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.

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.

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.

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.

Explores how Christians created, used, and adapted religionized categories of non-Christians through the centuries Christian Imaginations of the Religious Other traces the genealogy of religionization, the various ways Christians throughout history have created a sense of religious normativity while simultaneously producing various categories of non-Christian "otherness." Covering a broad expanse of processes, practices, and socio-political contexts, this innovative volume analyzes the complex intersections of patterns of religionization in different eras while investigating their entanglements with racialization, sexualization, and ethnicization. With a readable and accessible style, Marianne Moyaert offers a nuanced and well-balanced critical analysis of how and why Christianity’s others were named, categorized, essentialized, and governed by those exemplifying Christian normativity in Western European society. The author takes a longue durée approach — a long-term perspective on history that extends past human memory and the archaeological record — that integrates different case studies and a variety of ecclesial, theological, and literary documents. Throughout the text, Moyaert demonstrates how religionization shaped the ways Christians classified people, organized Christian societies, interacted with different Christian and non-Christian groups, and more. Surveys the relationship between shifts in Christian normativity and the way non-Christians are imagined Helps readers connect the lasting effects of patterns of religionization with their everyday experiences Discusses the role of Christian expansion in the differential and unequal treatment of Christianity’s others Examines legal regulations and disciplinary practices that were established to define the boundaries between Christians and non-Christians Incorporates a wide range of scholarly resources, cutting-edge research, and the most recent insights and issues in the field Includes textboxes with helpful summaries, illustrations, and commentary in each chapter Christian Imaginations of the Religious Other: A History of Religionization is an excellent textbook for undergraduate and graduate courses in interreligious studies, comparative theology, theological approaches to religious diversity, Christian-Jewish-Muslim relations, race and religion, and theorizing religion.

This study examines third- and fourth-century portraits of married Christians and associated images, reading them as visual rhetoric in early Christian conversations about marriage and celibacy, and recovering lay perspectives underrepresented or missing in literary sources. Historians of early Christianity have grown increasingly aware that written sources display an enthusiasm for asceticism and sexual renunciation that was far from representative of the lives of most early Christians. Often called a “silent majority,” the married laity in fact left behind a significant body of work in the material record. Particularly in and around Rome, they commissioned and used such objects as sarcophagi, paintings, glass vessels, finger rings, luxury silver, other jewellery items, gems, and seals that bore their portraits and other iconographic forms of self-representation. This study is the first to undertake a sustained exploration of these material sources in the context of early Christian discourses and practices related to marriage, sexuality, and celibacy. Reading this visual evidence increases understanding of the population who created it, the religious commitments they asserted, and the comparatively moderate forms of piety they set forth as meritorious alternatives to the ascetic ideal. In their visual rhetoric, these artifacts and images comprise additional voices in Late Antique conversations about idealized ways of Christian life, and ultimately provide a fuller picture of the early Christian world. Plentifully illustrated with photographs and drawings, this volume provides readers access to primary material evidence. Such evidence, like textual sources, require critical interpretation; this study sets forth a careful methodology for iconographic analysis and applies it to identify the potential intentions of patrons and artists and the perceptions of viewers. It compares iconography to literary sources and ritual practices as part of the interpretive process, clarifying the ways images had a rhetorical edge and contributed to larger conversations. Accessibly written, The Visual Rhetoric of the Married Laity in Late Antiquity is of interest to students and scholars working on Late Antiquity, early Christian and late Roman social history, marriage and celibacy in early Christianity, and early Christian, Roman, and Byzantine art.

The Roman Empire of the fourth century AD, ruled by the Emperor Constantine the Great, was a society marked by social, religious, and political transformation as the empire came under the influence of the Christian Church. To understand how this period's emperors and bishops, among other political and social actors, thought about and enacted political theory, Nathan Israel Smolin turns to theological sources, revealing an age of profound political, social, and religious ferment, in which ideas and structures fundamental to the history of the following millennia were developed and contested--ideas that continue to shape our world today.

Late Roman Africa gives us plenty to ponder. Christianity there had been divided between two factions since the early fourth century. By the fifth, militants among the Donatists (or sectarians) struck at their rivals, whose leading spokesman, Augustine, is our principal source. But did he exaggerate the difficulties catholic Christianity faced or wholly fabricate to attract government attention and intervention? For the same purposes, did he invent a resurgence of paganism? Or were there dangers to the safety of his congregations from sectarians and complications caused by polytheists purveying fake news about the history and fate of the empire? Did their seductive fictions threaten the ascendancy of Christianity, which its most prolific prelate would have been irresponsible to overlook? The scholarly consensus now tilts toward the claim that Augustine deployed the rhetoric of security to “wipe out” Donatists and pagan dissent. Some suggest the latter was then extinct. Safety First contends that Augustine’s concerns were well-founded and that his attempts to redirect civic philanthropy, reconcile with sectarian Christians, end idolatry, and draw support for those efforts from the politically influential expressed his interests in security and adapted what his faith considered sound perspectives on sin, the sacraments, sacrilege, and superstition.

Revision of the author's thesis (doctoral)--University of Pennsylvania, 2017, under the title: The writing on the wall: inscriptions and memory in the temples of late antique Greece and Asia Minor.