Asuman Lätzer-Lasar presents a working paper on 'Challenging the Concept of “Landscape Biography” – Theoretical Considerations on Cult Transfers in the Roman Empire by Using the Case Study of the Mater Magna Veneration'

During the Roman Republic and the Imperial period cults or religion(s) were introduced to different places for various reasons. Religion as a constitutive element of especially ancient societies had a high impact on culture, the shaping of the urban space and urban life, as well as their religious beliefs. However, the spatial dimension as well as the urban actors (emperors, aediles, priests, individual adherent) did also influence religious practices, and consequently lead to religious change. By using the example of a case study – the Mater Magna veneration – the paper seeks to evaluate in what regard the concept of a “landscape biography” might be useful for the discussion of concrete archaeological contexts. The paper will focus on the so-called “place-making”: How was the deity and its sanctuaries situated and integrated in the previously existing city-scape? How did the city-scape, urban life and the history of the city transform?

Emiliano Rubens Urciuoli gives a working paper on 'Unoffered Pain. Sacrifice and Martyrdom: An Uneasy Companionship'

This paper is on religion but not the city. Based on a 2017 conference talk I am now reworking for publication (the volume will be edited by the organizers of the conference, Jennifer Otto and Katharina Waldner), its genesis predates the series of intellectual, financial, and organizational events that have resulted in my personal ‘axial age’ called ‘Urban Religion’. Actually, the core of this piece dates back even before Otto’s and Waldner’s workshop, since it was drafted in between my first research stay (2013) and my first research contract (2015) in Erfurt. Over these four years, the shape of the text has significantly changed and some of the people attending this colloquium have played a role in this metamorphosis – without being accountable for its shortcomings.
The structure of the text reverses the actual chronology of the incorporated materials. In 2014, I was invited to a cross-disciplinary workshop in Lausanne whose title was ‘Martyres et sacrifices. Atelier comparatiste d’histoire des religions’. The presentation text featured a definition of martyrdom aiming at providing the participants with a common framework. It read as follows : ‘le martyr est celui qui se sacrifie volontairement pour une cause supérieure, parfois en entraînant d’autres personnes avec lui dans la mort’. My idea was to question these definitional guidelines by tackling the problem of the conceptual-discursive blending between martyrdom and sacrifice and sketching an archeology of this connection in the early Christian literature. The long second section of today’s paper reworks and expands this issue. It aims to show how uneasy, unstable, and situational the textual beginnings of this relationship appear to be and seeks to explain this find – a find that flies in the face of many scholars’ assumptions and perhaps some readers’ expectations.
The first part of the paper is far more recent. It is a theoretical reflection building on cognitive studies of religion and stimulated by Otto’s and Waldner’s emphasis on violence as one of the three main axes of their 2017 workshop (the other two are ‘Trauma’ and ‘Identity’). Comprising deep-rooted, panhuman mechanisms to encode and react to experiences of violence, the cognitive substratum is the first of the three intertwined dimensions I look at in order to dig out the nexus between sacrifice and martyrdom. I call the other two layers ‘socio-symbolic’ and ‘discursive-conceptual’ dimension. Only the latter will be thoroughly examined in the paper. Yet now that I am thinking backwards in order to write this introduction I clearly realize how and to what extent all the three dimensions actually bespeak of violence, namely: 1) the deep-historical, universal experience of physical violence that has long triggered and stabilized ways to encode knowledge and memories about context-depending ‘things’ like sacrifice and martyrdom; 2) the material and symbolic violence of an ancient social system comprising social technologies of reciprocity that imposed restrictions to the manners of thinking and talking about sacrifice and martyrdom; 3) the hermeneutical violence of a religious tradition that has long endorsed the conceptual-discursive blending between sacrifice and martyrdom, channeled it through the centuries, upgraded it to commonsense, and now is inviting us to read this ‘winning’ paradigm back into the earliest extant texts.
This paper is also looking forward. Right from the start, it attempts to smuggle the ‘Urban Religion program’ into its subject by saying that ancient Christian martyrdom is ‘a full-blown urban religious practice’. This sentence opens a small window onto the role martyrdom is going to play in my ongoing research.

Qian Zhao offers a working paper on 'Trial Comparative Research of Chinese and Britain Cultural Entrepreneurs in pre-modern Time'

My research is on Chinese young cultural entrepreneurs under socio-technological innovations in China. In a close observation of Chinese entrepreneurs, we can observe an interesting phenomenon that a group of Chinese entrepreneurs, especially some famous successful ones have many cultural actions in their economic activities.
In this paper, I would like to turn to historical comparative analysis of cultural entrepreneurs in Britain and China in pre-modern time and try to answer the questions as following: how should we view this cultural entrepreneurship phenomenon, unique or ubiquitous? How they acted as cultural entrepreneurs? Where did their cultural propensity come from? As a part of my dissertation in the topic of cultural entrepreneurs, I am also very interested in the research of the evolvement of cultural entrepreneurs in history, to find the source and course.
I suppose, given that business and personal values were so closely intertwined, we should find answers in the culture and its relation with entrepreneurs’ certain values. What is less discussed is a set of cultural values that pertain to entrepreneurs’ cultural activities.

Rubina Raja and Joerg Ruepke publish 'A Companion to the Archaeology of Religion in the Ancient World'

                                                Rubina Raja (Editor), Joerg Reupke (Editor)

ISBN: 978-1-4443-5000-5

520 pages, 2015, Wiley-Blackwell

The publication of A Companion to the Archaeology of Religion in the Ancient World presents a comprehensive overview of a wide range of topics relating to the practices, expressions, and interactions of religion in antiquity, primarily in the Greco-Roman world. As the below features will underline, it is a product of the close cooperation between the editors at the Max Weber Center, University of Erfurt, one of the leading research institutes in Lived Ancient Religion, together with colleagues from around the world, covering a broad range of disciplines.
The Companion covers
• Features readings that focus on religious experience and expression in the ancient world rather than solely on religious belief
• Places a strong emphasis on domestic and individual religious practice
• Represents the first time that the concept of “lived religion” is applied to the ancient history of religion and archaeology of religion
• Includes cutting-edge data taken from top contemporary researchers and theorists in the field
• Examines a large variety of themes and religious traditions across a wide geographical area and chronological span
• Written to appeal equally to archaeologists and historians of religion

The editors:
Rubina Raja is Professor of Classical Archaeology at Aarhus University, Denmark. She has published widely on religious identities in the eastern Roman provinces, and is editor of the series Contextualising the Sacred, Lived Ancient Religion, and Palmyrenske Studier. She is the author of the monograph Urban Development and Regional Identity in the Eastern Roman Provinces, 50 BC – AD 250: Aphrodisias, Ephesos, Athens, Gerasa. She is currently working on a monograph on the religious life of the Tetrapolis region.
Jörg Rüpke is Professor of History of Religion at the University of Erfurt, Germany and director of the ERC Research Group “Lived Ancient Religion.” His books include Domi militiae (1990); Rituals in Ink (2004); Religion and Law in Classical and Christian Rome (2006); (ed.) A Companion to Roman Religion (Wiley-Blackwell, 2007); Religion of the 

'Religion in the Roman Empire' - New journal in the History of Religion

 

 

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