Violence and Belief in Late Antiquity

Violence and Belief in Late Antiquity

Author: Thomas Sizgorich

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2012-03-19

Total Pages: 407

ISBN-13: 0812207440

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In Violence and Belief in Late Antiquity, Thomas Sizgorich seeks to understand why and how violent expressions of religious devotion became central to the self-understandings of both Christian and Muslim communities between the fourth and ninth centuries. Sizgorich argues that the cultivation of violent martyrdom as a path to holiness was in no way particular to Islam; rather, it emerged from a matrix put into place by the Christians of late antiquity. Paying close attention to the role of memory and narrative in the formation of individual and communal selves, Sizgorich identifies a common pool of late ancient narrative forms upon which both Christian and Muslim communities drew. In the process of recollecting the past, Sizgorich explains, Christian and Muslim communities alike elaborated iterations of Christianity or Islam that demanded of each believer a willingness to endure or inflict violence on God's behalf and thereby created militant local pieties that claimed to represent the one "real" Christianity or the only "pure" form of Islam. These militant communities used a shared system of signs, symbols, and stories, stories in which the faithful manifested their purity in conflict with the imperial powers of the world.


Religious Violence in the Ancient World

Religious Violence in the Ancient World

Author: Jitse H. F. Dijkstra

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020-10

Total Pages: 447

ISBN-13: 1108494900

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A comparative examination and interpretation of religious violence in the Graeco-Roman world and Late Antiquity.


Violence in Late Antiquity

Violence in Late Antiquity

Author: Harold Allen Drake

Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 438

ISBN-13: 9780754654988

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Violence in Late Antiquity brings together a selection of the papers delivered at the fifth biennial 'Shifting Frontiers' conference with others specially commissioned for the volume. The four sections on Defining Violence, 'Legitimate' Violence, Violence


Social Control in Late Antiquity

Social Control in Late Antiquity

Author: Kate Cooper

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020-10-01

Total Pages: 395

ISBN-13: 1108783724

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Social Control in Late Antiquity: The Violence of Small Worlds explores the small-scale communities of late antiquity – households, monasteries, and schools – where power was a question of personal relationships. When fathers, husbands, teachers, abbots, and slave-owners asserted their own will, they saw themselves as maintaining the social order, and expected law and government to reinforce their rule. Naturally, the members of these communities had their own ideas, and teaching them to 'obey their betters' was not always a straightforward business. Drawing on a wide variety of sources from across the late Roman Mediterranean, from law codes and inscriptions to monastic rules and hagiography, the book considers the sometimes conflicting identities of women, slaves, and children, and documents how they found opportunities for agency and recognition within a system built on the unremitting assertion of the rights of the powerful.


Shifting Frontiers in Late Antiquity

Shifting Frontiers in Late Antiquity

Author: Ralph W. Mathisen

Publisher: Variorum Publishing

Published: 1996

Total Pages: 410

ISBN-13:

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This volume results from a conference held at the University of Kansas in 1995. The papers it encapsulates cover frontier studies from the third to the seventh century. It takes in the Roman world from Spain to Syria and from Britain to Dacia, clarifying the boundary role of Late Antiquity.


Sacred Violence

Sacred Violence

Author: Brent D. Shaw

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2011-09

Total Pages: 931

ISBN-13: 0521196051

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Employs the sectarian battles which divided African Christians in late antiquity to explore the nature of violence in religious conflicts.


City of Demons

City of Demons

Author: Dayna S. Kalleres

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2015-10-13

Total Pages: 392

ISBN-13: 0520276477

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Although it would appear in studies of late antique ecclesiastical authority and power that scholars have covered everything, an important aspect of the urban bishop has long been neglected: his role as demonologist and exorcist. When the emperor Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the realm, bishops and priests everywhere struggledÊ to ÒChristianizeÓ the urban spaces still dominated by Greco-Roman monuments and festivals. During this period of upheaval, when congregants seemingly attended everything but their own ÒorthodoxÓ church, many ecclesiastical leaders began simultaneously to promote aggressive and insidious depictions of the demonic. In City of Demons, Dayna S. Kalleres investigates this developing discourse and the church-sponsored rituals that went along with it, showing how shifting ecclesiastical demonologies and evolving practices of exorcism profoundly shaped Christian life in the fourth century.


Violence in Late Antiquity

Violence in Late Antiquity

Author: H.A. Drake

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-12-05

Total Pages: 403

ISBN-13: 1351875744

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'Violence' is virtually synonymous in the popular imagination with the period of the Later Roman Empire-a time when waves of barbarian invaders combined with urban mobs and religious zealots to bring an end to centuries of peace and serenity. All of these images come together in the Visigothic sack of the city of Rome in A.D. 410, a date commonly used for the fall of the entire empire. But was this period in fact as violent as it has been portrayed? A new generation of scholars in the field of Late Antiquity has called into question the standard narrative, pointing to evidence of cultural continuity and peaceful interaction between "barbarians" and Romans, Christians and pagans. To assess the state of this question, the fifth biennial 'Shifting Frontiers' conference was devoted to the theme of 'Violence in Late Antiquity'. Conferees addressed aspects of this question from standpoints as diverse as archaeology and rhetoric, anthropology and economics. A selection of the papers then delivered have been prepared for the present volume, along with others commissioned for the purpose and a concluding essay by Martin Zimmerman, reflecting on the theme of the book. The four sections on Defining Violence, 'Legitimate' Violence, Violence and Rhetoric, and Religious Violence are each introduced by a theme essay from a leading scholar in the field. While offering no definitive answer to the question of violence in Late Antiquity, the papers in this volume aim to stimulate a fresh look at this age-old problem.


There Is No Crime for Those Who Have Christ

There Is No Crime for Those Who Have Christ

Author: Michael Gaddis

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2005-10-14

Total Pages: 415

ISBN-13: 0520241045

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Focusing on the 4th and 5th centuries, Michael Gaddis explores how various groups employed the language of religious violence to construct their own identities, to undermine the legitimacy of their rivals, & to advance themselves in the competitive & high stakes process of Christianizing the Roman Empire.


Constantinople

Constantinople

Author: Rebecca Stephens Falcasantos

Publisher: University of California Press

Published: 2020-06-02

Total Pages: 237

ISBN-13: 0520304551

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As Christian spaces and agents assumed prominent positions in civic life, the end of the long span of the fourth century was marked by large-scale religious change. Churches had overtaken once-thriving pagan temples, old civic priesthoods were replaced by prominent bishops, and the rituals of the city were directed toward the Christian God. Such changes were particularly pronounced in the newly established city of Constantinople, where elites from various groups contended to control civic and imperial religion. Rebecca Stephens Falcasantos argues that imperial Christianity was in fact a manifestation of traditional Roman religious structures. In particular, she explores how deeply established habits of ritual engagement in shared social spaces—ones that resonated with imperial ideology and appealed to the memories of previous generations—constructed meaning to create a new imperial religious identity. By examining three dynamics—ritual performance, rhetoric around violence, and the preservation and curation of civic memory—she distinguishes the role of Christian practice in transforming the civic and cultic landscapes of the late antique polis.