One route to understanding the nature of specifically religious violence is the study of past conflicts. Distinguished ancient historian Brent D. Shaw provides a new analysis of the intense sectarian ...battles between the Catholic and Donatist churches of North Africa in late antiquity, in which Augustine played a central role as Bishop of Hippo. The development and deployment of images of hatred, including that of the heretic, the pagan, and the Jew, and the modes by which these were most effectively employed, including the oral world of the sermon, were critical to promoting acts of violence. Shaw explores how the emerging ecclesiastical structures of the Christian church, on one side, and those of the Roman imperial state, on the other, interacted to repress or excite violent action. Finally, the meaning and construction of the acts themselves, including the Western idea of suicide, are shown to emerge from the conflict itself.
In analysing matters as diverse as state financing, strategic planning, public benefactions and long-term credit in private business transactions, the historian is faced with an underlying problem ...about the perceptions of time. One aspect of this problem is the manner in which pictures of a complex future are reflected in the behaviour of agents engaged in these activities. The manner in which actions were (or were not) taken by them suggests a peculiar configuration of future time in the Roman world. It is speculatively argued that perspectives on the future had analogies with the different ways in which a sense of depth was created by artists working on a two-dimensional space and with the contextual ways in which spatial perspective was employed.
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P. Fibiger Bang, C. A. Bayly, and W. Scheidel, eds. The Oxford World History of Empire. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021; xxviii + 552 pp.; xxxiv + 1,318 pp.
A conventional certainty is that the first state-driven persecution of Christians happened in the reign of Nero and that it involved the deaths of Peter and Paul, and the mass execution of Christians ...in the aftermath of the great fire of July 64 c.e. The argument here contests all of these facts, especially the general execution personally ordered by Nero. The only source for this event is a brief passage in the historian Tacitus. Although the passage is probably genuine Tacitus, it reflects ideas and connections prevalent at the time the historian was writing and not the realities of the 60s.
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In the Journal of Roman Studies of 2015, I argued that the evidence in Tacitus for a state-directed punishment of Christians in Rome in 64 ce was too weak to sustain the historical interpretation of ...it as a persecution. In a reply in this journal last year, Christopher Jones argued that knowledge of Christians under that name could well have reached Rome by the mid-60s, that the vulgus of the city could well have accused such persons, and that the Tacitean account is therefore generally credible. While admitting the justice of some of his criticisms, I attempt in this reply to clarify some of my arguments and to restate my original claim that a persecution of Christians by the emperor Nero in connection with the Great Fire of 64 seems improbable given the context of the relations between officials of the Roman state and Christians over the first century ce.
Bringing in the sheaves Shaw, Brent
Bringing in the sheaves,
c2013, 20121030, 2013, 2012-01-01, 2013-02-27
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The work features an edition of the reaper inscription, and a commentary on it. It is also lavishly illustrated to demonstrate the important iconic and pictorial dimensions of the story.
The creation of the Roman Peace involved technical and quantitative developments in a particular type of political rule that produced the appropriate imperial subjects. It also involved concepts of ...what that
was to be and how it was to function. These ideas, in turn, demanded new kinds of subjectivity that conflicted with the strong concepts of freedom enjoyed by the citizens of a city-state. The following essay attempts to investigate the development of the intertwining strands of subservience and peace in the middle Republic and their fruition in the transition to the Principate. The core concern is one raised by Momigliano: How did this sea change in political identity affect the mentality of the new subjects of empire?
In this cursory response, the author reflect on the hard work done by the three colleagues on whose articles he is commenting. Their investigations have contributed to a better understanding of the ...complex academic and professional background of a man who was surely one of the more influential historians of Greek and Roman antiquity writing in the latter half of the twentieth century. So it is to these colleagues that the reader should pay most attention. His first observation made in reflecting on the detailed recountings of one individual's past -- ordered details that produce an apparently sensible and logical narrative -- is to see less conscious and perhaps seemingly trivial factors in the making of the professional historian. These are easily ignored, but their long-term and situational impact was sometimes great. Finley seems to have come out of his wartime experience as a different public person, deliberately set on a new trajectory. By autumn 1946, along with other members of his family, he changed his name.
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If Frankfurter usefully draws attention to Van Gennep's categories, then I would like to draw attention to the significant studies of María Victoria Uribe on the Colombian Violencia-especially ...because these episodes of violence were frequently denounced as crazed and irrational or just plain insane.15 But the modes of enforcement, in which various parts of the body were cut, sliced, dissected, disemboweled, scalped, egorged, restuffed, and violently reshaped in other ways, were meant to signal things to the living witnesses and to the deceased. In the communication of violence, say in the narratives of the martyrs, what kinds of transformations took place in its picturing and representation? Since we find the bishops constantly re-interpreting their meanings for their parishioners, it cannot be that their significance was somehow manifest. Mia Bloom, Dying to Kill: The Allure of Suicide Terror (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005); Robert A. Pape, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (New York: Random House, 2005); Robert A. Pape and James K. Feldman, Cutting the Fuse: The Explosion of Global Suicide Terrorism and How to Stop It (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); Cristoph Reuter, My Life is a Weapon: A Modern History of Suicide Bombing (Princeton, NJ: R. Glenchill, "Churches Raided in Zimbabwe for Opposing Disgraced Bishop," Times Online, January 14, 2008; BBC Radio News, evening broadcast, December 17, 2012; C. W. Dugger, "Zimbabwe's Rulers Unleash Police on Anglicans," The New York Times, May 16, 2008; T. Presler, "Woman Age 89 Murdered for Loyalty to Harare Diocese," TitusOnMission, February 20, 2011; S. Nyaira, "Conflict in Zimbabwe Anglican Church Hits Low as Parishioner Denied Burial," VOANews, April 11, 2011; "Zimbabwe Anglican Church Appeals Property Ruling to Constitutional Court," VOANews, August 26, 2011; B. Hungwe, "Archbishop Will Find Zimbabwe Church in Chaos," BBC News Online, September 8, 2011; T. Karimakwenda, "Zimbabwe: Kunonga Faction Resists Eviction in Some Parishes," All Africa, November 28, 2012); E. Tree, "Problems Facing the Church in Zimbabwe," The London Evening Post, December 1 and 2, 2012), among many such reports, all online. 10.
