Theorizing 'Religion' in Antiquity; Nickolas P. Roubekas

Edited by

Nickolas P. Roubekas [+–]

University of Vienna

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Nickolas P. Roubekas is assistant professor of Religious Studies at the University of Vienna, Austria. He is the author of An Ancient Theory of Religion: Euhemerism from Antiquity to the Present (Routledge, 2017) and editor of Theorizing “Religion” in Antiquity (Equinox, 2019) and Explaining, Interpreting, and Theorizing Religion and Myth (with Thomas Ryba; Brill, 2020).

This volume brings theoretical and methodological discussions from religious studies, ancient history, and classics to the study of ancient religions, thus attempting to bridge a disciplinary chasm often apparent in the study of religions in antiquity. It examines theoretical discourses on the specificity, origin, and function of ‘religion’ in antiquity, broadly defined here as the period from the 6th century BCE to the 4th century CE. In addition, it explores the crucial question of what is meant by the term ‘religion’ and its applicability when employed to describe traditions that antedate the historical periods known as the Enlightenment and the Reformation. Theorizing about religion is often seen as an accomplishment of modernity, neglecting the insights stemming from the ‘pre-modern’ period. The contributors to this volume offer detailed discussions and links between how the ancients theorized about their religions and how modern scholars discuss about such discourses in their academic environments.

Series: Studies in Ancient Religion and Culture

Preface

Editor’s Preface [+–] vii-xiv

Nickolas P. Roubekas FREE

University of Vienna

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Rather than merely presenting the contents of the book, the preface explains the rationale behind the project, and discusses the two core issues addressed in the chapters of the book: the chasm between Religious Studies and Classical Studies scholarship in the study of ancient religions, and the current theoretical principles employed in the study of ancient religions, usually subsumed under the banners of modernity and postmodernity.

Introduction

1. The Present and Future of Ancient Religion [+–] 1-8

Brent Nongbri FREE

Aarhus University

Brent Nongbri is Visiting Associate Professor of New Testament Studies at Aarhus University, Denmark. Previously he was an Australian Research Council postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Ancient History at Macquarie University, Australia, and has held teaching positions at Oberlin College and Yale University. He is the author of Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept (Yale University Press, 2013) and several articles on the earliest copies of the New Testament preserved on ancient Greek papyri from Egypt. His research interests center on methodological problems in the study of religion and the material culture of the ancient Mediterranean world.

Nongbri presents the core arguments made in each chapter, while also reflecting on the overall nature of the vast and quite complex field of ‘ancient religions,’ paying attention to the very terminology that is traditionally employed in studies dealign with the religions of the ancient world.

Part I: From Language to Method

2. Our Language and Theirs: “Religious” Categories and Identities [+–] 11-31

Steve Mason £17.50

University of Groningen

Steve Mason (BA, MA McMaster; PhD University of St Michael’s College, Toronto) is Professor of Ancient Mediterranean Religions and Cultures at the University of Groningen. He edits the international series, Flavius Josephus: Translation and Commentary (Brill, 2000–), to which he has also contributed Life of Josephus (2001) and Judean War 2 (2008); he is now working on Judean War 4. His first monograph was Flavius Josephus on the Pharisees (Brill, 1991); most recent are A History of the Jewish War, A.D. 66–74 (Cambridge UP, 2016) and Orientation to the History of Roman Judaea (Wipf & Stock, 2016).

Most of our historical evidence—whether literary, inscriptional, or numismatic— involves language. In order to understand it, we need to know something of how educated persons viewed their world and what categories they assumed in talking with each other. Beginning students of ancient history typically find themselves off balance in this area. They quickly realize that terms with more or less obvious meanings in English—history, democracy, state, country, city, empire, emperor, province, myth, religion, superstition, priest, philosophy, professional, law, police, army, general (as rank), economy, markets, social class, genre, geography, maps —bring with them a cart-load of connotations that are not valid for the Greek and Latin (or Hebrew or Aramaic) terms they translate. One-for-one translation of words from ancient agrarian cultures to those of our post-industrial, post-modern western democracies is bound to be hazardous. This is evident in the study of ‘ancient religion’ and begs for out attention. Before we explore the terms that are most commonly translated as ‘religion’, we must deal with a thorny issue that sparks debate and creates misunderstandings even among specialists, namely: the legitimacy and status of such “insider-language” research.

