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Lived Religion in the
Ancient Mediterranean
World

Approaching Religious Transformations

from Archaeology, History and Classics

Edited by
Valentino Gasparini, Maik Patzelt, Rubina Raja,
Anna-Katharina Rieger, Jörg Rüpke
and Emiliano Rubens Urciuoli
in cooperation with Elisabeth Begemann
Published with support of the European Research Council (ERC).

ISBN 978-3-11-055757-2
e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-055759-6
e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-055794-7
DOI https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110557596

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0

International License. For details go to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019953611

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek

The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie;
detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de.

© 2020 Gasparini et al., published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston.

This book is published with open access at www.degruyter.com.

Cover image: Sacrificial scene; Roman wall painting.

Edificio B, Murecine/Pompeii, 1st century CE.
(Parco Archeologico di Pompei).
Typesetting: Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd.
Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck

www.degruyter.com
Contents
Valentino Gasparini, Maik Patzelt, Rubina Raja, Anna-Katharina Rieger,
Jörg Rüpke, Emiliano Rubens Urciuoli
Pursuing lived ancient religion 1

Section 1: Experiencing the religious

Maik Patzelt
Introduction to Section 1 11

Richard L. Gordon
(Re-)modelling religious experience:
some experiments with hymnic form in the imperial period 23

Angela Kim Harkins

Looking at the Shepherd of Hermas
through the experience of lived religion 49

Maria Dell’Isola
“They are not the words of a rational man”:
ecstatic prophecy in Montanism 71

Nicole Belayche
Kyrios and despotes: addresses to deities and religious experiences 87

Maik Patzelt
About servants and flagellants: Seneca’s Capitol description
and the variety of ‘ordinary’ religious experience at Rome 117

Ian Rutherford
The experience of pilgrimage in the Roman Empire:
communitas, paideiā, and piety-signaling 137
VI Contents

Irene Salvo
Experiencing curses: neurobehavioral traits of ritual and spatiality in the
Roman Empire 157

Oda Wischmeyer
Ego-documents on religious experiences in Paul’s Letters: 2 Corinthians
12 and related texts 181

Section 2: A “thing” called body:

expressing religion bodily

Anna-Katharina Rieger
Introduction to Section 2 201

Emma-Jayne Graham
Hand in hand: rethinking anatomical votives as material things 209

Georgia Petridou
The “lived” body in pain: illness and initiation
in Lucian’s Podagra and Aelius Aristides’
Hieroi Logoi 237

Heather Hunter-Crawley
Divinity refracted:
extended agency and the cult of Symeon Stylites the Elder 261

Nicola Denzey Lewis

Food for the body, the body as food:
Roman martyrs and the paradox of consumption 287

Section 3: Lived places: from individual appropriation

of space to locational group-styles

Valentino Gasparini
Introduction to Section 3 309
 Contents VII

Valentino Gasparini
Renewing the past: Rufinus’ appropriation of the sacred site of Panóias
(Vila Real, Portugal) 319

Anna-Katharina Rieger
This god is your god, this god is my god:
local identities at sacralized places in Roman Syria 351

Rubina Raja
Come and dine with us: invitations to ritual dining as part of social
strategies in sacred spaces in Palmyra 385

Barbara E. Borg
Does religion matter?
Life, death, and interaction in the Roman suburbium 405

Section 4: Switching the code: meaning-making

beyond established religious frameworks

Emiliano Rubens Urciuoli

Introduction to Section 4 437

Christopher Degelmann
Symbolic mourning: the literary appropriation of signs
in Late Republican and Early Imperial Rome 447

Luca Arcari
P.Oxy. 1.5 and the Codex Sangermanensis as “visionary living texts”:
visionary habitus and processes of “textualization” and/or
“scripturalization” in Late Antiquity 469

Katell Berthelot
To convert or not to convert: the appropriation of Jewish rituals, customs
and beliefs by non-Jews 493
VIII Contents

Douglas Boin
Emperor Julian, an appropriated word,
and a different view of 4th-century “lived religion” 517

Katharina Bracht
The appropriation of the book of Jonah in 4th century Christianity
by Theodore of Mopsuestia and Jerome of Stridon 531

