Pagan Inscriptions Christian Viewers

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.

Antiquity was a multi-cultural and multi-religious world. Meetings and interactions between cultures in East and West, and the consequent widespread exchange of ideas had an enormous impact on cultural practices and the creation of identities. These cultural diversities are reflected by both the archaeological material and the written sources. Patrons of luxurious buildings, elaborate grave monuments, and churches used architecture and images to demonstrate political, social and religious power. These buildings and their embellishment with sculpture, mosaics and paintings were strong factors in communicating identity and attitudes both in the public and private spheres. The continuous production of mythological sculpture and mosaics coexisted, sometimes peacefully other times with violent consequences, with an increasing influence from new philosophical mind sets originating in the East, such as Christianity. In this period of rapid social and religious change new patrons appeared, such as bishops, who were responsible for the construction of churches commemorating the Christian triumph. The seminar focuses on the way patrons, pagan as well as Christian, conveyed messages through material culture and the responses of the viewers.

The basic premise of the book at hand is that there is meaning to be 'excavated' (in both meanings of the word) from Christian responses to pagan sculpture in the period from the fourth to the sixth century. More than mindless acts of religious violence by fanatical mobs, these responses are revelatory of contemporary conceptions of images and the different ways in which the material manifestations of the pagan past could be negotiated in Late Antiquity. Statues were important to the social, political and religious life of cities across the Mediterranean, as well as part of a culture of representation that was intricately bound to bodily taxonomies and visual practices.

In Christians and Pagans in Roman Britain, first published in 1991, Professor Dorothy Watts sets out to distinguish possible Pagan features in Romano-British Christianity in the period leading up to and immediately following the withdrawal of Roman forces in AD 410. Watts argues that British Christianity at the time contained many Pagan influences, suggesting that the former, although it had been present in the British Isles for some two centuries, was not nearly as firmly established as in other parts of the Empire. Building on recent developments in the archaeology of Roman Britain, and utilising a nuanced method for deciphering the significance of objects with ambiguous religious identities, Christians and Pagans in Roman Britain will be of interest to classicists, students of the history of the British Isles, Church historians, and also to those generally interested in the place of Christianity during the twilight of the Western Roman Empire.

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.

A Chronicle of the Last Pagans is a history of the triumph of Christianity in the Roman Empire as told from the perspective of the defeated: the adherents of the mysteries, cults, and philosophies that dominated Greco-Roman culture. With a sovereign command of the diverse evidence, Pierre Chuvin portrays the complex spiritual, intellectual, and political lives of professing pagans after Christianity became the state religion. While recreating the unfolding drama of their fate--their gradual loss of power, exclusion from political, military, and civic positions, their assimilation, and finally their persecution--he records a remarkable persistence of pagan religiosity and illustrates the fruitful interaction between Christianity and paganism. The author points to the implications of this late paganism for subsequent developments in the Byzantine Empire and the West. Chuvin's compelling account of an often forgotten world of pagan culture rescues an important aspect of our spiritual heritage and provides new understanding of Late Antiquity.

Surveying the content and character of early Christian iconography from the third to the sixth century CE, this substantially revised and updated new edition of Understanding Early Christian Art makes the critical tools of art historians accessible to students. It opens by discussing a series of questions pertaining to the evidence itself and how scholars through the centuries have regarded this material as expressing and transmitting aspects of the developing faith and practice of early adherents of Christianity. It considers possible sources for the various motifs and the complex relationship between words and images, as well as the importance of studying visual and material culture alongside theological and liturgical texts. Rather than organising surviving examples by medium or chronology, the chapters categorise the evidence according to their general iconographic type, such as generic symbols, biblical narratives, and portraits. Each chapter takes up important questions of visual culture, formal style, and the ways in which the iconography is distinct from or shows parallels with contemporary documentary sources like sermons, exegetical works, catechetical lectures, or dogmatic treatises. Concluding with a discussion of the late-emerging depictions of Jesus’s crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension, it remains a valuable guide to comprehending the complex theology, history, and context of Christian art. Augmented by over 140 full-colour images, accompanied by parallel text, the interdisciplinary and boundary-breaking approach taken in this extensively revised edition of Understanding Early Christian Art enables students and scholars in fields such as religion and art history to further their understanding and knowledge of the art of the early Christian era.

Throughout the pharaonic period, hieroglyphs served both practical and aesthetic purposes. Carved on stelae, statues, and temple walls, hieroglyphic inscriptions were one of the most prominent and distinctive features of ancient Egyptian visual culture. For both the literate minority of Egyptians and the vast illiterate majority of the population, hieroglyphs possessed a potent symbolic value that went beyond their capacity to render language visible. For nearly three thousand years, the hieroglyphic script remained closely bound to indigenous notions of religious and cultural identity. By the late antique period, literacy in hieroglyphs had been almost entirely lost. However, the monumental temples and tombs that marked the Egyptian landscape, together with the hieroglyphic inscriptions that adorned them, still stood as inescapable reminders that Christianity was a relatively new arrival to the ancient land of the pharaohs. In Egyptian Hieroglyphs in the Late Antique Imagination, Jennifer Westerfeld argues that depictions of hieroglyphic inscriptions in late antique Christian texts reflect the authors' attitudes toward Egypt's pharaonic past. Whether hieroglyphs were condemned as idolatrous images or valued as a source of mystical knowledge, control over the representation and interpretation of hieroglyphic texts constituted an important source of Christian authority. Westerfeld examines the ways in which hieroglyphs are deployed in the works of Eusebius and Augustine, to debate biblical chronology; in Greek, Roman, and patristic sources, to claim that hieroglyphs encoded the mysteries of the Egyptian priesthood; and in a polemical sermon by the fifth-century monastic leader Shenoute of Atripe, to argue that hieroglyphs should be destroyed lest they promote a return to idolatry. She argues that, in the absence of any genuine understanding of hieroglyphic writing, late antique Christian authors were able to take this powerful symbol of Egyptian identity and manipulate it to serve their particular theological and ideological ends.