3. The Value(s) of Belief: Ancient Religion, Cognitive Science and Interdisciplinarity [+–] 32-58

Jason P. Davies £17.50

University College London

Jason Davies is Senior Teaching Fellow at the Centre for the Advancement of Learning and Teaching at the University College London, U.K. He is the author of Rome’s Religious History: Livy, Tacitus and Ammianus on Their Gods (Cambridge University Press, 2004) and has published articles on ancient religion, interdisciplinarity, and the notion of ‘belief.’ He is co-founder of the Teaching and Learning Ancient Religion Network (TLARNetwork.org).

‘Belief’ remains a vexed term in the study of ancient religion despite the fact that almost every publication on the topic aspires to bring the discussion to a point of completion. I shall argue that secular enquiries into aspects of ‘religion’ and ‘belief’ in particular will inevitably lead to scholarly fissure. This in part lies behind the long-standing disciplinary willingness to explore extradisciplinary methods and questions. The recent appearance of cognitive science of religion offers particular opportunities – and risks – that are the latest in a series of interdisciplinary borrowings. I shall outline these opportunities and risks, identifying some broad implications for history of religion as a field before contextualizing cognitive science of religion within the framework of cultural theory.

4. Imagining Religion in Antiquity: A How To [+–] 59-78

Kevin Schilbrack £17.50

Appalachian State University

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Kevin Schilbrack is Professor and Chair of Religious Studies at the Appalachian State University, USA. He previously taught at Florida International University, Wesleyan College, and Western Carolina University. He is the author of Philosophy and the Study of Religions: A Manifesto (Wiley-Blackwell, 2014) and of various articles on philosophy and the study of religion. He is the editor of Thinking Through Rituals: Philosophical Perspectives (Routledge, 2004), Thinking Through Myths: Philosophical Perspectives (Routledge, 2002), and The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Religious Diversity (Wiley-Blackwell, 2017).

J. Z. Smith raised the idea that religion is solely the creation of the scholar’s imagination in his widely read book, Imagining Religion (1982). Since the publication of that book, there has been a healthy growth of reflexivity in the study of religions, and many scholars have followed Smith’s call for more attention to the ways that the word “religion” is a product of modern European interests. This raises questions about the appropriateness of classifying other cultures with concepts they did not know. Is it appropriate to apply “religion,” anachronistically, to historical times and places when the concepts was not used? Arguments against imagining religion often raise interesting philosophical questions about the relationship between words and objects, the difference between classification in the natural sciences and the human sciences, and even about realism in general. In this paper, I defend the use of practice by raising and responding to three philosophically-informed reasons why scholars ought not use them, and by distinguishing two ways to read Smith’s famous proposal.

Part II: The Greek World

5. Philosophical Reflections on the Presocratics: A Contribution to the Scientific Study of Religion [+–] 81-102

Donald Wiebe £17.50

University of Toronto

Donald Wiebe is Professor of Philosophy of Religion in Trinity College at the University of Toronto, Canada. He is the author of Religion and Truth: Towards and Alternative Paradigm for the Study of Religion (De Gruyter, 1981), The Irony of Theology and the Nature of Religious Thought (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1991), Beyond Legitimation: Essays on the Problem of Religious Knowledge (Palgrave Macmillan, 1994), The Politics of Religious Studies: The Continuing Conflict with Theology in the Academy (Palgrave Macmillan, 1999) and The Learned Practice of Religion in the Modern University (Bloomsbury, 2019).

Implicit in the thought of the pre-Socratic cosmologists from the Milesians to the Atomists lies a new understanding of ‘knowledge’ in which beliefs are open to rational criticism and assessment. This kind of knowledge about the world and states of affairs in the world simply amounts to the espousal of beliefs about an objectively existing reality that have found rational and evidential support. This ‘knowledge as rationally justifiable beliefs’ stands in radical contrast to knowledge as metaphysical ‘Truths’ regarding indisputable realities such as the gods and the meaning of life vouchsafed to people either by way of revelation, intuition, or imagination. It is the emergence of this new conception of knowledge as entirely reliant on autonomous reason that constitutes a ‘critical episode’ in the development of human thought essential to the eventual emergence of science (and of the scientific study of religion) as we understand it today.

