dessen, was man heute sieht, in die Lebenswelten vergangener Epochen zu versetzen. Den roten Faden für die Auswahl bildet die Farbe Blau, die für das Wasser der Gera, den Umhang Mariens, Waid und Weiteres steht: Das Buch will auch überraschen mit ungewohnten Perspektiven.
Die blaue Stadt entstand in der Kolleg-Forschungsgruppe „Religion und Urbanität: Wechselseitige Formierungen“, die am Max-Weber-Kolleg der Universität Erfurt angesiedelt ist und von der Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft seit 2018 gefördert wird. Wie Urbanität und Religion sich wechselseitig beeinflussen, wird hier vergleichend, vor allem für Europa und Südasien untersucht.
Religion is identified as having played an important part in several instances of Roman warfare and expansion, but the broader spectrum of its role has never been addressed. This book seeks to fill that gap. It undertakes a survey of all rituals, and religious institutions in a broader sense, along with discourses related to warfare, whether in a more general sense or as part of the actual pursuit of war. Priests and senators, generals and soldiers, men and women are acknowledged as agents having not only very different competencies, interests, and experiences, but also different opportunities to leave material traces or textual reflections of their activities. A particular strength of the book is that it pays attention to developments in time as well as space. Practices and beliefs are treated as historical phenomena, subject to historical processes of change. Thus the book is as interested in identifying the formative periods of rituals such as the military oath, the fetials’ role in declaring war, or the erection of monuments, as it is in following the development of such institutions through changes in the processes of state-formation and middle- and late-republican competition, and the establishment of monarchic (imperial) rule. It seeks to reconstruct the “religious construction of war” in Rome, not as a unified cultural fact, but as a tool and an attitude caught up in a process of change.
Central theses
The book persists in addressing the ways in which specific religious concepts might further or impede the pursuit of power and obedience to power, sharpen or mitigate internal competition, be conducive or not to the integration of allied powers, without ever claiming to “explain” military success or expansion. Arguing from an anthropological perspective, the book develops three central claims:
- The conceptualization of war in religious and above all ritual terms established “war” as a spatial rather than a temporal category. Rome, domi, “home”, was a zone of (nearly) permanent peace. Correspondingly, militiae, the realm where military rules reigned, and soldiers necessarily owed total obedience to their superiors, was a permanent spatial category, in times both of war and peace.
- Religious rituals above all were the means of crossing the dividing line, of turning citizens into soldiers, and retranslating military success into domestic prestige. More than this, the religious construction of war was instrumental in controlling that process of translation and retranslation.
- Whereas the Republic focused its religious construction of war on the person of the general, the imperator, the new imperial monarch could make use of the same mechanism in order to centralize and exert military command even while he in person remained “at home”.
Warum wurde Religion im Laufe der römischen Kaiserzeit immer wichtiger? Anstatt von „Religionen“ auszugehen, blickt dieses Buch auf die Vielfalt gelebter antiker Religion und auf die Auswirkungen des umfassenden politischen Großraumes, des Imperium Romanum. In dieser Spannung, so die These, werden neue Normen religiösen Handelns entwickelt. Urbanisierung, Reichsbildung und Selbst-Bildung erweisen sich als die entscheidenden Faktoren religiöser Transformation.
ISBN 978-3-11-063740-3
Drawing on a vast range of literary and archaeological evidence, Pantheon shows how Roman religion shaped and was shaped by its changing historical contexts from the ninth century BCE to the fourth century CE. Because religion was not a distinct sphere in the Roman world, the book treats religion as inseparable from political, social, economic, and cultural developments. The narrative emphasizes the diversity of Roman religion; offers a new view of central concepts such as “temple,” “altar,” and “votive”; reassesses the gendering of religious practices; and much more. Throughout, Pantheon draws on the insights of modern religious studies, but without “modernizing” ancient religion. With its unprecedented scope and innovative approach, Pantheon is an unparalleled account of ancient Roman and Mediterranean religion.