Emiliano Rubens Urciuoli

Weapons of the (Christian) weak: pedagogy of trickery
in Early Christian texts 553

Biographical Notes 581

Index 587
Valentino Gasparini, Maik Patzelt, Rubina Raja, Anna-
Katharina Rieger, Jörg Rüpke, Emiliano Rubens Urciuoli
Pursuing lived ancient religion
“Lived ancient religion” is a new approach to the religious practices, ideas, and
institutions of the distant past. The notion of “lived religion”, as it has been ap-
plied to recent phenomena that go beyond orthodox beliefs and religious organ-
izations, cannot be transferred directly to a study of ancient religions because its
methodology, inspired above all by anthropology and empirical sociology, re-
quires some form of direct access to the living of the religion. This departure is
implied by the oxymoronic form of “lived ancient religion”, which juxtaposes the
living of religion with an only incompletely accessible past in which the subjects
of study are no longer living. What might have been deplored as a loss, has
turned out to be a gain, allowing for a significant expansion of the concept.
While still invoking “lived religion” as it is understood in modern contexts,1
“lived ancient religion” is neither restricted to “everyday religion” nor focused
on subjective experiences. Rather, the focus on the ancient world, the past, the
already lived experiences and events, provides the opportunity to study lived re-
ligion with a renewed and revitalized focus. This approach overcomes the dichot-
omy of official and institutionalized religion on the one hand and “lived religion”
on the other. Rather, taking the perspective on individual appropriations to its
extremes, it also allows studying institutions as sedimented forms of lived reli-
gion. Thus, as “lived ancient religion” a framework to analyze religious change is
given, religion in the making even on a large scale (see Albrecht et al. 2018).
As is indicated by the subtitle of the foundational project, “Questioning
‘cults’ and ‘polis religion’”, “lived ancient religion” shares a critical impetus
with the study of contemporary “lived religion”. Yet given the very different
degrees of coherence and embeddedness of religious practices in ancient
Mediterranean societies, and in the Roman Empire in particular, our project
(2012–2017) aimed at a much broader re-description of ancient “religion” (Rüpke
2012). Fundamentally, it questioned the implicit assumption that all inhabitants
of the Imperium Romanum were equally religious. Likewise, the tendency to
focus upon civic, that is collective, institutionalized religious practices was ques-
tioned, as such a focus has led to the production of a series of sub-categories
(“oriental cults”, “votive religion”, “funerary rites”) in order to save those phe-
nomena whose relation to civic practice is indeterminate. This shift in focus was

1 E.g. Ammerman 1997; Hall 1997; Orsi 1997; Bergmann 2008; McGuire 2008.

Open Access. © 2020 Valentino Gasparini et al., published by De Gruyter. This work is
licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110557596-001
2 Valentino Gasparini et al.

necessary because, in terms of quantity, these phenomena are the subject of

the majority of our ancient evidence and not just some small, hard to recon-
cile, subset. Finally, the project criticized the descriptive reproduction of dis-
ciplinary boundaries and the practice of treating “pagan” religion, Judaism, and
Christianity as though they each had existed historically in separate worlds.
From a methodological perspective, the project focused on four different
social and communicative spaces, from the domestic over associations, public
sanctuaries and literary communication. Building on recent research of the re-
lationship between religious institutions and individualization (briefly Fuchs
and Rüpke 2015; Fuchs et al. 2018) made it possible to focus on the connec-
tions between social structures and individual agents, with the help of four
key notions: appropriation, agency, situational meaning, and mediality (Raja
and Rüpke 2015a).
Appropriation denotes the situational adaptation and deployment of existing
practices and techniques, institutions, norms, and media in order to suit the con-
tingent needs and aims of the individual or group (Raja and Rüpke 2015a; Arnhold
and Rüpke 2016; Rüpke 2016c). The idea of religious agency, which grew out of an
interest in the ascription of agency and a focus on competences, was used to un-
derline the priority of personal engagement, knowledge, and skill in providing
services of all kinds, including public and private performances, authorship, teach-
ing, and networking, whether on an occasional or a professional basis (Gordon
2005; Hüsken 2009; Petridou 2013; Raja 2016). Instead of concentrating on profes-
sional religious roles (priests), this broader notion of “religious agency” functions
as a perspective that replaces the narrow focus on the political elite of civic reli-
gion, widening and underlining the impact that studies of ancient material can
have on discussions of religion in the context of modern societies. In speaking of
the situational construction of meaning, we have assumed that religious meanings
were not generated by worldviews, but by the complex interplay of interests, be-
liefs, and satisfactions in specific situations (Raja and Weiss 2015; 2016). Finally,
the focus on communication (both vertical and horizontal) mandates a specific
concern with the roles of material culture, embodiment, and group-styles in the
construction of religious experience, in short, what we have called mediality.2
Insofar as communication requires materiality, this amounts to a demand for a
new approach in the archaeology of religion (the “archaeology of religious experi-
ence”, Raja and Rüpke 2015b). Inspired by Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology,3 we
have focused on the role of bodily movements, actions, and gestures in conveying