6. Impiety and Versions of Rationalization of Religion in Classical Greece [+–] 103-128

Emese Mogyoródi £17.50

University of Szeged, Hungary

Emese Mogyoródi is Associate Professor of Ancient Philosophy at the University of Szeged, Hungary. Her fields of interest include presocratic philosophy, Socrates, Plato’s ethics and political philosophy, and moral psychological and theological issues in archaic and classical Greek thought. She has been granted the fellowship of the Center for Hellenic Studies (2003/2004) and the National Humanities Center (2012/2013). Her most recent book is a collection of essays entitled Achilles and Socrates: Moral Psychology and Political Philosophy in the Archaic and Classical Age of the Greeks (in Hungarian).

In Classical Greece some thinkers (Critias, Prodicus, Democritus) formulated theories about the origins of religion and/or the gods that accounted for religious belief in terms that today qualify as ‟reductionist” explanations. None of these theories represented a direct attack on Greek religion nor propounded explicit atheism, nonetheless for one reason or another they did imply a challenge to traditional religious sentiment. This essay explores the theoretical implications of these theories and argues that it was not because of their atheism that they provoked religious sentiment, but because they accounted for religious belief in terms of some ideological function. Traditional Greek religion, however, was distinctly non-ideological in many ways. Reductionist theories of the Greek Enlightenment resulted from the projection of a reductive conception of the human-human and the human-divine relationship onto Greek religion that misrepresented fundamental aspects of Greek piety.

7. Theorizing About (Which?) Origins: Herodotus on the Gods [+–] 129-149

Nickolas P. Roubekas £17.50

University of Vienna

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Modern theories of religion are preoccupied with the questions of origin and function of religion. By ‘origin’ theorists refer to the questions of when, why, and how religion originates, either historically i.e., the first time in history that religion appearsor recurrently i.e., every time that religion appears in a given culture, setting, geographical area, etc. Although this explanatory exercise is deemed modern, it nevertheless preoccupied ancient authors as well. Among the most notable ancient attempts to explain the origins of the gods (and, thus, religion) is the Histories of Hedorotus, the often deemed father of history. The main interpretative approach taken by classicists, historians, and religious studies scholars is the assignment of a diffusionism theory to Herodotus. In this essay, this explanation is challenged by a closer reading of the Histories and Herodotus’s goal.

Part III: From Mesopotamia to Rome

8. Ancient Mesopotamian Scholars, Ritual Speech and Theorizing Religion without “Theory” or “Religion” [+–] 153-175

Alan Lenzi £17.50

University of the Pacific

Alan Lenzi is Associate Professor and Chair of Religious Studies at the University of the Pacific, Stockton CA, USA. He specializes in the study of ancient Assyrian and Babylonian scholarship, literature, and religion during the first millennium BCE. His books include a monograph entitled Secrecy and the Gods: Secret Knowledge in Ancient Mesopotamia and Biblical Israel (Helsinki, 2008), a text edition of Ludlul Bēl Nēmeqi: The Standard Babylonian Poem of the Righteous Sufferer (with Amar Annus; Helsinki, 2010), and two edited volumes: Reading Akkadian Prayers and Hymns: An Introduction (SBL Press, 2011) and Divination, Politics, and Ancient Near Eastern Empire (with Jonathan Stökl; SBL Press, 2014).