Utilizzando con sapienza fonti letterarie e riscontri archeologici, Rüpke dimostra come la religione romana abbia modellato e sia stata modellata dal mutare dei contesti storici dal ix secolo a.C. al iv d.C. Nel mondo romano essa non costituiva una sfera a sé stante, ed è quindi necessario collocarla sempre in relazione con gli sviluppi politici, sociali, economici e culturali. L'autore sottolinea ogni peculiarità della religione romana, presentando, tra l'altro, una nuova visione di concetti centrali quali «tempio» e «altare», e dei ruoli maschili e femminili nelle pratiche religiose.
Un saggio innovativo e completo, che si basa sulle recenti ricerche degli studi religiosi, sempre attento a non «modernizzare» la religione antica, illustrandone tutte le forme all'interno di un «pantheon» complessivo.I. Una storia della religione
1. Cosa significa una storia della religione mediterranea?
2. Religione
3. Aspetti della competenza religiosa
L’agire religioso
Identità religiosa
Comunicazione religiosa
4. La religione come strategia individuale
II. Rivoluzione dei mezzi di comunicazione nell’Italia dell’età del ferro (IX-VII secolo a.C.)
1. Lo speciale
La religione della prima età del ferro: considerazioni metodologiche
2. Il passaggio dall’età del bronzo all’età del ferro nell’area mediterranea
Lo spazio
Modelli di sviluppo ed evoluzioni
3. Depositi
4. Sepolture
5. Dèi, immagini e banchetti
Immagini
Templi e differenziazione religiosa
III. Infrastruttura religiosa (VII-V secolo a.C.)
1. Case per gli dèi
Innovazione
Investimenti
2. Tempio o altare?
Comunicazione religiosa
3. Dinamiche di VI e V secolo
Investire nella religione
IV. Pratiche religiose (VI-III secolo a.C.)
1. L’uso del corpo
Di chi è quella testa?
Continuando a parlare
Voti
2. Sacralizzazione
Classificazioni
Strategie
3. Rituali complessi
Calendari
4. Narrazioni e immagini
V. Attori: appropriazione e formazione delle pratiche religiose (V-I secolo a.C.)
1. Eterarchia e aristocrazia
2. Sacerdoti
Le vergini di Vesta
Pontefici e auguri
3. Distinzione
Carriere sacerdotali
La costruzione del tempio
4. La cultura del banchetto
Bacco
5. Comunicazione di massa
Giochi
Guerre
La guerra a Roma
6. Il divino
Auspici
Religione della polis
VI. Parlare e scrivere di religione (III-I secolo a.C.)
1. La testualità del rituale
Disciplina etrusca
2. Osservare se e l’altro
Miti e critica dei miti
3. Sistematizzazione
Storiografia e norme
Conoscenza e autorità
“Religione”
