Chapter 10 brings together the trends in material production and liturgical revision presented across the book. It first discusses what the three thirteenth-century Dominican liturgical exemplars (Rome, Santa Sabina, XIV L 1; London, British Library, Add. 23935; and Salamanca, San Esteban, SAL.–CL.01) reveal as a microcosm of Dominican and Parisian book production, contributing in particular to our understanding of the working practices of professional music scribes or notators. It then shifts focus to the liturgical contents of the exemplars, charting the types of changes that were made at different stages of the Dominican liturgical revision, and considering what these changes reveal about the agendas of those involved in the revision. Finally, the status of the first exemplar is reconsidered, offering new insights into the process of revising the Dominican liturgy.

This chapter examines a selection of ‘confession inscriptions’ from Asia Minor. These inscriptions attest to a religious hermeneutic or diagnostic practice through which individuals sought to discover which past transgression might have been the cause of divine punishment in the form of a present illness. Even a small childhood incident could set in motion a train of events leading to illness and even death. In retrospect, the initial event needed to be pinpointed: only then could one take part in the ‘juridical procedure’ in which one could atone for one’s transgression and be forgiven by the god(s). The conception of illness in terms of a divinatory sign attests to individuals’ ‘omen-mindedness’, a term denoting a perpetual state of receptiveness to possible supernatural signs. Omen-mindedness implies a set of beliefs in and about the gods. These inscriptions preserve individual accounts of a person’s intimate relationship with the divine – the belief that the gods punished when angered and were forgiving when an individual made amends. The seriously ill interacted with their gods to find a cure; those who were successful recorded the process and thus reveal the character and depth of their belief and the important part of it that was omen-mindedness.

This chapter examines some core commitments of the monotheistic worldview that has dominated the Western sphere and spread to all corners of the Earth over the past 1,000 years. It also addresses the differences between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, while commenting on what sets apart the form of theism found in some Hindu traditions.

Chapter 1 considers the evolving significance of a putative ideal of religious uniformity for the makeup of political institutions in late antiquity. It suggests that we have the chronology of the Christianisation of late ancient bureaucracies back to front. It was only when those elites became predominantly Christian that religious uniformity within the state became a feasible goal for individual regimes. In that sense, for the Christianisation of the Roman state, the conversion of the Roman aristocracy only represents the beginning of the story. This chapter thus pursues the question of religious uniformity further into late antiquity, by considering the developing understanding of what was required to ensure an appropriately (orthodox) Christian state in the fifth and sixth centuries. It argues that requirements for (orthodox) Christian administrators were not simply an axiomatic assumption of late (and post-)Roman regimes, but a product of shifts in institutional norms and wider cultural assumptions across the fourth to sixth centuries.

This chapter examines scientism. Its advocates maintain that there is nothing outside the domain of science, nor is there any area of human life to which science cannot successfully be applied. A scientific account of anything and everything constitutes the full story of the universe and its inhabitants.

Part III of this book reconstructs expectations of official churchgoing and entanglements with churchmen and Christian institutions in select political environments across the fifth and sixth centuries. Ch. 6 pursues this problem in the best attested of these: the Eastern imperial capital of Constantinople. It begins by charting norms of imperial religious observance. Eastern emperors seem to have attended public churches at major festivals and special occasions. Various reports suggest that when the emperor went to church, those who served them (and the senatorial aristocracy as a collective) were supposed to go too. Within these politics of church attendance, the bishop of Constantinople represents a surprisingly peripheral figure. Although some courtiers and bureaucrats were regular attendees at Hagia Sophia, they seem to have kept themselves at a critical distance from the bishop’s pastoral authority. As with other members of the Constantinopolitan elite, many imperial officials focused their Christian identities on activities within their own households, whether these were dynastic commemorations, building projects, patronage arrangements for clerics, monastic start-ups, or their own ascetic practices. This chapter shows how the religious practices and affiliations of these ‘over-mighty congregants’ were also shaped by the corporate Christianity of the imperial palace, consistory, and Senate.