There is no word in the Babylonian language for “religion” or “theory.” This fact is not surprising since the scribes rarely discussed abstract concepts that we find useful for organizing our existence. For example, there is no general word for “music,” “law,” “art,” “science,” or “culture.” There are, however, many words for ritual speech, and there is very good evidence for how the ancient scribes classified and organized many of these texts they label as such by function and/or genre into series and ritual complexes. As J. Z. Smith has emphasized, taxonomy or classification is fundamental to cognition, and religions are powerful classificatory engines. This paper surveys the evidence for labeling and organizing Mesopotamian ritual speech, with emphasis on the Akkadian materials of the first millennium BCE. If there is evidence that discourse with accompanying ritual actions directed to non-human, non-obvious beings was labeled and organized distinctly from discourse directed to humans, might we see therein the beginnings of a tacit theory of religion, despite the absence of the words “theory” and “religion”?

9. Magic and Religion in Ancient Egypt [+–] 176-196

Rita Lucarelli £17.50

University of California at Berkeley

Rita Lucarelli is Assistant Professor of Egyptology at the University of California, Berkley, USA. She specializes in the religions of ancient Egypt, demonology, and magic in the Near East, and the funerary culture and literature of ancient Egypt. She has held positions at the University of Verona, Bonn University, University of Bari, and she was a visiting research scholar at the Italian Academy of Advanced Studies of Columbia University (2009) and at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World of New York University (2012). She is the author of The Book of the Dead of Gatseshen: Ancient Egyptian Funerary Religion in the 10th Century BC (Brill, 2006), and co-editor of Herausgehen am Tage: Gesammelte Schriften zum altägyptischen Totenbuch (with Marcus Müller-Roth and Annik Wüthrich; Harrassowitz Verlag, 2012).

In ancient Egypt there are no emic terms that we could translate as ‘religion’ or ‘magic’. For decades, Egyptologists have been using these terms in contrast to each other when describing the official, more sophisticated religious activities of the temple versus the personal and more limited magical practices as described in spells. The most recent trend in studies of ancient Egyptian magic, instead, considers it as an integral part of religion. In this essay the textual and material evidence of religious and magical practices, rituals and artifacts produced during the long span of the ancient Egyptian history, which stretches from Prehistory through the Pharaonic and until the Graeco-Roman Period, will be discussed in order to illustrate the main theoretical issues related to the ancient Egyptian beliefs and activities concerned with the supernatural and according to an emic perspective on the available sources.

10. Manipulating “Religion”: The Egyptian ‘Theologoumena’ in Diodorus Siculus [+–] 197-220

Panayotis Pachis £17.50

Aristotle University

Panayotis Pachis is Professor of Religious Studies at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. His publications include Religion and Politics in the Graeco-Roman World: Redescribing the Isis-Sarapis Cult (Barbounakis, 2010) and many articles on the Graeco-Roman religions and the cognitive study of religion. He is also the author of five books in Greek and co-editor of four volumes, most recently Chasing Down Religion: In the Sights of History and the Cognitive Sciences (with Donald Wiebe; Equinox, 2014).

In the first book of his Library of History Diodorus presents a panorama of ideas and practices that dominated the Egyptian everyday practices and customs during his own life time (1st century BCE). Diodorus lived in an unstable and constantly changing world where everything was challenged. The information that he provides regarding the religious practices of Egypt is of particular importance since it adds to the knowledge about Egypt in general. This approach of the Egyptian theologoumena by Diodorus Siculus may provide further confirmation regarding the encouragement, especially in the case of examining mythical narrations, which could be considered as ideological, that is an ongoing process of constructing, authorizing, and reconstructing social identities and/or social formations. In Diodorus’ work there are constant innuendos regarding the oppositions between the local and ecumenical character of the cults of the Egyptian deities. The priests of Egypt who remained loyal to religious traditions represent the first tendency. The second one is exemplified by the ecumenical and syncretistic character that is adopted in the worshipping of these deities already from the beginning of the Hellenistic era. The tendency towards ecumenism is directly related to the Ptolemaic attempts for a renewal of the traditional character of the Egyptian religion.

11. Metaphor and Religion in Ancient Rome [+–] 221-242

Spencer E. Cole £17.50

University of Minnesota

Spencer Cole is Associate Professor of Classics at the University of Minnesota, USA. His publications include Cicero and the Rise of Deification at Rome (Cambridge University Press, 2013) and articles on Roman religion in the republican and imperial periods, Augustan poetry, and Greek drama. He is also a contributor to The Routledge Dictionary of Ancient Mediterranean Religions.

