Ritual Sites and Religious Rivalries in Late Roman North Africa

Description

In Ritual Sites and Religious Rivalries in Late Roman North Africa, Lander examines the rhetorical and physical battles for sacred space between practitioners of traditional Roman religion, Christians, and Jews of late Roman North Africa. By analyzing literary along with archaeological evidence, Lander provides a new understanding of ancient notions of ritual space. This regard for ritual sites above other locations rendered the act or mere suggestion of seizing and destroying them powerful weapons in inter- group religious confl icts. Lander demonstrates that the quantity and harshness of discursive and physical attacks on ritual spaces directly correlates to their symbolic value. This heightened valuation reached such a level that rivals were willing to violate conventional Roman norms of property rights to display spatial control. Moreover, Roman Imperial policy eventually appropriated spatial triumphalism as a strategy for negotiating religious confl icts, giving rise to a new form of spatial colonialism that was explicitly religious. List of Illustrations page ix Preface xiii List of Abbreviations xv Introduction: Scaff olding 1 1 Foundational Assumptions 41 2 Christian Perceptions of Communal Places 74 3 Internecine Christian Contestation 119 4 Christian Supersession of Traditional Roman Temples 176 5 Christian Supersession of Synagogues 215 Conclusion: Ritual Spatial Control, Authority, and Identifi cation 237 Select Bibliography 245 Index 271