VII. La duplicazione della religione nell’epoca di passaggio augustea (I secolo a.C. – I secolo d.C.)
1. Restaurazione come innovazione
Augusto
Reti
Rituali
Rarefazione della religione
2. Religione nello spazio
Edilizia templare
3. Duplicazione della religione
Monete
Statue e calendari
Testi
VIII. Religione vissuta (I-II secolo d.C.)
1. Gli individui nella loro relazione col mondo
2. Casa e famiglia
Combinazioni
3. Imparare ad agire religiosamente
4. Luoghi dell’esperienza religiosa
Camere da letto
Giardini
Tombe
Progetti di edilizia sepolcrale
5. Dèi domestici
Lari
6. Religione vissuta anziché culti domestici
IX. Nuovi dèi (I secolo a.C. – I secolo d.C.)
1. Condizioni generali
2. Iside e Serapide
3. Augusti: l’iniziativa
Istituzioni
Controllo
Presenza e assenza
4. Il sé
5. Riepilogo
X. Esperti e fornitori (I-III secolo d.C.)
1. Autorità religiosa
2. Esperte ed esperti
3. “Sacerdoti pubblici” e innovazione religiosa
4. Profeti e visionari di entrambi i sessi
5. Fondatori di religione
6. Cambiamenti
XI. Comunità immaginarie, comunità reali (I-III secolo d.C.)
1. Comunità testuali
Costruire gruppi attraverso i testi
Testualizzazione della religione
2. Narrazioni
L’impero romano come cornice narrativa
Schemi biografici
Diversificazioni narrative e l’allargamento delle reti
3. Storicizzazioni e l’origine del cristianesimo
Contesti giudaici
L’invenzione del cristianesimo
4. Esperienze religiose e identità
XII. Linee di confine e comunità (III-IV secolo d.C.)
1. Il valore di mercato della conoscenza religiosa
2. Attori politici
Interessi per il potere
3. Come trattare la differenza
Epica biblica
4. In concorrenza
XIII. Epilogo
Ringraziamenti
In such a perspective the normative and frequently hysterically critical texts from antiquity are not only documents of a discourse about deviance that is constructing public norms, but they are offering a window into actual individual behaviour. Thus, the book is able to demonstrate that individual appropriations of religion are a powerful factor for those changes that we term history of Roman religion.
In anschaulichen Bildern und einprägsamen Beispielen werden die Techniken und Strategien der Texte wie die kulturellen und historischen Voraussetzungen ihrer Verfasser beleuchtet. Jörg Rüpke erschließt ebenso die historische Quellenlage wie literaturwissenschaftliche Zugänge zu diesen Texten.
Four aspects will be focused upon in this chapter, which will trace the processes of institutionali- sation of priesthoods from the fifth century to the end of the Republic. This entails (i) considera- tion of legislative regulations, implicit norms and recruitment strategies; (ii) concentrating on sacerdotia publica, a discussion of the institutional form of the priestly within its social and cultural context; (iii) a deepening of this attempt at contextualisation by analysing conflicts with and between priests from the end of the third century onwards and thus mapping individual space for the appropriation of priestly roles and their function in the distinction of patricians and plebeians; and finally, (iv) an analysis of the role of divination in general, and the augurs in particular, in the process of political deliberation and decision- making, thus bringing us to the heart of politics.
This chapter will explore the forms and media of the articulation and experience of such diversity. How, when, and how often did differences become visible? How and where were they articulated as differences? What were the metaphors and concepts to create or bridge plurality?
Part of this development, triggered by processes of urban growth as described above, but also related to political and social changes, was the incremental development of religious groups and identities. How did such developments feed into notions of the quality and quantity of diversity and religious pluralism? How did they trigger intersectoral repercussions? By taking a longer period into consideration, the chapter tries to identify possibilities and dangers inherent to situations and places of “cohabitation.”
con le contingenze e quali sono le sue capacità di integrazione. L’immagine che ne emerge, in cui religione e guerra si rafforzano reciprocamente, non dovrebbe essere considerata un’affermazione definitiva: è invece una conseguenza dell’approccio metodologico e può essere tanto facilmente smentita quanto provata in una moltitudine di singoli casi. È per questo che solo una concreta ricerca storica può risultare significativa: a che punto del corso della guerra, in quali forme, e soprattutto, in quali segmenti del complesso sistema rappresentato dalla «religione», o più precisamente per conto di chi, le funzioni politiche della religione sono percepibili?