This paper employs contemporary metaphor theory to unpack and analyze structural principles that configure ancient Roman religious discourses. Attuned to the cognitive dimensions of metaphor, it explores how metaphorical framings normalized new ideas and arrangements in phases of religious reordering at Rome. It focuses on cognitive “cross-domain mapping” in two case studies: the naturalization of new divinities at Rome and the formation of novel concepts of death and afterlife.

Part IV: From Judaism to Christianity

12. Defining Judaism: The Case of Philo [+–] 245-264

Michael L. Satlow £17.50

Brown University

Michael L. Satlow is Professor of Judaic Studies and Religious Studies at Brown University, USA. His research focuses on the social and religious history of Jews and Judaism in antiquity, but he also has broader research interests on Jews and Judaism as well as on issues of method and theory in the study of religion. He is the author of How the Bible Became Holy (Yale University Press, 2014), Creating Judaism: History, Tradition, Practice (Columbia University Press, 2006), Jewish Marriage in Antiquity (Princeton University Press, 2001), Tasting the Dish: Rabbinic Rhetorics of Sexuality (Brown Judaic Studies, 1995), and he has edited and co-edited The Gift in Antiquity (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013) and Religion and the Self in Antiquity (with David Brakke and Steven Weitzman; Indiana University Press, 2005).

Despite the wide scholarly recognition of and dissatisfaction with the first-order essentialism inherent in the academic study of individual ‘religions’ or ‘traditions’, scholars have been far slower to develop nonessentialist models that take seriously both the plurality of religious communities that all identify as part of the same religion and the characteristics that allow these communities to see themselves as members of a single ‘religion’. This article, building on earlier work by Jacob Neusner and Jonathan Z. Smith, and taking Philo as a case study, attempts to develop a polythetic model for Judaism that has implications not only for the study of ‘Judaism’ but more broadly also for how scholars might develop individual ‘traditions’ as useful second-order categories of analysis.

13. Religion, Geography, and the Impossibility of Jewish Identity [+–] 265-288

Sarah Imhoff £17.50

Indiana University

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Sarah Imhoff is Jay and Jeanie Schottenstein Chair in Jewish Studies and Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies and the Borns Jewish Studies Program at Indiana University. She is author of Masculinity and the Making of American Judaism (Indiana University Press, 2017) and The Lives of Jessie Sampter: Queer, Disabled, Zionist (Duke University Press, 2022). She is the founding co-editor of the journal American Religion.

When contemporary historians and sociologists discuss Jewish identity, they often tell a tale of decline. Once upon a time, everyone knew who was Jewish and who wasn’t. Though some people converted, and some Jews occasionally passed as non-Jews, the lines between Jew and non-Jew were visible and agreed upon. Then came emancipation and its unfortunate companions assimilation and intermarriage, and thus Jewish identity became diffuse, partial, and mixed. This decline narrative suggests the loss of a stable center of Jewishness. Jewish Studies scholars might valorize certainty and stability of Jewishness for a variety of reasons—the analytical appeal of certainty, a holdover from the centrality of objectivity in the origins of Jewish Studies, or even a theological desire for clarity about who is a Jew. But a close look at antiquity shows us that “Jewish identity” has long been diffuse and mixed. The intensity of the Jew/Judean translation debate also suggests that scholars cannot decide whether the ancient ioudaioi were religious or national. And for good reason: these ioudaioi do not neatly fit into one of these established categories. Like the second-century rabbinic discussions about the fictional animal called a koi, they were sometimes one, sometimes the other, sometimes both, and sometimes neither. In the end, the ancient material suggests that Jewishness had—and has—no stable essence.

14. Whither Shall we Go? Tertullian and Christian Identity Formation [+–] 289-306

Nickolas P. Roubekas £17.50

University of Vienna

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It is today common practice to refer to identity-formation practices and processes when dealing with early Christianity. In addition, postmodern approaches to religion tend to focus on identity formation as the underlying aim of ‘religion’ as a phenomenon. Tertulian, perhaps the most important author of the early Christian period in the west, dedicates a treatise on the spectacles and whether, how, and why Christians should avoid participating as spectators to the games, theater, and other social gatherings curated by the Roman Empire on the basis of their pagan contents. Although his argumentation is based on theological principles, his discussion touches upon the issue of theorizing about space, religion, and identity.

