Leadership and Community in Late Antique Gaul
Leadership and Community in Late Antique Gaul

Author: Raymond Van Dam

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2023-11-10

Total Pages: 367

ISBN-13: 0520341961

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The rise of Christianity to the dominant position it held in the Middle Ages remains a paradoxical achievement. Early Christian communities in Gaul had been so restrictive that they sometimes persecuted misfits with accusations of heresy. Yet by the fifth century Gallic aristocrats were becoming bishops to enhance their prestige; and by the sixth century Christian relic cults provided the most comprehensive idiom for articulating values and conventions. To strengthen its appeal, Christianity had absorbed the ideologies of secular authority already familiar in Gallic society.

Leadership and Community in Late Antiquity
Leadership and Community in Late Antiquity

Author: Young Richard Kim

Publisher:

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 9782503583235

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Throughout a distinguished career, Raymond Van Dam has contributed significantly to our understanding of Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages with ground-breaking studies on Gaul, Cappadocia, and the emperor Constantine. The hallmarks of his scholarship are critical study of a wide variety of written and material sources and careful historical analysis, insightfully rooted in sociological and anthropological methodologies. The essays in this volume, written by Van Dam's former students, colleagues, and friends, explore the dynamics between leaders and their communities in the fourth through seventh centuries. During this period, people negotiated profound religious, intellectual, and cultural change while still deeply enmeshed in the legacy of the Roman Empire. The memory of the classical past was a powerful and compelling social and political force for the denizens of Late Antiquity, even as their physical surroundings came to resemble less and less the ideals of the Greco-Roman city. These themes - leadership, community, and memory - have been central to Van Dam's work, and the contributors to this volume build on the legacy of his scholarship. Their papers examine how leaders exercised their authority in their communities, at times exhibiting continuity with ancient patterns of leadership, but in other cases shifting toward new paradigms characteristic of a post-classical world. Taken together, the essays produce a fuller picture of the Mediterranean world and add further nuance to our understanding of Late Antiquity and early Middle Ages as a time of both continuity and transformation.

The Making of Christian Communities in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages
The Making of Christian Communities in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages

Author: Mark F. Williams

Publisher: Anthem Press

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 206

ISBN-13: 1898855773

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The Making of Christian Communities sheds light on one of the most crucial periods in the development of the Christian faith. It considers the development and spread of Christianity between Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, and includes analysis of the formation and development of Christian communities in a variety of arenas, ranging from Late Roman Cappadocia and Constantinople to the court of Charlemagne and the twelfth-century province of Rheims, France during the twelfth century. The rise and development of Christianity in the Roman and Post-Roman world has been exhaustively studied on many different levels, political, legal, social, literary and religious. However, the basic question of how Christians of Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages formed themselves into communities of believers has sometimes been lost from sight. This volume explores the idea that survival of the Christian faith depended upon the making of these communities, something that the Christians of this period were themselves acutely - and sometimes acrimoniously - aware.

A Social and Cultural History of Late Antiquity
A Social and Cultural History of Late Antiquity

Author: Douglas Boin

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2018-03-20

Total Pages: 315

ISBN-13: 1119076811

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2019 PROSE Award finalist in the Classics category! A Social and Cultural History of Late Antiquity examines the social and cultural landscape of the Late Antique Mediterranean. The text offers a picture of everyday life as it was lived in the spaces around and between two of the most memorable and towering figures of the time—Constantine and Muhammad. The author captures the period using a wide-lens, including Persian material from the mid third century through Umayyad material of the mid eighth century C.E. The book offers a rich picture of Late Antique life that is not just focused on Rome, Constantinople, or Christianity. This important resource uses nuanced terms to talk about complex issues and fills a gap in the literature by surveying major themes such as power, gender, community, cities, politics, law, art and architecture, and literary culture. The book is richly illustrated and filled with maps, lists of rulers and key events. A Social and Cultural History of Late Antiquity is an essential guide that: Paints a rich picture of daily life in Late Antique that is not simply centered on Rome, Constantinople, or Christianity Balances a thematic approach with rigorous attention to chronology Stresses the need for appreciating both sources and methods in the study of Late Antique history Offers a sophisticated model for investigating daily life and the complexities of individual and group identity in the rapidly changing Mediterranean world Includes useful maps, city plans, timelines, and suggestions for further reading A Social and Cultural History of Late Antiquity offers an examination of everyday life in the era when adherents of three of the major religions of today—Christianity, Judaism, and Islam—faced each other for the first time in the same environment. Learn more about A Social and Cultural History of Late Antiquity’s link to current social issues in Boin’s article for the History News Network.

Ambrose of Milan and Community Formation in Late Antiquity
Ambrose of Milan and Community Formation in Late Antiquity

Author: Ethan Gannaway

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2021-03-08

Total Pages: 283

ISBN-13: 1527567265

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Ambrose, the first patrician bishop and a prolific writer of a broad range of works, presents numerous opportunities for interdisciplinary research. His participation in many social groups, sometimes at odds with each other, and sometimes overlapping, demanded flexibility. The result is a protean figure, whose motives are not always clear. His own works and those of the scholars who contribute to this volume are accordingly multidisciplinary. Fields such as theology (especially historical theology), history, classics, philosophy, linguistics, and aesthetics, among others, and the recent international research that belongs to them nuance the volume’s investigation of Ambrose’s actions and motivations. The reader will find that Ambrose’s efforts to create and to strengthen social cohesion included building relationships and erecting social structures set on the foundations of Nicaean Christianity against heresy and paganism. A fusion of Graeco-Roman and Judeo-Christian intellectual traditions reinforced the solidarity Ambrose promoted. These endeavors met with success then, and continue to do so now, as indicated by the modern community of scholars found within this book.

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.

Egypt in Late Antiquity
Egypt in Late Antiquity

Author: Roger S. Bagnall

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 1996

Total Pages: 396

ISBN-13: 9780691010960

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Focusing on Egypt from the accession of Diocletian in 284 to the middle of the fifth century, this book brings together information pertaining to the society, economy and culture of a province important to understanding the entire eastern part of the later

The Oxford Handbook of Late Antiquity
The Oxford Handbook of Late Antiquity

Author: Scott Fitzgerald Johnson

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2015-11

Total Pages: 1294

ISBN-13: 019027753X

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The Oxford Handbook of Late Antiquity offers an innovative overview of a period (c. 300-700 CE) that has become increasingly central to scholarly debates over the history of western and Middle Eastern civilizations. This volume covers such pivotal events as the fall of Rome, the rise of Christianity, the origins of Islam, and the early formation of Byzantium and the European Middle Ages. These events are set in the context of widespread literary, artistic, cultural, and religious change during the period. The geographical scope of this Handbook is unparalleled among comparable surveys of Late Antiquity; Arabia, Egypt, Central Asia, and the Balkans all receive dedicated treatments, while the scope extends to the western kingdoms, and North Africa in the West. Furthermore, from economic theory and slavery to Greek and Latin poetry, Syriac and Coptic literature, sites of religious devotion, and many others, this Handbook covers a wide range of topics that will appeal to scholars from a diverse array of disciplines. The Oxford Handbook of Late Antiquity engages the perennially valuable questions about the end of the ancient world and the beginning of the medieval, while providing a much-needed touchstone for the study of Late Antiquity itself.