In scholarship, by talking about “imperial cult” attention is paid to the political value at the centre and the diffusion of the practice from the centre to a geographically defined periphery. Instead, I will focus on the option offered by these religious practices to bottom-up initiatives. Even if the narrative starts at the centre, Rome (1), it is a narrative about initiatives from the fringes, it is a narrative about giving permanency and visibility to such communication in the form of dedications, monumentalized inscriptions, temples or foundations for smaller or larger (festivals) rituals on the edge of empire (2). This is not to claim that these practices were specific or even exclusive to social or geographical peripheries. Such a claim would easily contradicted by the participation of members of the imperial family at Rome or provincial governors. However, such practices were open also to the peripheries and particularly attractive there, as can be seen from the absolute and relative numbers of the surviving evidence. It is the specific interaction, imagined as well as real, between centre(s) and peripheries that is of interest here. Thus, my analysis is also one about the attempts at the centre to control such practices (3). Throughout, the analysis will try to reconstruct motives for engaging in such actions and trans-regional communications and institutionalisations that were framing and informing such choices. Finally, I will return to specific spatial aspects and the locations of the agents involved (4)
by the individual? This fundamental question lies behind any approach
to ancient Mediteraenean religion that deals with individual agency in religious
contexts, from an elite’s self-styled sacra publica (‘rituals on behalf of the commonwealth’)
to groupings centring on a god, secta dei (‘sect of the God’, as Tertullian
says).
The high social and material investment involved in the construction of initially
less plausible contemporaries (or ‘counterintuitive agents’ in the terminology
of evolutionary theories of religion) and in the project of producing relevant
communication with them seems to produce, time and again, a surplus of
self-stabilisation, power, or the capacity to solve problems. And it is immediately
rendered precarious and contested due to the shifting of positions, of prestige,
and even of the power produced by success. Sacralisations, that is, engaging in
the risky type of communication described as religious above, within the otherwise
unquestioned plausible and evident environment, are elements of such strategic
action.
with different agents and time-lines in varying social contexts.
those affected by their actions? What powers did religious experts dispose of, which allowed or enabled them to exceed the remit of their duty? What factors prompted them to seek to modify the tasks that they were expected to perform? Any decision to exceed the remit of one’s duty implied some degree of challenge to existing power arrangements or institutional frameworks.
Taking as its starting point the concept of ‘materialities and meanings’, this volume explores how human perceptions and understanding of magnified and miniaturized forms and structures are shaped and changed, both synchronically and diachronically, by our understanding of the human body and its size, and the impact that this has in our relationship with the wider world in the context of ritual practices. The chapters collected here consider a range of questions, from a discussion on the essentials of magnification or miniaturization to an exploration of the impact of such strategies on humans and their wider socio-political ramifications. Together, these chapters contribute to a unique discussion that offers new insights into ‘materialities and meanings’, the creation of items for ritual, and the ways in which they influence human perception and understanding.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
List of Illustrations
Abbreviations
1. Magnification and Miniaturization in Religious Communication in Antiquity and Modernity: Materialities and Meanings
Elisabeth Begemann, Diana Pavel, Georgia Petridou, Rubina Raja, Anna-Katharina Rieger, and Jörg Rüpke
Miniaturization
2. Look Closely and You Will See: The Banqueting Tesserae from Palmyra and Small-Scale Iconography
Rubina Raja
3. The Material Record of Micro-Shares: An Archaeological Case Study on Sanctuary Transactions in Ancient Sicily
Natascha Sojc
4. What Do Tiny Objects Want? A Case Study with Miniature Pottery from Pompeii
Anna-Katharina Rieger
5. Are the Same Objects Desirable for People and for Gods? Material and Dimensional Interchangeability
Elisabeth Trinkl
Monumentalization
6. Scaling Altars in the Etruscan Funerary Sphere
Diana Pavel
7. Urban Monumentality and Religion
Jörg Rüpke
8. Perceptions of Changing Religious Landscapes in Augustan Rome
Devmini Malka Wijeratne
9. The King and the Population as Protagonists of the Oath: Intermediatory Semantics in Ancient Near Eastern Treaties
Elena Malagoli
Domestic Space
10. Small, Versatile, Numinous: Pagan-Mythological Statuettes at the End of Antiquity
Ine Jacobs
11. The Dancing Deity: Diminishing the Goddess Libertas on the Palatine
Elisabeth Begemann
12. Di Penates: From Small Objects to Anthropomorphic Gods
Peter Scherrer
The Fragmented and the Augmented Body
13. The Eyes Have It: Materialities, Monumentality, and Meanings in Eye-shaped Modern Greek tamata and Ancient Greek anathemata
Georgia Petridou
14. A Triangle of Mary: Relating Religious Artefacts to Non-Religious Lorry Drivers
Manuel Moser
Index
come into play.
