You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Where Dreams May Come was the winner of the 2018 Charles J. Goodwin Award of Merit, awarded by the Society for Classical Studies. In this book, Gil H. Renberg examines the ancient religious phenomenon of “incubation", the ritual of sleeping at a divinity’s sanctuary in order to obtain a prophetic or therapeutic dream. Most prominently associated with the Panhellenic healing god Asklepios, incubation was also practiced at the cult sites of numerous other divinities throughout the Greek world, but it is first known from ancient Near Eastern sources and was established in Pharaonic Egypt by the time of the Macedonian conquest; later, Christian worship came to include similar practices. Renberg’s exhaustive study represents the first attempt to collect and analyze the evidence for incubation from Sumerian to Byzantine and Merovingian times, thus making an important contribution to religious history. This set consists of two books.
The central theme of this volume is to re-examine the received concepts and images of ghosts in various religious cultures ranging from the Ancient Near East and Egypt to the Old Testament, the Classical Era, Early Medieval and Early Modern Europe, Early India, and Medieval China. As a religious phenomenon, the realm of ghosts has been less studied than the realm of the divine. Through a collaborative effort by scholars from different disciplines, this volume proposes a multi-cultural approach to construct a wider and complicated picture of the phenomenon of ghosts and spirits in human societies and to have a grasp of the various problems involved in understanding the phenomenon of ghost.
In this book, Gil H. Renberg examines the ancient religious phenomenon of "incubation", the ritual of sleeping at a divinity's sanctuary in order to obtain a prophetic or therapeutic dream. Most prominently associated with the Panhellenic healing god Asklepios, incubation was also practiced at the cult sites of numerous other divinities throughout the Greek world, but it is first known from ancient Near Eastern sources and was established in Pharaonic Egypt by the time of the Macedonian conquest; later, Christian worship came to include similar practices. Renberg's exhaustive study represents the first attempt to collect and analyze the evidence for incubation from Sumerian to Byzantine and Merovingian times, thus making an important contribution to religious history.
Modern study of biblical prophecy frequently defines prophecy as a message from God and has focused almost exclusively on prophets' words. But prophecy was always also embodied. Anathea E. Portier-Young insists on the synergy of word and body in biblical prophecy. Prophets did more than reveal knowledge: the prophetic body connected God and people, making them present to one another, channeling divine power, traveling between realms. Drawing insights from disciplines ranging from neurobiology to cultural studies, the author examines stories of prophetic commissioning, bodily transformation, asceticism and ecstasy, mobility and immobility, affect and emotion, revealing the body's centrality to prophetic mediation.
The thirty-nine articles in this volume, One Who Loves Knowledge, have been contributed by colleagues, students, friends, and family in honor of Richard Jasnow, professor of Egyptology at Johns Hopkins University. Despite his claiming to be just a demoticist, Richard Jasnow's research interests and specialties are broad, spanning religious and historical topics, along with new editions of demotic texts, including most particularly the Book of Thoth. A number of the authors demonstrate their appreciation for Jasnow's contributions to the understanding of this difficult text. The volume also includes other studies on literature, Ptolemaic history, and even the god Thoth himself, and features detailed images and abundant hieroglyphic, hieratic, demotic, Coptic, and Greek texts.
None
In Jesus the Oracle, Annelies Gisela Moeser reads Jesus’s journey from Capernaum to Jerusalem in Mark’s gospel through the cultural context of second/third century Roman Egypt. Moeser provides a rich description of the Egyptian practice of oracles, including processional oracles, to build a model with which to read Mark. This prism brings attention to descriptions of Jesus’s supernatural knowledge and wisdom, such as in the story of the Rich Man (Mk 10:17–22). In contrast to Clement of Alexandria’s homily on the Rich Man which counseled detachment from possessions, this reading from a non-elite perspective considers Jesus’s advice to be more radical. This model of processional oracles highlights the importance of access to the divine, including by non-elite crowds, by persons with disabilities (e.g., in comparing Bartimaeus [Mk 10:46–52] with Gemellus Horion of Karanis [a town in Egypt]), and by children. Traditional Egyptian religion upheld the existing sociopolitical regime. However, Jesus’s procession and proclamation of the basileia (reign) of G*d subverts the Roman world order and that of their local, elite allies.
The historians, classicists and psychiatrists who have come together to produce Mental Disorders in the Classical World aim to explain how the Greeks and their Roman successors conceptualized, diagnosed and treated mental disorders. The Greeks initiated the secular understanding of mental illness, and have left us a large body of penetrating and thought-provoking writing on the subject, ranging in time from Homer to the sixth century AD. With the conceptual basis of modern psychiatry once again under intense debate, we need to learn from other rational approaches even when they lack modern scientific underpinnings. Meanwhile this volume adds a rich chapter to the cultural and medical history of antiquity. The contributors include a high proportion of the best-regarded scholars in this field, together with papers by some of its rising stars.
In ancient Greece, epiphanies were embedded in cultural production, and employed by the socio-political elite in both perpetuating pre-existing power-structures and constructing new ones. This volume is the first comprehensive survey of the history of divine epiphany as presented in the literary and epigraphic narratives of the Greek-speaking world. It demonstrates that divine epiphanies not only reveal what the Greeks thought about their gods; they tell us just as much about the preoccupations, the preconceptions, and the assumptions of ancient Greek religion and culture. In doing so, it explores the deities who were prone to epiphany and the contexts in which they manifested themselves, as well as the functions (narratives and situational) they served, addressing the cultural specificity of divine morphology and mortal-immortal interaction. Divine Epiphany in Greek Literature and Culture re-establishes epiphany as a crucial mode in Greek religious thought and practice, underlines its centrality in Greek cultural production, and foregrounds its impact on both the political and the societal organization of the ancient Greeks.
Shenoute of Atripe led the White Monastery, a community of several thousand male and female Coptic monks in Upper Egypt, between approximately 395 and 465 C.E. Shenoute's letters, sermons, and treatises—one of the most detailed bodies of writing to survive from any early monastery—provide an unparalleled resource for the study of early Christian monasticism and asceticism. In Monastic Bodies, Caroline Schroeder offers an in-depth examination of the asceticism practiced at the White Monastery using diverse sources, including monastic rules, theological treatises, sermons, and material culture. Schroeder details Shenoute's arduous disciplinary code and philosophical structure, including th...