Religious World of Late Antiquity
Program Unit Type: Section
Accepting Papers? Yes
Call For Papers: For 2012 we are soliciting proposals on three topics:
1) Codifying knowledge in Late Antiquity
We welcome proposals that explore the cultural impulse in late antiquity toward gathering, preserving, and reformulating bodies of knowledge (ritual, legal, philosophical, scholastic, etc.) that encompass topics such as ritual procedures, oracles, rules of conduct, wisdom sayings, or genealogical, scholastic, or prophetic chains of tradition, by means of a variety of formats (magical handbooks, scriptural canons, bibliographies, etc.). We are particularly interested in proposals that examine the exercise of power, cultural poetics, and contexts of production in relation to one or more such collections.
2) Palpable Gods
Proposals are sought that examine ways in which the potential remoteness and transcendence of divinity were mitigated discursively, ritually, and materially in late antique religious practice, e.g. through iconism, relics, ingestion of sacralized food, magical and theurgic invocation, theophany and incarnation, oracles, possession, and deification or sanctification of humans or animals. We are especially interested in proposals that engage both ancient and modern understandings of the purpose and value of such palpability in relation/contrast to elite commonplaces of locating "true" religion in the transcendent.
3) Inventing Conversion (joint session with Social History of Formative Christianity and Judaism – please submit your single proposal to both Sections)
We invite proposals that investigate the emergence of the idea of religious conversion in relation/contrast to other ancient modes of joining, belonging to, and/or transgressing boundaries between imagined communities. We are most interested in proposals whose close reading of ancient evidence complicates and problematizes current scholarly, theoretical models of conversion embedded in religious studies.
Program Unit Chairs
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