Starting with a systematic question on the possibility of
comparing worldviews (Hermann Deuser and Markus Kleinert), reflections
on and examples of comparisons beyond Western modernity are presented, such as regarding the need for decolonising social science research, partly with reference to India (Martin Fuchs, Antje Linkenbach and Beatrice Renzi), the concept and cultural meaning of “market” in China (Carsten Herrmann-Pillath, Qian Zhao), an alternative interpretation of Walter Benjamin from an East European perspective (Gábor Gángó), and the handling of death in ancient cities (Jörg Rüpke).
Practical conclusions for and from the cultural and social sciences are drawn in the third part, for example with regard to practices of sharing and exchange (Christoph Henning), the policies related to the concept of “refugee” (Nancy Alhachem), and the design of research sites such as Institutes for Advanced Study (Bettina Hollstein).
German cities in the early modern period, Jeddah, Mes Aynak, Ahmedabad, Amritsar
and movements of “spiritual urbanism” in modern India.
investing considerable human and material resources in expanding their territory.
Each, however, eventually had to stop expansion and come to terms with a shift to
defensive strategy. This volume explores the factors that facilitated Eurasian
empires’ expansion and contraction: from ideology to ecology, economic and
military considerations to changing composition of the imperial elites. Built around
a common set of questions, a team of leading specialists systematically compare a
broad set of Eurasian empires -from Achaemenid Iran, the Romans, Qin and Han
China, via the Caliphate, the Byzantines and the Mongols to the Ottomans,
Safavids, Mughals, Russians, and Ming and Qing China. The result is a state-of-the
art analysis of the major imperial enterprises in Eurasian history from antiquity to
the early modern that discerns both commonalities and differences in the empires’
spatial trajectories.
written by specialists from a variety of disciplinary contexts (Jewish Studies,
Theology, Classics, Early Christian Studies) dealing with the history of religion of the Mediterranean, West-Asian, and European area from the (late) Hellenistic period to the (early) Middle Ages and shaped by their intensive exchange. From the point of view of their respective fields of research, the contributors engage with discourses on agency, embodiment, appropriation and experience. They present innovative research in four fields also of theoretical debate, which are “Experiencing the Religious”, “Switching the Code”, „A Thing Called Body“ and “Commemorating the Moment”.
Advanced Cultural and Social Studies, Erfurt University). Combining a wide range of disciplinary approaches, methods and theories, the volume assembles over 50 contributions that explore and compare processes of religious individualisation in different religious environments and historical periods, in particular in Asia, the Mediterranean, and Europe from antiquity to the recent past.
Contrary to standard theories of modernisation, which tend to regard religious individualisation as a specifically modern or early modern as well as an essentially Western or Christian phenomenon, the chapters reveal processes of religious individualisation in a large variety of non-Western and pre-modern scenarios. Furthermore, the volume challenges prevalent views that regard religions primarily as collective phenomena and provides nuanced perspectives on the appropriation of religious agency, the pluralisation of religious options, dynamics of de-traditionalisation and privatisation, the development of elaborated notions of the self, the facilitation of religious deviance, and on the notion of dividuality.
