The first issue of a new journal dedicated to “Religion in
the Roman Empire” (RRE) is out. “Individual appropriation in lived ancient
religion” is the title of the first issue of 130 pages. The articles focus on
methodologies to reconstruct individual appropriations of traditions, religious
experiences and communication on religion in different social spaces. Such
perspectives, standard in approaches on recent and contemporary religion, are
facing serious challenges when addressing the material available for ancient
Mediterranean religion. New methods are developed in case studies on Mithraic
representations, practices of sacralizing space at Italian Ostia, consumption
of religion in Egyptian Karanis or rituals and their literary reflections at
Rome.
The new journal, published by Mohr Siebeck, intends to further
and document new and integrative perspectives on religion in the Ancient World
combining multidisciplinary methodologies. Starting from the notion of “lived
religion” it will offer a space to take up recent, but still incipient,
research to modify and cross the disciplinary boundaries of “History of
Religion”, “Archaeology”, “Anthropology”, “Classics”, “Ancient History”,
“Jewish History”, “Rabbinics”, “New
Testament”, “Early Christianity”, “Patristics”, “Coptic Studies”, “Gnostic and
Manichean Studies”, “Late Antiquity” and “Oriental Languages”. The editors,
based at European and American universities hope to stimulate the development
of new approaches that can encompass the local and global trajectories of the
multi-dimensional pluralistic religions of antiquity. The editorial office is
based at the Max Weber Center of the University of Erfurt and can be reached
via rre@uni-erfurt.de. See also www.mohr.de/rre
