Religious Diversity in Late Antiquity

This new volume in the well-established Late Antique Archaeology series draws together recent research by archaeologists and historians to shed new light on the religious world of Late Antiquity. A detailed bibliographic essay provides an overview of relevant literature, while individual articles explore the diversity of late antique religion. Rabbinic and non-rabbinic Judaism is traced in Beth Shearim, Dura Europus and Sepphoris, and the Samaritan community in Israel, while Christian concepts of orthodoxy and heresy are examined with a particular focus on the `Arian' Controversy. Popular piety receives close attention, through the archaeology of pilgrimage and the stylite `pillar saints', and too does the complex relationship between religion and magic and between sacred and secular in Late Antiquity.

Contributors are David M. Gwynn, Susanne Bangert, Jodi Magness, Zeev Weiss, Shimon Dar, Michel-Yves Perrin, Bryan Ward-Perkins, Lukas Amadeus Schachner, Arja Karivieri, Carla Sfameni, Claude Lepelley, Mark Humphries, Elizabeth Jeffreys, and Isabella Sandwell.

David M. Gwynn Ph.D. Oxford (2003), is Lecturer in Ancient and Late Antique History at Royal Holloway, University of London. His recent publications include The Eusebians: The Polemic of Athanasius of Alexandria and the Construction of the `Arian Controversy' (OUP 2007) and the edited volume A.H.M. Jones and the Later Roman Empire (Brill 2008).
Susanne Bangert Ph.D. Copenhagen (2005), is Museum Inspector, Naestved Museum, Denmark. Her doctoral thesis will shortly be published as The Ashmolean Collection of Menas Ampullae within Their Context (Archaeopress, Oxford).