Section 1: Forms of Imagining Divine Presences and of Referring to Divine Agents
Steven J. Friesen: Material Conditions for Seeing the Divine: The Temple of the Sebastoi at Ephesos and the Vision of the Heavenly Throne in Revelation 4–5 – Katharina Rieger: Imagining the Absent and Perceiving the Present: An Interpretation of Material Remains of Divinities from the Rock Sanctuary at Caesarea Philippi (Gaulantis) – Kristine Iara: Seeing the Gods in Late Antique Rome – Jörg Rüpke: Not Gods Alone: on the Visibility of Religion and Religious Specialists in Ancient Rome
Section 2: Modes of Image Creation and Appropriation of Iconographies and Visual Cues
Richard L. Gordon: Getting it Right: Performative Images in Greco-Egyptian Magical Practice – Marlis Arnhold: Imagining Mithras in Light of Iconographic Standardization and Individual Accentuation – Robin Jensen: The Polymorphous Jesus in Early Christian Image and Text – David Balch: Founders of Rome, of Athens, and of the Church: Romulus, Theseus, and Jesus. Theseus and Ariadne with Athena Visually Represented in Rome, Pompeii and Herculaneum
Section 3: Evocation of Specific Images in People’s Minds
Harry O. Maier: Seeing the Blood of God: The Triumphant Charade of Ignatius of Antioch the God-Bearer – Annette Weissenrieder: Space and Vision of the Divine: The Temple Imagery of the Epistle to the Ephesians – Brigitte Kahl: Citadel of the God(s) or Satan’s Throne: The Image of the Divine at the Great Altar of Pergamon between Ruler Religion and Apocalyptic Counter-Vision – Vernon K. Robbins: Kinetic Divine Concepts, the Baptist, and the Enfleshed Logos in the Prologue and Precreation Storyline of the Fourth Gospel
Als erste inter-und transdisziplinäre Arbeit richtet der vorliegende Band seinen Fokus auf die Bedeutung der visuellen Kultur in der Erforschung der klassischen, römischen und christlichen Antike. Er untersucht die Rolle des Bildlichen bei der Schaung einer Vorstellung von den Göttern und wie die Festlegung auf eine Sichtbarkeit des Göttlichen die antiken religiösen Praktiken, Rituale und Überzeugungen beeinusste. Die enthaltenen Aufsätze umfassen eine große Bandbreite von Fachgebieten wie Archäologie, Ikonologie, Kulturwissenschaften, visuelle Anthropologie, antike Rhetorik und Kognitionswissenschaft, um die visuellen Aspekte in den antiken Religionen von verschiedenen Blickwinkeln betrachten zu können. Dieses bahnbrechende Buch verspricht, die Diskussion um die Bedeutung und Rolle visueller Kultur für die Gestaltung der Religionen der Antike maßgeblich voranzubringen.
Full text available open access (see link)
Edited by Eric Rebillard and Jörg Rüpke
An edited collection on the subjective experience of religion
To understand the past, we necessarily group people together and, consequently, frequently assume that all of its members share the same attributes. In this ground-breaking volume, Eric Rebillard and Jörg Rüpke bring renowned scholars together to challenge this norm by seeking to rediscover the individual and to explore the dynamics between individuals and the groups to which they belong.
Instead of taking religious groups as their point of departure, the authors in Group Identity and Religious Individuality in Late Antiquity address the methodological challenges attached to a rescaling of the analysis at the level of the individual. In particular, they explore the tension between looking for evidence about individuals and taking individuals into account when looking at evidence. Too often, the lack of direct evidence on individuals is used as a justification for taking the group as the unit of analysis. However, evidence on group life can be read with individuals as the focal point. What it reveals is how complex is the interaction of group identity and religious individuality.
The questions examined by these authors include the complex relationships between institutional religions and religious individuals, the possibility of finding evidence on individual religiosity and exploring the multiplicity of roles and identities that characterizes every individual. Shifting the attention towards individuals also calls into question the assumption of groups and invites the study of group-making process. The result is a picture that makes room for dynamic tension between group identity and religious individuality.
