This book fills a gap in the study of mystery cults in Graeco-Roman Antiquity. Focusing on the visual language surrounding these cults, it aims to understand how images depict mysteries in different cults: Dionysus, Mithras, Mother of the Gods, and Isiac cults.

Martyrdom is a phenomenon common to many of the world's religious traditions. But why? In this study, John Soboslai offers insights into the practices of self-sacrifice within specific sociopolitical contexts. Providing a new understanding of martyrdom through the lens of political theology, he analyzes discourses and performances in four religious traditions during social and political crises, beginning with second-century Christianity in Asia Minor, where the term 'martyr' first took its meaning. He also analyzes Shi'a Islam in the 1980s, when 'suicide bombing' first appeared as a strategy in West Asia; global Sikhism during World War I, where martyrs stood for and against the British Raj; and twenty-first-century Tibetan Buddhism, where self-immolators used their bodies in opposition to the programs of the People's Republic of China. Presenting a new theory of martyrdom linked to constructions of sovereign authority, Soboslai reveals common features of self-sacrifice and demonstrates how bodily performances buttress conceptions of authority.

SENSORIVM publishes the first results of a collective investigation into how Roman rituals smelled, sounded, felt and struck the eye. It brings Roman religious experience into the realm of the senses.

The Roman world was diverse and complex. And so were religious understandings and practices as mirrored in the enormous variety presented by archaeological, iconographic, and epigraphic evidence. Conventional approaches principally focus on the political role of civic cults as a means of social cohesion, often considered to be instrumentalized by elites. But by doing so, religious diversity is frequently overlooked, marginalizing ‘deviating’ cult activities that do not fit the Classical canon, as well as the multitude of funerary practices and other religious activities that were all part of everyday life. In the Roman Empire, a person’s religious experiences were shaped by many and sometimes seemingly incompatible cult practices, whereby the ‘civic’ and ‘imperial’ cults might have had the least impact of all. Our goal therefore is to rethink our methodologies, aiming for a more dynamic image of religion that takes into account the varied and often contradictory choices and actions of individual, which reflects the discrepant religious experiences in the Roman world. Is it possible to ‘poke into the mind’ of an individual in Roman times, whatever his/her status and ethnicity, and try to understand the individual’s diverse experiences in such a complex, interconnected empire, exploring the choices that were open to an individual? This also raises the question whether the concept of individuality is valid for Roman times. In some periods, the impact of individual actions can be more momentous: the very first adoption of Roman-style sculpture, cult practices or Latin theonyms for indigenous deities can set in motion long-term processes that will significantly influence people’s perceptions of local deities, their characteristics, and functions. Do individual choices and preferences prevail over collective identities in the Roman Empire compared to pre-Roman times? To examine these questions, this volume presents case studies that analyze individual actions in the religious sphere.

"The authors offer a very different perspective on this campaign and are very frank in their assessment of the performance of the Allies and Germans on many levels." — New York Journal of Books Wars never run according to plan, perhaps never more so than during the Italian campaign, 1943–45, where necessary coordination between the different armies added additional complexity to Allied plans. Errors in the strategies, tactics, the coalition tensions, and operations at campaign command level can clearly be seen in firsthand accounts of the period. This new account examines the Italian campaign, from Sicily to surrender in 1945, exploring the strategy, intentions, motives, plans, and deeds. It then offers a detailed insight into the five commanders who led the battles in Italy—the two British commanders, Montgomery and Alexander; two American, Patton and Clark; and the leading German commander, Field Marshal Kesselring. Their personal notes and accounts, taken alongside archival material, provides some surprising conclusions—Montgomery was not quite the master of war he is portrayed as; Patton had serious flaws, exposed by wasting men’s lives to save a relative and overlooking the shooting of prisoners of war; Clark lost lives to bolster his image; Alexander the gentleman was far too vague to be effective as a senior leader. Meanwhile, condemned war criminal Kesselring appears to be the most efficient and also, like Alexander, one of the most popular leaders.

