Sensorivm The Senses In Roman Polytheism

SENSORIVM publishes the first results of a collective investigation into how Roman rituals smelled, sounded, felt and struck the eye. It brings Roman religious experience into the realm of the senses.

"SENSORIVM: The Senses in Roman Polytheism explores how a range of cults and rituals were perceived and experienced by participants through one or more senses. The present collection brings together papers from an international group of researchers all inspired by 'the sensory turn'. Focusing on a wide range of ritual traditions from around the ancient Roman world, they explore the many ways in which smell and taste, sight and sound, separately and together, involved participants in religious performance. Music, incense, images and colors, contrasts of light and dark played as great a role as belief or observance in generating religious experience. Together they contribute to an original understanding of the Roman sensory universe, and add an embodied perspective to the notion of Lived Ancient Religion. Contributors are Martin Devecka; Visa Helenius; Yulia Ustinova; Attilio Mastrocinque; Maik Patzelt; Mark Bradley; Adeline Grand-Clément; Rocío Gordillo Hervás; Rebeca Rubio; Elena Muñiz Grijalvo; David Espinosa-Espinosa; A. César González-García, Marco V. García-Quintela; Jörg Rüpke; Rosa Sierra del Molino; Israel Campos Méndez; Valentino Gasparini; Nicole Belayche; Antón Alvar Nuño; Jaime Alvar Ezquerra; Clelia Martínez Maza"--

Panthée presents a collective reflection relating to the changes that affected the Graeco-Roman Empire and over the long term altered its religious landscapes. Fifty years after the foundation of the series EPRO, the volume aims to avoid the division between the supposedly "Roman" or "Graeco-Roman" and the "Oriental" by linking the available information relating the different major areas, such as the relation between local and global, the place of emotions in relation to soteriological and initiatory aspects, strategies of integration and negotiation of identities. For the first time the leading specialists in every field bring their approaches into contact with one another, and jointly construct a picture of practices and conceptual frames, which, in their diversity and inter-action, model a religious universe whose complexity will help to understand our modern globalising world. Panthée propose une réflexion collective sur les mutations qui ont affecté l'Empire gréco-romain et ont progressivement remodelé ses paysages religieux. Cinquante ans après la création de la collection des EPRO, ce livre ambitionne de dépasser le clivage entre ce qui serait "romain", ou "gréco-romain", et ce qui serait "oriental" en articulant les données disponibles autour de quelques thèmes majeurs, comme les jeux d'échelle entre local et universel, la place du registre des émotions en relation avec les dimensions sotériologiques et mystériques, les stratégies d'intégration et de négociation des identités. Pour la première fois, les meilleurs spécialistes venus de tous les horizons croisent leurs approches et construisent ensemble un tableau des pratiques et des cadres de pensée qui, dans leur diversité et dans leur interaction, dessinent les contours d'un univers religieux dont la complexité aide à penser le monde moderne de la globalisation.

Religious Practices and Christianization of the Late Antique City studies the phenomenon of the Christianization of the Roman Empire within the context of the transformations and eventual decline of the Greco-Roman city.

What can we know about the everyday experiences of Christians during the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries? How did non-elite men and women, enslaved, freed, and free persons, who did not renounce sex or choose voluntary poverty become Christian? They neither led a religious community nor did they live in entirely Christian settings. In this period, an age marked by "extraordinary" Christians--wonderworking saints, household ascetics, hermits, monks, nuns, pious aristocrats, pilgrims, and bishops--ordinary Christians went about their daily lives, in various occupations, raising families, sharing households, kitchens, and baths in religiously diverse cities. Occasionally they attended church liturgies, sought out local healers, and visited martyrs' shrines. Barely and rarely mentioned in ancient texts, common Christians remain nameless and undifferentiated. Unfinished Christians explores the sensory and affective dimensions of ordinary Christians who assembled for rituals. With precious few first-person accounts by common Christians, it relies on written sources not typically associated with lived religion: sermons, liturgical instruction books, and festal hymns. All three genres of writing are composed by clergy for use in ritual settings. Yet they may also provide glimpses of everyday Christians' lives and experiences. This book investigates the habits, objects, behaviors, and movements of ordinary Christians by mining festal preaching by John Chrysostom, Cyril of Jerusalem, Gregory of Nyssa, and Romanos the Melodist, among others. It also mines liturgical instructions to explore the psalms and other songs performed on various feast days. "Unfinished," then, connotes the creativity and agency of unremarkable Christians who engaged in making religious experiences: the "Christian-in-progress" who learns to work with material and bring something into being; the artisans who attended sermons; and, more widely, the bearers of embodied knowing.

The Medinet Madi Library comes of age in this landmark volume as one of the 20th century’s major finds of religious manuscripts. Discovered in Egypt’s Fayum region in 1929, these Coptic codices contain a cross-section of the sacred literature of the Manichaean religion. Early work on the collection in the 1930s was cut short by the ravages of the second world war. Recent decades have brought multiple new editorial projects, on which this volume offers a comprehensive set of status reports, as well as individual studies on aspects of the Manichaean religion informed by the library’s contents.

A pioneering interdisciplinary study of the art, production and social functions of Late Antique ritual artefacts. Utilising case studies from the Graeco-Egyptian magical papyri and the Heidelberg archive it establishes new approaches, provides a holistic understanding of the multi-sensory aspects of ritual practice, and explores the transmission of knowledge traditions across faiths.

Explores the religious rituals and beliefs of ancient Greece and Rome, using modern research into human cognition to better understand the experiences of men and women. Integrates literary, epigraphic, visual and archaeological evidence. Accessible to those without prior knowledge either of cognitive theory or of the ancient world.