Calling Upon Gods, Offering Bodies

Calling Upon Gods, Offering Bodies analyses the micro and macro strategies employed in the Roman World for communication with the supernatural. From lexical to physical utterances, from socializing materiality to personal appropriation, the chapters of this book demonstrate the variety and performative creativity of Roman religions.

This volume aims at analysing how self-experience of religious communication becomes a reflexive phenomenon reproduced in time and space to constitute a collectively shared narrative. The issues addressed in this volume investigate how individual, creative micro-strategies of communication with the gods became established patterns of behaviour, to what extent individual behaviour was mediated by cultural constraints, or why individual biographies of divine experience became exempla and identity markers. The different chapters of this volume explore human-divine communication through three different study-cases: linguistic communication and, specially, the role and processes of construction of divine epithets; the use of the body as a tool for communication with the supernatural; and the role of objects in the human-divine communicative act.

Autorentext

Antón Alvar Nuño is Associate Professor of Ancient History at the University of Málaga (Spain). He has specialized in the study of ancient magic and religion from a bottom-up perspective. Clelia Martínez Maza is full professor of Ancient History at University of Málaga. Her main research lines are: Religions in Late Antiquity with a particular interest in the relationship between Christianity and pre-Christian religions, Christianization of the Roman Empire, and Women's Religious Life in Antiquity. She has published more than 100 publications in national and international publishers of recognized impact. Jaime Alvar Ezquerra is Professor of Ancient History, specialized on Roman Polytheism. He is corresponding member of the Real Academia de la Historia and of the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut.

Inhalt

Table of contents - Introduction - Divine Onomastic Attributes in the Greco-Roman World. Proposal for a New Taxonomy - Artemis Iphigeniaand Artemis Calliste: A Comparative Study - Communicating Jupiter - Animal Sacrifice, Vernacular Language and Code-Switching: Adressing the Gods in Lusitanian - Augustus, Regina and Dominus. Epithets of Power as a Way to Call Upon Gods in Roman Hispania - Women's Choice. Divine Epithets in the Female Epigraphic Record in Hispania - Religious Negotiation in Polysemic Contexts and the Religious Characterisation of Socius in Imperial Epigraphy - Calling Upon Gods, Offering Bodies and the Antonine Plague - : children's bodies and voices, and prophetic mediumshipbetween Paganism and Christianity.- Angels or daemones? Angelic worship and magic in the Latin West during Late Antiquity: The example of the Visigothic slates - The Message of Martyrdom: Saint Vincent in Late-Antique Sermons - Hic martyr est Salsa.Holy Bodies and their Meaning for the Veneration of Saints in North Africa. The Case of Salsa of Tipasa - Shaping a saint from relics in early Medieval England: Oswald of Northumbria as a hagiographical model - The Saint, the Empire, and the Crowds between and . The Life of Daniel the Stylite as a Case Study - Transgender dynamics in Early Christianity asceticism: rereading hagiographies of 'cross-dressed saints' - Aedem vovit.The Military votumas a Religious Communication Strategy - The "Superstition" of a Few Litentious, Emperor Julian and Alexandria: A Case of Religious Normalisation? - Divine Objects scapes