Choreonarratives, a collection of essays by classicists, dance scholars, and dance practitioners, explores the uses of dance as a narrative medium. Case studies from Greek and Roman antiquity illustrate how dance contributed to narrative repertoires in their multimodal manifestations, while discussions of modern and contemporary dance shed light on practices, discourses, and ancient legacies regarding the art of dancing stories. Benefitting from the crossover of different disciplinary, historical, and artistic perspectives, the volume looks beyond current narratological trends and investigates the manifold ways in which dance can acquire meaning, disclose storyworlds ranging from myths to individual life-stories, elicit the narratees’ responses, and generate powerful narratives of its own. Together, the eclectic approaches of Choreonarratives rethink dance’s capacity to tell, enrich, and inspire stories. Contributors are Sophie M. Bocksberger, Iris J. Bührle, Marie-Louise Crawley, Samuel N. Dorf, Karin Fenböck, Susan L. Foster, Laura Gianvittorio-Ungar, Sarah Olsen, Lucia Ruprecht, Karin Schlapbach, Danuta Shanzer, Christina Thurner, Yana Zarifi-Sistovari, Bernhard Zimmermann

This volume elucidates how processions, from antiquity to the present, contribute to creating consensus with regards to both political power and communitarian experiences. Many classical sources often only tangentially allude to processions, focusing instead on other ritual moments, such as sacrifice. This book adopts a comparative approach, bringing together historians of antiquity and later periods as well as social anthropologists working on contemporary societies, analysing both ancient and modern examples of how rituals, symbols, actors, and spectators interact in the construction of communities. The different examples explored in this study illustrate the performative capacity of processions to construct reality: the protagonism of image and movement, the design of cultic itineraries, and the active participation of members of the public. In studying these examples, readers develop an understanding of how power is exercised and perceived, the extent of its legitimacy, and the limits of community in a variety of case studies. Processions and the Construction of Communities in Antiquity is of interest to students and scholars of the classical and early Christian worlds, especially those working on cult, religion, and community formation. The volume also appeals to social anthropologists interested in these issues across a broader chronology.

Irish legends need to have their stories heard… Who better to help than Johnny Magory, Lily-May and Ruairi? Johnny, Lily-May, Ruairi, and of course, Mammy and Daddy, go on holiday around Ireland in their old campervan. Before beginning their journey, they meet an old man Finegas who is fishing for “The Salmon of Knowledge”. He tells Johnny and Lily-May of an important mission; they need to make sure Irish legends have their stories heard. Can they succeed? Meet Fionn MacCumhall, Queen Medh, Oisín, Niamh Chinn Óir and Brian Boru in this beautiful book telling precious tales of Irish heritage in English and as Gaeilge.

The Danubian provinces represent one of the largest macro-units within the Roman Empire, with a large and rich heritage of Roman material evidence. Although the notion itself is a modern 18th-century creation, this region represents a unique area, where the dominant, pre-Roman cultures (Celtic, Illyrian, Hellenistic, Thracian) are interconnected within the new administrative, economic and cultural units of Roman cities, provinces and extra-provincial networks. This book presents the material evidence of Roman religion in the Danubian provinces through a new, paradigmatic methodology, focusing not only on the traditional urban and provincial units of the Roman Empire, but on a new space taxonomy. Roman religion and its sacralized places are presented in macro-, meso- and micro-spaces of a dynamic empire, which shaped Roman religion in the 1st-3rd centuries AD and created a large number of religious glocalizations and appropriations in Raetia, Noricum, Pannonia Superior, Pannonia Inferior, Moesia Superior, Moesia Inferior and Dacia. Combining the methodological approaches of Roman provincial archaeology and religious studies, this work intends to provoke a dialogue between disciplines rarely used together in central-east Europe and beyond. The material evidence of Roman religion is interpreted here as a dynamic agent in religious communication, shaped by macro-spaces, extra-provincial routes, commercial networks, but also by the formation and constant dynamics of small group religions interconnected within this region through human and material mobilities. The book will also present for the first time a comprehensive list of sacralized spaces and divinities in the Danubian provinces.

This edited collection explores forms of multi-religious cohabitation as well as the spatial arrangements that underpin and shape them through sixteen chapters that range across disciplines, historical periods, and global geographies. Focusing on interactions between different religious groups and traditions, the authors conceptualize three types of spatial arrangements and explore how they operate ad geographies of encounter; i.e., multi-religious places, multi-religious cities, and multi-religious landscapes. With perspectives from anthropologists, historians, sociologists, and geographers, the book demonstrates the multiple ways in which geographies of interreligious encounters and forms of multi-religious cohabitation have changed throughout history due to their embeddedness id different frameworks of political organization, shifting religious ideologies, and changing forms of human mobility.