Religious Diversity in Late Antiquity

This new volume in the well-established Late Antique Archaeology series draws together recent research by archaeologists and historians to shed new light on the religious world of Late Antiquity. A detailed bibliographic essay provides an overview of relevant literature, while individual articles explore the diversity of late antique religion. Rabbinic and non-rabbinic Judaism is traced in Beth Shearim, Dura Europus and Sepphoris, and the Samaritan community in Israel, while Christian concepts of orthodoxy and heresy are examined with a particular focus on the 'Arian' Controversy. Popular piety receives close attention, through the archaeology of pilgrimage and the stylite 'pillar saints', and so too does the complex relationship between religion and magic and between sacred and secular in Late Antiquity.Contributors are David M. Gwynn, Susanne Bangert, Jodi Magness, Zeev Weiss, Shimon Dar, Michel-Yves Perrin, Bryan Ward-Perkins, Lukas Amadeus Schachner, Arja Karivieri, Carla Sfameni, Claude Lepelley, Mark Humphries, Elizabeth Jeffreys, and Isabella Sandwell.

"an excellent representative of contemporary approaches to the important questions of Late Antique religious change, among religious identities as well as in the nature and scope of the religious sphere. As the editors point out in the introduction, material and textual evidence present different opportunities and limitations. The religious history of this period will surely benefit from collaborative efforts like this one." – Alice Christ, School of Art and Visual Studies, University of Kentucky, in: American Journal of Archaeology 117/2 (April 2013) [Full review]

David M. Gwynn, Ph.D. Oxford (2003), is Lecturer in Ancient and Late Antique History at Royal Holloway, University of London. His recent publications include The Eusebians: The Polemic of Athanasius of Alexandria and the Construction of the ‘Arian Controversy’ (OUP 2007) and the edited volume A.H.M. Jones and the Later Roman Empire (Brill 2008).Susanne Bangert, Ph.D. Copenhagen (2005), is Museum Inspector, Naestved Museum, Denmark. Her doctoral thesis will shortly be published as The Ashmolean Collection of Menas Ampullae within Their Social Context (Archaeopress, Oxford).