John Cassian and the Creation of Monastic Subjectivity

Joshua Daniel Schachterle

John Cassian (360-435 CE) started his monastic career in Bethlehem. He later traveled to the Egyptian desert, living there as a monk, meeting the venerated Desert Fathers, and learning from them for about fifteen years. Much later, he would go to the region of Gaul to help establish a monastery ther...

Critical Theory and Early Christianity

Matthew G. Whitlock

This volume aims to create--in Walter Benjamin's terms--dialectical images from early Christian texts and the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It blasts the past and the present into one another, creating new constellations of thought, ones connected with tensions and mediated by theory (mediat...

Indigenous Religious Traditions in 5 Minutes

Molly H. Bassett, Natalie Avalos

Indigenous Religious Traditions in Five Minutes aims to answer many of the questions that come to mind when we think about the religious lives of Native and Indigenous peoples of the world. Scholars from many fields answer dozens of questions about a wide variety of specific Indigenous religious tra...

Spectres of John Ball

James Crossley

For centuries, the priest John Ball was one of the most infamous or famous figures in the history of English rebels, best known for his saying 'When Adam delved and Eve Span, Who was then the gentleman'. But over the past hundred years his memory has faded dramatically. Along with Wat Tyler, Ball wa...

The Complexity of Conversion

Valerie Nicolet, Marianne Kartzow

Today, conversion is a contested religious, political, and personal phenomenon, and that was also the case in the ancient world. Using several primary sources (Jewish and Christian) and case studies, this volume discusses what this change could have meant for various individuals or groups of people...

The Use and Dissemination of Religious Knowledge in Antiquity

Catherine Hezser, Diana V. Edelman

Ancient Mesopotamian, biblical, rabbinic, and Christian literature was created and transmitted by the intellectual elite and therefore presents their world views and perspectives. This volume investigates for the first time whether and to what extent religious knowledge - e.g., "sacred" narratives,...

Jesus and Addiction to Origins

Willi Braun

Russell T. McCutcheon

This collection of essays constitute an extended argument for an anthropocentric, human-focused, study of religious practices. The basic premise of the argument, offered in the opening section, is that there is nothing special or extraordinary about human behaviors and constructs that are claimed to...

The Dissolution of the Monasteries in England and Wales

Hugh Willmott

This book provides a timely and original overview of the Dissolution of the Monasteries and its longer term affects on the social and physical landscape of England and Wales during the decades that followed. Combining for the first time the full wealth of archaeological evidence gathered over the la...

Theorizing Religion in Antiquity

Nickolas P. Roubekas

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 speci...

New Antiquities

Dylan M. Burns, Almut-Barbara Renger

Just as we speak of "dead" languages, we say that religions "die out." Yet sometimes, people try to revive them, today more than ever. New Antiquities addresses this phenomenon through critical examination of how individuals and groups appeal to, reconceptualize, and reinvent the religious world of...