15. The Anachronism of “Early Christian Communities” [+–] 307-324

Sarah Rollens £17.50

Rhodes College, Memphis, Tennessee

Sarah E. Rollens is Visiting Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Rhodes College, Memphis TN, USA. She is the author of Framing Social Criticism in the Jesus Movement: The Ideological Project of the Sayings Gospel Q (Mohr Siebeck, 2014) and has also published on the synoptic problem, violence in early Christianity, and Greco-Roman associations. She is currently working on her second monograph treating violence in early Christianity. She has taught courses on the study of religion and early Christianity at the University of Alabama, the University of Toronto, and the University of North Carolina at Wilmington.

It has long been common to speak of “early Christian communities”, and especially to assume that particular communities were associated with texts with supposed unique theological ideas (e.g., “Matthew’s community” or “the Roman Christian community”). Stanley Stowers has shown that many scholarly portraits of these communities rely on idealizations from the Book of Acts and Eusebius’ writings. This essay argues, in a similar vein, that presumptions of “early Christian communities” are anachronistic, because they depend on—indeed embody modern understandings of religious identity: in particular, that religion is a private, interior matter that is shared among a wider “community” of believers who all orient their collective identity around these beliefs. These features of identity should not be taken for granted in non-modern contexts, and there are more nuanced ways to understand the group identity generated by many proto- Christian texts.

Part V: Topics in the Study of (Ancient) Religion

16. Cognitive Study of (Ancient) Religions [+–] 327-360

Leonardo Ambasciano £17.50

Independent researcher

Leonardo Ambasciano earned his PhD in Historical Studies at the University of Turin, Italy, in 2014 with a cognitive and evolutionary analysis of gender & sexuality in the ancient Roman cult of Bona Dea. In 2016, he was Visiting Lecturer in Religious Studies at Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic. He also served as Editorial Assistant and Managing Editor of the Journal of Cognitive Historiography from 2014 to 2021. He is the author of An Unnatural History of Religion (Bloomsbury, 2019).

The chapter offers a detailed discussion of the history as well as the latest developments in the field of cognitive study of religion (CSR), and applies the theories and methods of that sub-discipline to the study of ancient religions – with Roman religion acting as a case study.

17. Cultural Geography [+–] 361-380

Justin Tse £17.50

University of British Columbia

Justin K. H. Tse is Visiting Assistant Professor of Asian American Studies at Northwestern University, Evanston IL, USA. Previously, he taught at the University of Washington’s Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies in Seattle, WA, USA and human geography at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, B.C., Canada. He became a Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada postdoctoral fellow at the University of Washington in 2014 after receiving his Ph.D. in Geography from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, B.C., Canada. His research interests revolve around geographies of religion in the Pacific region. His work has appeared in Progress in Human Geography, Global Networks, and Population, Space, Place: A Journal of Population Geography.

The chapter discusses how geographers and religious studies scholars, despite their unawareness, have long worked closely when studying religion. By revisiting Mircea Eliade’s work on space and religion Justin Tse argues that the two fields have more in common than one might expect, and calls for an interdisciplinary study of ancient religions.

18. Texts [+–] 381-397

James Crossley £17.50

St Mary’s University, London

James Crossley is Research Professor in Bible, Society, and Politics at MF Norwegian School of Theology, Religion, and Society, Academic Director of the Centre for the Critical Study of Apocalyptic and Millenarian Movements (CenSAMM), and Professor of Bible and Society at St Mary’s University, Twickenham, London. He is author of numerous books and articles on Christian Origins, reception history of the Bible, and English politics and religion, reception history of the Bible, including Cults, Martyrs and Good Samaritans: Religion in Contemporary English Political Discourse (Pluto, 2018). The website John Ball, English Legend provides images and resources discussed in Spectres of John Ball.

