Religious Deviance in the Roman World
Religious Deviance in the Roman World
£90.00
GBPReligious individuality is not restricted to modernity. This book offers a new reading of the ancient sources in order to find indications for the spectrum of religious practices and intensified forms of such practices only occasionally denounced as 'superstition'. Authors from Cicero in the first century BC to the law codes of the fourth century AD share the assumption that authentic and binding communication between individuals and gods is possible and widespread, even if problematic in the case of divination or the confrontation with images of the divine. A change in practices and assumptions throughout the imperial period becomes visible. It might be characterised as 'individualisation' and informed the Roman law of religions. The basic constellation - to give freedom of religion and to regulate religion at the same time - resonates even into modern bodies of law and is important for juridical conflicts today.
- Written by one of the most important scholars working on Roman religion today
- Reconstructs a hitherto neglected feature of ancient Mediterranean religion and its conceptualisation by contemporaries
- Offers an important insight into both public religious norms and the primacy of individual religious experience in the ancient world
Product details
May 2016Adobe eBook Reader
9781316685136
0 pages
0kg
This ISBN is for an eBook version which is distributed on our behalf by a third party.
Table of Contents
- 1. Superstitio: conceptions of religious deviance in Roman antiquity
- 2. Creation of religious norms in the Late Republic
- 3. The role of ethos and knowledge in controlling religious deviance: a Tiberian view of priestly deviance
- 4. De superstitione: religious experiences best not had in temples
- 5. The normative discourse in Late Antiquity
- 6. The individual in a world of competing religious norms
- 7. Deviance and individuation: from Cicero to Theodosius.