The underlying concept of religion stresses individual experience at home as in the usage of public religious infrastructure ("lived religion" pace M. McGuire). Public religion is seen as the attempt at creating order and boundaries rather than a normative system only imperfectly reproduced by the citizens. Understanding of religion as “lived religion”, the chapters take a view on religion as informing experiences, as offering media of expressiveness, constantly informed by and at the same time construing shared and encoded meanings.
In terms of geographical and chronological range, the chapters will cover the whole Mediterranean area including distant Roman provinces from the archaic period down to late antiquity; insofar Jewish and Christian material will be covered, too. The chapters are focused on problems of reconstructing religion in the sense of experiences, actions, structures, occasionally beliefs and will offer exemplary case studies and discuss their generalization, thereby employing material from all over the ancient world.
Aims
The volume aims to help its readers
- develop an understanding of religion as “lived religion”, informing experiences, offering media of expressiveness, constantly informed by and at the same time construing shared and encoded meanings;
- develop an appreciation of the different dimensions of religiosity in antiquity;
- reflect about the relationship of material culture and religious practices and beliefs in different perspectives;
- relate features of sanctuaries, instruments and representation to basic as complex ritual procedures;
- acquire a broad range of methodological approaches to seemingly intransigent phenomena; the presuppositions and limits of these approaches will be made explicit;
- acquire knowledge about graphic presentations/analysis of usage of sites; and
- offer basic information about the most important types of religious localities and institutions (made accessible by a detailed index).
The volume has the ambition to explore the public-private distinction in religion and law in the ancient Mediterranean, with a particular focus on comparative study and historical change. When does the concept of private religion emerge, and why? What work does the concept perform, and how does it change? Is it related to concepts of private reflection in the philosophical tradition? Does private reflection occur in private spaces, and how are these related to changing understandings of the domestic? Are the distinctions drawn differently in the grand metropolitan centers, where individuals exist in more atomized relation to one another, than they are in mid-size municipalities? Do changes occur in relation to mere population growth or are they better indexed to some increase in heterogeneity? How does the Roman notion of the privatus stand in relation to the modern individual or the subject?
Contributions to the volume treat classical and Hellenistic Athens, Rabbinic Judaism, classical and Christian Rome, the early imperial Near East, and early Islam.
--
urn:nbn:de:0159-2020111702
Review of: Richard W. Burgess, Michael Kulikowski: Mosaics of Time. The Latin Chronicle Traditions from the First Century BC to the Sixth Century AD. Vol. 1: A Historical Introduction to the Chronicle Genre from its Origins to the High Middle Ages”
Die Ausschreibung ist nun veröffentlicht, es gibt ab 1.10. am Max-Weber Kolleg Erfurt und an der Uni Graz insgesamt 9 neue Positionen für Doktoratsstudierende, insbesondere der Altertumswissenschaften: http://dk-resonance.uni-graz.at
44th Tubingen Colloquium on 26 November, 1988, has
meanwhile resulted in a first publication, the
forthcoming chronological listing of the members of the
Roman priesthood over a period of some 800 years,
from about 300 B.C. to the end of the fith century A.D.
Close to 7000 data sets (inscriptions, texts) have yielded
some 1600 names of religious functionaries. The
handbook presents these by name in brief biographical
entries, as well as chronologically by their years of
office. The further aims of the project, cumulating into a
»Social History of Roman Religion«, are a calendar of
cult activities, an inventory of cult objects, a religious
onomastics, and an investigation of religious
socialisation. TUSTEP data formats and routines have
been employed for optimal organisation and
reorganisation of the data in the service of the project's
several objectives.
