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Exploring Christian Identity from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages

Author : Chris Baghos

Publisher : Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Page : 128 pages

File Size : 20,63 MB

Release : 2024-10-04

Category : Religion

ISBN : 1036410994

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Book Description

This book challenges the popular understanding that all Byzantines regarded the Christian faith, Hellenic cultural legacy, and Roman imperial tradition as inextricably linked. To this end, it outlines and explores the patristic resistance to the emperor’s involvement in ecclesial affairs as evidenced by the writings of St. Maximus the Confessor and his disciples, in addition to their martyrial and monastic influences. It therefore considers what the orthodox Christians of the Early Byzantine period perceived as their identity capital, including the virtues defined by the New Testament and such Late Antique texts as the Acts of Justin and the Sayings of the Desert Fathers. Factoring in the theological crisis of the seventh century, this investigation highlights how the Confessor’s clerical and lay accusers reclaimed the Greek legacy to distinguish themselves from the defenders of Christ’s two wills residing in “Old Rome”. Contrary to the conviction of many scholars, this book discloses that many Byzantines did not recognise anything holy about the office of the emperor (with the church fathers especially rejecting imperial trappings).



Graphic Signs of Identity, Faith, and Power in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages

Author : Ildar H. Garipzanov

Publisher : Brepols Publishers

Page : 0 pages

File Size : 32,89 MB

Release : 2017

Category : Christian art and symbolism

ISBN : 9782503567242

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Book Description

In this volume, twelve specialists examine the role of graphic signs such as cross signs, christograms, and monograms in the late Roman and post-Roman worlds and the contexts that facilitated their dissemination in diverse media. The essays collected here explore the rise and spread of graphic signs in relation to socio-cultural transformations during Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages, focusing in particular on evolving perceptions and projections of authority. They ask whether some culturally specific norms and practices of graphic composition and communication can be discerned behind the rising corpus of graphic signs from the fourth to tenth centuries and whether common features can be found in their production and use across various media and contexts. The contributors to this book analyse the uses of graphic signs in quotidian objects, imperial architectural programmes, and a wide range of other media. In doing so, they argue that late antique and early medieval graphic signs were efficacious means to communicate with both the supernatural and earthly worlds, as well as to disseminate visual messages regarding religious identity and faith, and social power.



Religious Identity in Late Antiquity

Author : Isabella Sandwell

Publisher : Cambridge University Press

Page : 324 pages

File Size : 13,78 MB

Release : 2007-08-30

Category : History

ISBN : 9780521879156

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Book Description

Studies of religious interaction in the fourth century AD have often assumed that the categories of 'pagan', 'Christian' and 'Jew' can be straightforwardly applied, and that we can assess the extent of Christianization in the Graeco-Roman period. In contrast, in this text, Dr Sandwell tackles the fundamental question of attitudes to religious identity by exploring how the Christian preacher John Chrysostom and the Graeco-Roman orator Libanius wrote about and understood issues of religious allegiance. By comparing the approaches of these men, who were living and working in Antioch at approximately the same time, she strives to get inside the process of religious interaction in a way not normally possible due to the dominance of Christian sources. In so doing she develops approaches to the study of Libanius' religion, the impact of John Chrysostom's preaching on his audiences and the importance of religious identity to fourth-century individuals.



Christians and Their Many Identities in Late Antiquity, North Africa, 200-450 CE

Author : Éric Rebillard

Publisher : Cornell University Press

Page : 145 pages

File Size : 34,15 MB

Release : 2012-10-25

Category : History

ISBN : 0801465559

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Book Description

For too long, the study of religious life in Late Antiquity has relied on the premise that Jews, pagans, and Christians were largely discrete groups divided by clear markers of belief, ritual, and social practice. More recently, however, a growing body of scholarship is revealing the degree to which identities in the late Roman world were fluid, blurred by ethnic, social, and gender differences. Christianness, for example, was only one of a plurality of identities available to Christians in this period. In Christians and Their Many Identities in Late Antiquity, North Africa, 200–450 CE, Éric Rebillard explores how Christians in North Africa between the age of Tertullian and the age of Augustine were selective in identifying as Christian, giving salience to their religious identity only intermittently. By shifting the focus from groups to individuals, Rebillard more broadly questions the existence of bounded, stable, and homogeneous groups based on Christianness. In emphasizing that the intermittency of Christianness is structurally consistent in the everyday life of Christians from the end of the second to the middle of the fifth century, this book opens a whole range of new questions for the understanding of a crucial period in the history of Christianity.