2 Malik, Rüpke and Wobbe 2007; Meyer 2008; Hjarvard 2011; Lövheim 2011.
3 See e.g. Dreyfus and Dreyfus 1999; Reynolds 2004; Silver 2011; Morgan 2015.
 Pursuing lived ancient religion 3

culturally-coded meanings and emotions. “Lived ancient religion” emphasizes the

social context of religious action and, specifically, the group-styles in specific cul-
tural contexts, such as the family, neighborhoods, and associations (Lichterman et
al. 2017). From this perspective, public cult appears less as a set of ideals, and
more as a scheme for ordering priorities and distinctions, the effect of which is to
outline (rather than define) an imagined community. Religious change starts from
domestic and individual practices, not from the competition of groups and cities.
The challenge that has been addressed in the project is to observe, describe, and
analyze such changes and their underlying patterns through the use of material
and written evidence from antiquity.
The main thrust of the lived ancient religion approach is to resist the easy
reification of “religion” in order to emphasize its ceaseless construction through
individual action within the loose parameters provided by traditions and institu-
tions (summarized as a new introduction to Roman religion in Rüpke 2016b).
That is, to view religion as a precarious practice, whose referents (“gods”) and
communicative strategies are constantly in need of investment-labor of different
kinds in order to maintain their plausibility, as formulated by Richard Gordon
(see Albrecht et al. 2018). The paradigm of “lived ancient religion” provides the
stimulus to integrate “the” evidence on a new basis, invoke new types of evi-
dence, challenge existing classifications of material, and focus on neglected
types of religious action. The long-term aim from the beginning of the project
was to provide new narratives of religious change in the Roman Empire, for in-
stance by relating change to religious innovation across social groups and indi-
viduals.4 Looking at lived ancient religion opens a window into the day-to-day
workings of long-term changes in religions that are never fixed but always tradi-
tions in the making.
For this reason, the present volume attempts to leave behind chronologi-
cal as well as disciplinary comfort zones. Following several conferences and
more than a hundred publications,5 the project ended with a final conference
held at Eisenach in April 2017. Many of the revised contributions to that con-
ference are included in this volume, all of which deliberately apply the “lived
ancient religion” approach to new fields and new foci. These contributions
are organized in four parts with different perspectives, which are developed
in their respective introductions. “Experiencing the religious” is the first part of

4 Rüpke 2016a; 2018a; 2018b; Raja 2015.

5 Several of the conferences are published in the journal Religion in the Roman Empire from
2015 onwards (see the overviews by Feldmeier et al. 2015; Raja and Rüpke 2015a; Raja and
Weiss 2015; Rüpke and Degelmann 2015; Lichterman et al. 2017), but see also Petridou, Gordon
and Rüpke 2017.
4 Valentino Gasparini et al.

