This volume provides novel social-scientific and historical approaches to religious identifications in late antique (3rd–12th century) Egyptian papyri, bridging the gap between two academic fields ...that have been infrequently in full conversation: papyrology and the study of religion. Through eleven in-depth case studies of Christian, Islamic, “pagan,” Jewish, Manichaean, and Hermetic texts and objects, this book offers new interpretations on markers of religious identity in papyrus documents written in Coptic, Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic. Using papyri as a window into the lives of ordinary believers, it explores their religious behavior and choices in everyday life. Three valuable perspectives are outlined and explored in these documents: a critical reflection on the concept of identity and the role of religious groups, a situational reading of religious repertoire and symbols, and a focus on speech acts as performative and efficacious utterances. Religious Identifications in Late Antique Papyri offers a wide scope and comparative approach to this topic, suitable for students and scholars of late antiquity and Egypt, as well as those interested in late antique religion. A PDF version of this book is available for free in Open Access at www.taylorfrancis.com. It has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.
Religion is never simply there. In Religion and the Everyday Life of Manichaeans in Kellis, Mattias Brand shows where and when ordinary individuals and families in Egypt practiced a Manichaean way of ...life. Rather than portraying this ancient religion as a well-structured, totalizing community, the fourth-century papyri sketch a dynamic image of lived religious practice, with all the contradictions, fuzzy boundaries, and limitations of everyday life. Following these microhistorical insights, this book demonstrates how family life, gift-giving, death rituals, communal gatherings, and book writing are connected to our larger academic debates about religious change in late antiquity.
This review article aims to reflect on the history of religion at home through testing the comparative promise of the Bloomsbury series A Cultural History of the Home. Through an extensive reflection ...on six historical periods of western history, the reader encounters key ideas about the historical-specific demarcation of the home, gender roles, and the domestic religious objects and practices that came to co-define those boundaries. Despite the comparative layout of the series, and the excellent contributions, A Cultural History of the Home never engages in explicit comparisons across the volumes, leaving space for future comparative work in the study of religion, gender and material culture.
In this introduction to the special forum discussion on the role of historians in the study of religion\s, I present three main challenges to the discipline: (1) profound questioning of the most ...central concepts in the historical study of religion\s; (2) increasing fragmentation of the discipline, with many excellent – but hyper‐specialised – contributions; and (3) limited success in communicating specific academic insights to a larger audience of scholars and the general public. The aim of this forum discussion is to reflect on these challenges and rethink the role of the role of historians and historical analysis in the study of religion\s, in particular through research practices such as historicising, comparing, theorising, and generalising.
This article argues for a re‐appreciation of explicit and self‐reflective historicising, comparing, and theorising as three research practices that offer the best answers to the main challenges that ...the historical study of religion\s faces today. In examining these research practices, I stress the intersection of particularising and generalising tendencies. First, the practice of historicising requires a contextualisation of the historical object(s) and the historian's own situatedness; such a dual contextualisation dovetails with the relational paradigm that characterises current studies of religion\s. Second, comparative research practices make explicit what is often concealed: the methodological back‐and‐forth between the contemporary researcher's frameworks and the selected data set. Rather than delegitimising comparison, this awareness should lead to deeper scrutiny and an ambition to carefully generalise. Third, shifting to a processual notion of theorising rather than engaging solidified theory enables cross‐disciplinary collaboration on and public engagement with large themes in history and society. By illustrating these three research practices and highlighting several of their operational steps, I hope to contribute to the dialogue between historians and social‐scientific theory.