Strategies of Identification

Author : Walter Pohl

Publisher :

Page : 349 pages

File Size : 18,70 MB

Release : 2013

Category : History

ISBN : 9782503540443

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Book Description

"How were identities created in the early Middle Ages and when did they matter? This book explores different types of sources to understand the ways in which they contributed to making ethnic and religious communities meaningful: historiography and hagiography, biblical exegesis and works of theology, sermons and letters. Thus, it sets out to widen the horizon of current debates on ethnicity and identity. The Christianization and dissolution of the Roman Empire had provoked a crisis of traditional identities and opened new spaces for identification. What were the textual resources on which new communities could rely, however precariously? Biblical models and Christian discourses could be used for a variety of aims and identifications, and the volume provides some exemplary analyses of these distinct voices. Barbarian polities developed in a rich and varied framework of textual ‘strategies of identification’. The contributions reconstruct some of this discursive matrix and its development from the age of Augustine to the Carolingians. In the course of this process, ethnicity and religion were amalgamated in a new way that became fundamental for European history, and acquired an important political role in the post-Roman kingdoms. The extensive introduction not only draws together the individual studies, but also addresses fundamental issues of the definition of ethnicity, and of the relationship between discourses and practices of identity. It offers a methodological basis that is valid for studies of identity in general"--Back cover.





Christianity, Empire, and the Making of Religion in Late Antiquity

Author : Jeremy M. Schott

Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press

Page : 264 pages

File Size : 16,82 MB

Release : 2013-04-23

Category : History

ISBN : 0812203461

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Book Description

In Christianity, Empire, and the Making of Religion in Late Antiquity, Jeremy M. Schott examines the ways in which conflicts between Christian and pagan intellectuals over religious, ethnic, and cultural identity contributed to the transformation of Roman imperial rhetoric and ideology in the early fourth century C.E. During this turbulent period, which began with Diocletian's persecution of the Christians and ended with Constantine's assumption of sole rule and the consolidation of a new Christian empire, Christian apologists and anti-Christian polemicists launched a number of literary salvos in a battle for the minds and souls of the empire. Schott focuses on the works of the Platonist philosopher and anti- Christian polemicist Porphyry of Tyre and his Christian respondents: the Latin rhetorician Lactantius, Eusebius, bishop of Caesarea, and the emperor Constantine. Previous scholarship has tended to narrate the Christianization of the empire in terms of a new religion's penetration and conquest of classical culture and society. The present work, in contrast, seeks to suspend the static, essentializing conceptualizations of religious identity that lie behind many studies of social and political change in late antiquity in order to investigate the processes through which Christian and pagan identities were constructed. Drawing on the insights of postcolonial discourse analysis, Schott argues that the production of Christian identity and, in turn, the construction of a Christian imperial discourse were intimately and inseparably linked to the broader politics of Roman imperialism.



Transformations of Romanness

Author : Walter Pohl

Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Page : 712 pages

File Size : 46,34 MB

Release : 2018-07-09

Category : Literary Criticism

ISBN : 311059756X

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Book Description

Roman identity is one of the most interesting cases of social identity because in the course of time, it could mean so many different things: for instance, Greek-speaking subjects of the Byzantine empire, inhabitants of the city of Rome, autonomous civic or regional groups, Latin speakers under ‘barbarian’ rule in the West or, increasingly, representatives of the Church of Rome. Eventually, the Christian dimension of Roman identity gained ground. The shifting concepts of Romanness represent a methodological challenge for studies of ethnicity because, depending on its uses, Roman identity may be regarded as ‘ethnic’ in a broad sense, but under most criteria, it is not. Romanness is indeed a test case how an established and prestigious social identity can acquire many different shades of meaning, which we would class as civic, political, imperial, ethnic, cultural, legal, religious, regional or as status groups. This book offers comprehensive overviews of the meaning of Romanness in most (former) Roman provinces, complemented by a number of comparative and thematic studies. A similarly wide-ranging overview has not been available so far.



Being Pagan, Being Christian in Late Antiquity and Early Middle Ages

Author : Katja Ritari

Publisher : Helsinki University Press

Page : 341 pages

File Size : 14,94 MB

Release : 2023-12-28

Category : Social Science

ISBN : 9523690981

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Book Description

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.



Between Personal and Institutional Religion

Author : Bruria Bitton-Ashkelony

Publisher : Brepols Pub

Page : 345 pages

File Size : 38,89 MB

Release : 2013

Category : History

ISBN : 9782503541310

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Book Description

This book addresses change and continuity in late antique Eastern Christianity, as perceived through the lens of the categories of institutional religion and personal religion. The interaction between personal devotion and public identity reveals the creative aspects of a vibrant religious culture that altered the experience of Christians on both a spiritual and an institutional level. A close look at the interrelations between the personal and the institutional expressions of religion in this period attests to an ongoing revision of both the patristic literature and the monastic tradition. By approaching the period in terms of 'revision', the contributors discuss the mechanism of transformation in Eastern Christianity from a new perspective, discerning social and religious changes while navigating between the dynamics of personal and institutional religion. Recognizing the creative aspects inherent to the process of 'revision', this volume re-examines several aspects of personal and institutional religion, revealing dogmatic, ascetic, liturgical, and historiographical transformations. Attention is paid to the expression of the self, the role of history and memory in the construction of identity, and the modification of the theological discourse in late antique culture. The book also explores several avenues of Jewish-Christian interaction in the institutional and public sphere.



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