the volume. Although experience is a central aspect of religious life, it is still an

under-researched topic in the field of religious studies and especially in the his-
tory of ancient religion. In the light of recent approaches, such as those of
Matthias Jung and Ann Taves (Jung 2006; Taves 2009), we understand (religious)
experience as the product of a wide range of sensory stimuli, effects, and inner
feelings that are articulated by subjects or interpreted by observers as religious
experience. The production of such stimuli is as interesting as the spatial, tempo-
ral, and discursive contexts that favor the interpretation of a given phenomenon
as “religious”. Individual experiences could thus be a result of passive participa-
tion in any ritual, such as in public sacrifices or in processions. These have re-
cently been theorized as “emotional communities” (Chaniotis 2013a; 2013b).
Alternatively, they can be conceptualized as resulting from individual and delib-
erate attempts at stimulation. The empirical evidence required can be found by
examining ritualized patterns and spatial arrangements, as well as first person
reports or literary narratives, which cast light on this point of view. Different
questions help to bring to the fore experiences which underlie religious action
and identify the discourses about the dangers or values of true or false religious
experiences. In what contexts do we find reference to specifically religious expe-
rience? How can we detect religious experience and techniques toward them in
our sources and how does this affect our overall view of religiosity, religious be-
lief, and religious practice? How did people try to communicate, commemorate
and contour their experiences through the channels available to them, such as
the re-use of mythical narratives or the setting up of material objects? How did
architectural spaces and objects allow for or stimulate religious experiences?
How did certain persons or groups try to control the articulation and interpreta-
tion of experience?
“A ‘thing’ called body: expressing religion bodily” is the title of the second
part of the volume. This part focuses on the use, reuse, abuse, and misuse of bod-
ies, bones, bodily remains, body parts, anatomical votives, amulets, and saintly
relics in Classical and Late Antiquity. Methodologically speaking, it aims to con-
nect some of the theoretical parameters of the “lived ancient religion” project
with a reapplication and semantic expansion of Bill Brown’s “Thing Theory”
(Brown 2003) to cover not only objects, but also bodies, body-parts and remains,
bodily extensions (prostheses) and body-modifications. In Brown’s view, material
artifacts become “things”, when they stop working for us and when they are re-
moved from their natural/original environment and situated in new contexts of
meaning. This view dovetails nicely with the emphasis of a lived ancient religion
approach to the situational meaning of material artifacts in religious contexts.
The notion of “embodiment” links materiality with corporeal experience, two no-
tions central to the contemporary anthropology of religion. Such an approach
 Pursuing lived ancient religion 5

allows us to palpate the bodies of our scholarly interest and take their “vital
signs”. In other words, it enables us to revisit and look afresh at the synchronic
practices (pilgrimage, agonistic performance, medical agōnes, dedication, heal-
ing rituals, prayer, divination, magic rituals, worship of saintly relics) which en-
livened and literally “breathed life” into these bodies in their original contexts,
as well as casting new light on our conceptualizations of this.
The third part of the volume is dedicated to “Lived places: from individual
appropriation of space to locational group-styles”. The aim here is to investigate
the methods employed by individual religious specialists or groups to inscribe in-
dividual acts of devotion and communication with “not unquestionably plausible
supernatural agents” (Rüpke 2015) in shared sacred spaces. However, the focus is
not on the obvious candidates, temples, and individual dedications or votive of-
ferings. Since the emphasis of the “lived ancient religion” project is on individual
appropriation and modification of (mainly public) norms in the religious field, in-
cluding rituals, objects and spaces, this part focusses on micro-strategies of sa-
cralization. The aim is to go beyond the religious actions themselves and their
immediate apprehension, and ask how they were remembered, memorialized,
contested, and prolonged in various media (including architecture) over time. We
understand such reception and commemoration as critical to the construction of
sacred space, time, and even experience for those coming after, whether helped
in their understanding by religious specialists or not. Individual practice so me-
diated and re-presented could thus be transformed into patterns, inspiration, or
constraint for later religious action, both at the original site and elsewhere. The
contributions to this part are driven by questions such as: What were the motiva-
tions to give individual innovations a more permanent form? What can be said
about the agents or guiding spirits of such moves? Why were some successful,
others not? How were initial sacralizations modified by subsequent appropria-
tions? How were religious spaces modified and how were the various competing
claims negotiated? The focus will be as much on archaeological evidence as on
literary and juridical text, narrating, reflecting, or regulating such practices, their
conditions and consequences.
“Switching the code: meaning-making beyond established religious frame-
works” is the heading of the fourth part of the volume. Phenomena of religious
inventiveness are anything but a yardstick of modernization. Throughout ancient
and late antique Mediterranean societies, a whole variety of motives prompted
individuals to creatively adapt existing signs, beliefs, settings, and practices for
their own personal ends, serving to re-key or displace them. Such creativity is
not a prerogative of a political elite or of religious specialists. By different means,
even “weak” individuals could recast aspects of a religious habitus and thus en-
gage agentically with their structuring religious environments by appropriating
6 Valentino Gasparini et al.

