Religious World of Late Antiquity

Call For Papers: We will host three thematic panels in 2024: 1. Back from the Dead: Lost Texts, Ideas, Things. We invite abstracts that make a case for “resurrecting” an obscure or cast-aside text (whether an ancient text or a scholarly work); a seemingly useless ancient object; or a modern intellectual paradigm that appears “worn out” or broken beyond repair. Proposals should suggest how their selection can enrich and deepen the study of religion in late antiquity. This will be a lightning panel with 8-minute papers followed by an extended discussion. 2. Theopraxy: Knowing the Gods by Doing. From the distinction between “myth and ritual” to the very concept of “theology,” knowledge often takes priority over practice in thinking about human/divine relationships. Recent studies of late ancient religion challenge this distinction, asking us to consider the means and methods of acquiring, transmitting, and transforming human knowledge of the gods as neither its expression nor its accessory but its very basis. Rather than models in which elite knowledge is diffused to “the people” who perform it, what changes if we take practices such as oracles, dreams, and prophecies, as a common vehicle for knowing the gods, shared by diverse branches of society? 3. Latent Late Antiquity. How does “late antiquity” (whether a period or a cultural construct) figure in our making or understanding of the present? This session will reflect on the questions, concerns, and tensions of contemporary experience that bubble (barely) beneath the surface – that is, in a latent way – of the study of late antiquity. How do these impulses propel or constrain the production and reception of our work on the religious world of late antiquity? We are also cosponsoring an invited review panel for Monika Amsler's The Babylonian Talmud and Late Antique Book Culture (Cambridge, 2023) with the Book History and Biblical Literatures program unit.

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