Utilizing the Bible as case study, James Crossley offers a succinct but informed presentation of the malleability of textual resources, applicable to the study of ancient religions despite the different nature of the various textual resources that scholars have at their disposal from antiquity.

19. Gender [+–] 398-413

Irene Salvo £17.50

Georg-August University Göttingen, Germany

Irene Salvo is Research Associate at the Georg-August University Göttingen, Germany, holding a postdoctoral position within the project ‘Enlightened Men – Superstitious Women? Religion, Education and Stereotypes of Gender in Classical Athens.’ From 2013 to 2015, she was the Gerda Henkel Scholar in Ancient History at the Royal Holloway, University of London, U.K. Her main research interest is the relationship between gender and religion from the evidence of Greek inscriptions of religious interest, such as curse tablets, oracle enquiries, ‘confession inscriptions,’ and healing miracle stories. She has published various articles on Greek social and cultural history, in particular on Greek epigraphy, pollution and purification, and emotions.

Although a modern term, ‘gender’ is usually either overlooked or not adequately discussed in studies dealing with ancient religions. Salvo offers an introduction to the issue, by taking ancient Athens as a core example, and discusses how scholars dealing with ancient religions can utilise the expanding field of gender studies in their own works.

Epilogue

20. Epilogue: The Jabberwocky Dilemma – Take Religion for Example [+–] 414-438

Luther H. Martin £17.50

University of Vermont

Luther H. Martin is Professor Emeritus of Religion, University of Vermont. He also has been a Distinguished International Fellow at the Institute of Cognition and Culture, Queen’s University Belfast, and a Visiting Professor at Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic. He is the author of Hellenistic Religions (1987) and of numerous articles in this field of his historical specialization. He has also published widely in the field of theory and method in the study of religion, especially, in the area of cognitive theory and historiographical method, and has coedited several volumes in this area, including Past Minds: Studies in Cognitive Historiography (2011). He is a founding member of the International Association for the Cognitive Science of Religion and is co-editor of its Journal of the Cognitive Science of Religion.

An exponent of the social scientific study of religion, Martin discusses not only the contents of the chapters of this volume, but also offers ideas and other theoretical suggestions for ‘moving forward’ in the important field of ‘ancient religions.’

End Matter

Index [+–] 439-443

Nickolas P. Roubekas FREE

University of Vienna

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Reviews

Theorizing “Religion” in Antiquity is a formidable accomplishment, bringing together scholars from various disciplines, convincing them to reflect on their usage of concepts like “religion,” and applying a self-critical perspective throughout. One critical remark, here hardly at the right place, is that I hope that “theorizing” ancient religion will come to involve more than the current definition-and-applicability-debate. For now, this volume models the type of conversations we should be having within the study of ancient religion(s)—and beyond. As such, it is highly recommended.
Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses

This volume raises a great many important and substantial questions regarding the nature of our evidence for ‘religion’, the character of our critical language, and the scope of divides in humanistic disciplines dedicated to the study of ancient religions. It is clear that we need to talk more to each other. We might as well start by listening carefully to what this insightful, irritating, intelligent and genuinely path-breaking and bridge-building volume has to say.
Greece & Rome

This book is important for its theoretical scope and the various perspectives it offers on the topic of ‘religion’ in antiquity. It is a multi‐authored volume susceptible to irritate readers looking for coherent conclusions, but it will excite researchers who have wondered about the vast possibilities to explore both from classics/ancient history and from religious studies scholars.
Theorizing ‘Religion’ in Antiquity is extremely rich in the analysis it offers and the topics it presents. It moves beyond the artificial divide of classics, ancient history, and religious studies.
Reviews in Religion and Theology

[We] conclude that the publication is highly recommended for those who seek to delve into the complex study of “religion”, especially for those researchers whose work focuses on the religiosities of the ancient world.
ARYS Journal

The volume is important in embodying the interdisciplinarity, fault lines of disagreement and difference, and distinctive methods with which scholars come to “religion” in (only) Western antiquity. In this regard, this volume is at least a should-read for students of ancient religion.
Reading Religion

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Theorizing "Religion" in Antiquity

Nickolas P. Roubekas [+–]

University of Vienna

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