religious signs to one’s own ends, transposing existing meanings into different
settings, and reshaping established patterns of action so that they appear quite
new. By focusing explicitly on such strategies, these contributions aim to re-con-
sider the techniques and procedures by which non-discursive practices, dis-
courses, and writings were performed, controlled, and reproduced in religious
settings and/or for theological purposes. That is, these papers aim to look at the
techniques and procedures not as powerful acts but, rather, as initially con-
strained and consumption-oriented practices that allow “consumers” to leave
their mark on them in the process of reception. It also aims to raise the question
of how these strategies fare over time, as they encounter resistance and attract
polemics. We can see here a range of possibilities, from the establishment of new
norms and group-generating processes to reactions to stigmatization as well as
cunning attempts at the spread of false beliefs about what is the case.
*
With the conclusion of the project, we wish to thank the European Research
Council for its generous “Advanced Grant” within the 7th Framework Programme
(2011–16, contract no. 295555), which financed the preceding research of the edi-
tors as much as the conference itself and its Open Access publication. Ursula
Birtel-Koltes had been most helpful throughout the project; we wish to thank her
for her continuous, efficient and friendly support. Thanks go also to the Max
Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies of the University of
Erfurt, which hosted the project from 2012 to 2017, and its directors Wolfgang
Spickermann and Hartmut Rosa as well as its general secretary Bettina Hollstein.
In addition, we were repeatedly guests at Aarhus University and from 2015 at the
Danish National Research Foundation’s centre of excellence for Urban Network
Evolutions (also Aarhus University) and enjoyed the hospitality immensely. The
team at Walter de Gruyter, Berlin, was helpful in every respect in the final phase
of publication.

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Biographical Notes

Arcari, Luca
Luca Arcari (b. 1977) is Associate Professor of History of Christianity at Federico II University of
Naples. Between 2013 and 2016 he has served as general director of the FIRB Project – Future
in Research 2012 on “The Construction of Space and Time in the Transmission of Collective
Identities (1st–6th Centuries CE)”. He has published two books on the relationships between
the Book of Revelation and Jewish Apocalyptic Literature, as well as essays on New
Testament, Early Christianity, Christian Gnosticism, History of religions, Monotheism in the
ancient world, and historical-religious historiography during the 19th and 20th century.

Belayche, Nicole
Nicole Belayche is directeure d’études (Pr.) on Religions of Rome and the Roman world at the
departement of Sciences religieuses of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, PSL, Paris. Her
major research fields cover pagan cults and their changes in the Eastern Roman Empire
(Anatolia and Near-East) – with a focus on religious contacts and interactions –, and analysis
of rituals (like practices of divine glorification or “mysteries”) and their dynamics as a “lieu”
of both theological discourse within classic polytheisms and social expression. Joining history
and anthropology, she coedited recently Puissances divines à l’épreuve du comparatisme.
Constructions, variations et réseaux relationnels (Paris, 2017, BEHE/SR 175).

Berthelot, Katell
Katell Berthelot is a CNRS Professor within the University of Aix-Marseille, France. As a histo-
rian of Judaism in the Hellenistic and Roman period, she first worked on accusations of misan-
thropy against the Jews in the Greco-Roman world and on the Jewish responses to these
charges (Philanthrôpia judaica. Le débat autour de la “misanthropie” des lois juives dans
l’Antiquité [Brill, 2003]). Her last book, In Search of the Promised Land? The Hasmonean
Dynasty Between Biblical Models and Hellenistic Diplomacy (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2018)
emphasizes the influence of Hellenistic models of kingship upon the Hasmoneans, the rulers
of Judea in the second and first centuries BCE. She now coordinates a program funded by the
European Research Council, on the political and religious challenge posed by the Roman
Empire to the Jews (www.judaism-and-rome.org).