Roman religion as a system of religious rites, but at exploring
it in the processes of human practice. It temporahzes, regionalizes
and personalizes the extant source materials A pilot
project completed in 1988 has computerized 3,200 data sets
and utilized TUSTEP to analyse them
importance of visual culture in the study of classical, Roman, and Christian antiquity. It
explores the role of the visual in helping to create a vision of the gods and how commitment to
the visibility of the divine affected ancient religious practices, rituals, and beliefs. The essays
deploy a wide range of disciplines that include archaeology, iconology, cultural studies, visual
anthropology, the study of ancient rhetoric, and the cognitive sciences to consider the visual
aspects of ancient religion from a variety of angles. The contributors take up the role of the
visual in multiple contexts including domestic art, the imperial cult, martyrology, ritual practice,
and temples. This groundbreaking book, which includes essays by classicists, Roman historians,
archaeologists, biblical scholars, and scholars of ancient Christian iconography, promises to
advance the discussion of the importance and role of visual culture in shaping the religions of
antiquity in significant new ways.
European Academy of Religion Annual Conference Bologna, March 4-7 2019
Global history and the study of religion. New methodologies and historical trajectories
movements as an important if underexposed
aspect in research on the reciprocal formation of
religion and urbanity. It explores how new religious
groups in towns and cities make themselves
in/visible or are made in/visible. The workshop also
considers the impact this had on the urban space
and its multifarious conceptions.
https://urbrel.hypotheses.org/9752
The concept of ambivalence - in difference to diffusion, histori-cal dialectics, development, or progress - takes a synchronic stance and observes tensions and contradictions. It stresses conflict and constitutive ambiguity, bi-polar orders, bi-valence at any given moment. The opposition in a religious or urban ambivalence is neither dissolved in good and bad religion, good and bad urbanity nor are such ambivalences seen as ephemeral and transitory. When using such a concept in a research approach, complexity is predicted as a condition for survival of a city or religion rather than a critical state.
Even a quick glance at research literature demonstrates that cities and religion are characterised by contradictions or tensions. Even synchronously, and even in individual actors’ conceptions of urbanity or religion, both are internally com-plex and charged with tensions, and do not interact as two monoliths.
The complexity of urbanity can be seen as constitutive of the ambivalences of the urban as a field of tensions that can be examined in terms of actors, positions, strategies and phe-nomena.
Religion can likewise be described by ambivalence. Religious ambivalences have been described, for instance, by Jonathan Z. Smith with the conceptual pair of locative and utopian, Thomas Tweed as dwelling and crossing and Jörg Rüpke in the concept of the duplicity of religious (and divine) agency mutually constituting each other.
As in the case of the urban, further ambivalences that do not just occasionally occur but are constitutive for what is em-braced by religion as an academic classification or people’s practices. Aiming at sharpening and perfecting a heuristic grid for the study of the mutual formation of religion and urbanity, the contributors will develop concepts of religion that are addressing material, socio-spatial, temporal, and power-related issues with a view on religious complexity in general and religious ambivalences in particular. The ultimate aim is to better grasp the entanglement between religion and urbanity and the ways urban and religious practices and ideas can change through the interferences of these internal tensions.
Ritual practices have always been a crucial element of cultural research, for they provide a key to understanding differences in cultural belief systems and social order. Thus, the differences and changes within circum-Mediterranean antiquity have been reconstructed as the differences between polytheist and monotheist rituals and beliefs, urban (polis) societies and autocracies. The central assumption of our IGDK is that these ritual practices have to be taken much more seriously and need to be analysed and understood as socio-religious practices establishing highly significant and particular relationships between self and world. We claim that in those ritual practices, particular persons, objects or places are bestowed with a power that makes them resonant, i.e. responsive to the embodied subject, in particular ways. Processes of sacralisation configure and stabilise this kind of ‘resonance’.
Roman Empire. The three-day international conference entitled ‘Beyond Duty: Interacting with Religious Professionals and Appropriating Tradition’, which took place in Erfurt in January 2015, was intended to evoke answers to three central questions: who laid claim to special performative competence in cultic matters, how they went about acquiring it, and how they used existing schemata to anchor and legitimate their innovations in the realm of religious knowledge.
Katie Day/Elise M. Edwards (Hrsg.), The Routledge Handbook of Religion
and Cities, London 2021. xx, 447 S. ISBN: 978-0-367-36712-1