Boin, Douglas
Douglas Boin is a professor of history at Saint Louis University (St. Louis, MO, USA) and the
author of four books, including Alaric the Goth: An Outsider’s History of the Fall of Rome,
forthcoming in June 2020 from W. W. Norton.

Borg, Barbara E.
Barbara E. Borg is Professor of Classical Archaeology at the University of Exeter and
Extraordinary Professor at Stellenbosch University. She has published widely on Greek and
Roman art and archaeology. Her books include Crisis and Ambition: Tombs and Burial Customs
in Third-Century CE Rome (2013), Roman Tombs and the Art of Commemoration: Contextual

Open Access. © 2020 Gasparini et al., published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under
a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110557596-028
582 Biographical Notes

Approaches to Funerary Customs in the Second Century CE (2019), and the edited volumes
Paideia: The World of the Second Sophistic (2004) and The Blackwell Companion to Roman Art
(2015). She is the recipient of a number of awards and prizes, including a Getty Research
Fellowship, a Senior Onassis Fellowship, the Hugh Last Fellowship at the British School at
Rome, and a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship.

Bracht, Katharina
Katharina Bracht is Professor of Church History at Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, Germany.
She is author of Vollkommenheit und Vollendung. Zur Anthropologie des Methodius von
Olympus, Studien und Texte zu Antike und Christentum 2, Tübingen 1999, and Hippolyts Schrift In
Danielem. Kommunikative Strategien eines frühchristlichen Kommentars, Studien und Texte zu
Antike und Christentum 85, Tübingen 2014 as well as the translator of Hippolyt von Rom.
Danielkommentar. Eingeleitet, übersetzt und kommentiert von Katharina Bracht, Bibliothek
der griechischen Literatur 80, Stuttgart 2016. Currently her research focusses on patristic
commentaries and reception of the bible in general.

Degelmann, Christopher
Christopher Degelmann is Lecturer in Ancient History at the Humboldt University Berlin. After
finishing his PhD in Erfurt, he published his thesis as Squalor. Symbolisches Trauern in der
Politischen Kommunikation der Römischen Republik und Frühen Kaiserzeit (2018). In 2019, he
was Visiting Fellow at the University of Edinburgh, where he worked on his new project
Gossiping and Rumour in Classical Athens. His research also focuses on ancient youth culture
and the history of historiography and classics.

Dell’Isola, Maria
Maria Dell’Isola holds a Ph.D. in Cultural Sciences from the Scuola Internazionale di Alti Studi
“Scienze della cultura” of the Fondazione Collegio San Carlo in Modena and Max Weber Centre
for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies in Erfurt (joint Doctorate). She has been post-doctoral
researcher at Associazione “Amici della Peterson” (University of Turin). She is currently Marie
Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellow at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense, with a
project titled Eschatological time as women’s time? Gendered temporality and female holiness in
Early Christianity and Byzantium.

Denzey Lewis, Nicola

Nicola Denzey Lewis is the Margo L. Goldsmith chair in Women’s Studies in Religion at Claremont
Graduate University in Claremont, California. A social historian of the high Roman Empire and
late antiquity with a specialization in the city of Rome, Denzey Lewis received her Ph.D. from
Princeton University in 1998. She is the author of several books, most recently The Early Modern
Invention of Late Antique Rome (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming), and has received
honors from, among others, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American
Council of Learned Societies. She has a particular fascination with women’s lives in antiquity,
social practices around death, and food – all of which, she notes, are curiously related.

Gasparini, Valentino
After spending seven years (2010–2017) at the Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and
Social Studies of the University of Erfurt as post-doctoral Research Fellow and member of the
 Biographical Notes 583

ERC-funded research group “Lived Ancient Religion. Questioning ‘Cults’ and ‘Polis-Religion’” (FP7/
2013, no. 295555), Valentino Gasparini is currently leading a project at the Charles III University of
Madrid on “Lived Ancient Religion in North Africa” (2018–2022), funded by the Autonomous
Community of Madrid (Aids for the Attraction of Research Talent, 2017-T1/HUM-5709).

Gordon, Richard L.
Richard L. Gordon (1943) is an Associate Fellow of the Max Weber Centre for Advanced
Cultural and Social Studies at the University of Erfurt. His main research interest is in social
and cultural aspects of religious practice in the Roman Empire. As a member of the project
“Lived Ancient Religion” directed by Jörg Rüpke and Rubina Raja (2012–2017), he co-edited
with Georgia Petridou and Jörg Rüpke the conference-volume Beyond Priesthood: Religious
Entrepreneurs and Innovators in the Roman Empire (Berlin 2017).

Graham, Emma-Jayne
Emma-Jayne Graham is Senior Lecturer in Classical Studies at the Open University. Her research
focuses on the archaeology of Roman Italy, with a particular interest in votive offerings, material
religion, sensory archaeologies, and experiences of ancient disability and impairment. She
recently published Bodies of Evidence: Ancient Anatomical Votives Past, Present and Future
(2017, edited with Jane Draycott) and co-produces TheVotivesProject.org website and network.

Harkins, Angela Kim

Angela Kim Harkins is Associate Professor of New Testament at Boston College. Harkins works
on religious experience, with a special interest in prayers and emotions in Second Temple
Jewish and early Christian writings. She is the author of Reading with an “I” to the Heavens,
Ekstasis 3, De Gruyter, 2012, and co-editor of a number of collected studies on Second Temple
Judaism, Religious Experience and the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the Enochic Book of the
Watchers. She is currently working on a long-term project on the visions in the early Christian
text known as the Shepherd of Hermas.

Hunter-Crawley, Heather
Dr Heather Hunter-Crawley has held the positions of Research Associate and Senior Associate
Teacher at the University of Bristol, and Lecturer in Ancient History at Swansea University. She
is an Independent Scholar and Writer, based in Bristol, UK.

Patzelt, Maik
Maik Patzelt is Lecturer in Ancient History at the History Department of the University of
Osnabrück, Germany, and a Research Fellow (2019/20) at the History Department of the
University of Sheffield, UK, where he works on his new project on inheritance hunting in late
Antiquity. He is specialized in ancient history, especially the social and religious history of the
early Roman Empire. He has published a book Über das Beten der Römer (2018) and a number
of articles that investigate Roman prayers through the lens of emotion theory, cognitive
science and theory of practice. He is also interested in social network analysis, concepts of
borders and frontiers, migration and mobility.
584 Biographical Notes

Petridou, Georgia
Georgia Petridou is a Lecturer in Ancient Greek History at the University of Liverpool in the UK.
She works on Classical Literature, History of Greek and Roman Religion, and Ancient Medicine
in its socio-political context. She is the author of Divine Epiphany in Greek Literature and
Culture (OUP, 2015) and the co-editor (with Chiara Thumiger) of Homo Patiens. Approaches on
the Patient in the Ancient World (Brill, 2016), as well as (with Richard Gordon and Jörg Rüpke)
of Beyond Priesthood. Religious Entrepreneurs and Innovators in the Imperial Era (DeGruyter,
2017). She has also guest-edited a special issue of the journal Religion in the Roman Empire:
Embodying Religion: Lived Ancient Religion and the Body (RRE 3.2, 2017).

Raja, Rubina
Rubina Raja is professor of Classical Archaeology and center director of the Danish National
Research Foundation’s Centre of Excellence for Urban Network Evolutions (UrbNet). She also
heads the Palmyra Portrait Project, which has collected the largest portrait corpus of all existing
funerary portraiture from Roman Palmyra. Rubina Raja’s research focuses on urban
development, iconography and religious identities in the eastern Roman provinces, the Levant
and Rome. Raja directs an excavation project in Gerasa/Jerash, Jordan, together with Achim
Lichtenberger, Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, focusing on the Northwest Quarter of
the ancient city. Furthermore, she co-directs the new Italian-Danish excavations on Caesar’s
Forum in Rome together with Jan Kindberg Jacobsen and the Italian Soprintendenza. She studied
at University of Copenhagen, La Sapienza in Rome and Oxford University, England.

Rieger, Anna-Katharina
Dr. Anna-Katharina Rieger is classical archaeologist with main areas of interest in Roman religion,
Greco-Roman material and visual culture, Roman urbanism, landscape archaeology, and
archaeology of arid regions. Currently she works as a Post-doc researcher at the University of
Graz. Before, she was member of the ERC-project “Lived Ancient Religion” (directed by Jörg Rüpke
and Rubina Raja) at the Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies, University of
Erfurt, Germany with a project on sacred spaces in Roman Syria. Fellowships from the Gerda
Henkel Stiftung and the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung lead her to Italy (1997–2000; 2015/
2016). In Egypt, she directed the Eastern Marmarica Survey (2004–2011). She held positions at
the universities of Halle–Wittenberg, Gottingen, and Berlin, at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences,
Munich, and the German Archaeological Institute, Rome. For her PhD-thesis on Heiligtümer in
Ostia (Munich 2004) she was awarded the travel grant of the German Archaeological Institute.

Jörg Rüpke
Jörg Rüpke is Fellow in Religious Studies and Vice-director of the Max Weber Centre for Advanced
Cultural and Social Studies of the University of Erfurt, Germany. Before, he was professor for
Classical Philology at the University of Potsdam (1995–99) and for Comparative Religion at the
University of Erfurt (1999–2008). He was director of the ERC-Advanced Grant Project “Lived
Ancient Religion: Questioning ‘Cults’ and ‘Polis Religion’”, co-director of the DFG-funded
Humanities Centre for Advanced Studies “Religious Individualization in Historical Perspectives”
and of the DFG-Research Program “Roman Imperial and Provincial Religion: Globalization and
Regionalization in the Ancient History of Religion” and is now co-director of the Humanities
Centre for Advanced Studies “Urbanity and Religion: Reciprocal Formations” (with Susanne Rau).
He has published widely on Roman culture and religion.
 Biographical Notes 585

Rutherford, Ian
Ian Rutherford is Professor of Classics at the University of Reading, UK. He was a visiting research
fellow at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World 2013–4. He is the author of Pindar’s
Paeans (2001), and State Pilgrims and Sacred Observers (2013), and has edited or coedited
several volumes of essays including Seeing the Gods (2006, with Jas Elsner), and Greco-Egyptian
Interactions (2016). He is currently writing a book on the relationship between Hittite and Greek
religion.

Salvo, Irene
Irene Salvo is Leventis Research Associate in Hellenic Studies at the University of Exeter. She
previously worked at the University of Goettingen in the DFG-funded Collaborative Research
Centre 1136 Education and Religion. Her area of expertise is ancient Greek history and epigra-
phy, with a focus on religious and magical practices. Her publications have investigated blood
pollution and rites of purification, gender, embodiment and religion, history of emotion as
well as history of knowledge and education. She is co-editing (with Professor Tanja S. Scheer)
a forthcoming volume on religion and education in the Greek world (Mohr Siebeck Press).

Urciuoli, Emiliano Rubens

Emiliano Rubens Urciuoli is Junior Fellow at the Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and
Social Studies in Erfurt. He is currently research associate of the DFG research group “Religion
and Urbanity: Reciprocal Formation”. His research interests focus on the history of early Christ
religion and the methodological advancements in the study of ancient Mediterranean religious
groups and traditions. The title of his second monograph is Servire due padroni: una genealo-
gia dell’uomo politico cristiano (50–313 e.v.) (Brescia, 2018). His current project, Citifying
Jesus: Early Christians’ Making of an Urban Religion (I-V cent. CE), develops a socio-spatial
analysis of early Christians’ religious communication in cityspaces.

Wischmeyer, Oda
Prof. em. Dr. Dr. h.c. Oda Wischmeyer (University of Lund) was professor for Early Jewish
literature and New Testament from 1993 to 2009 at the Friedrich-Alexander Universität
Erlangen-Nürnberg. Her main field of interest are: Early Jewish wisdom literature (especially
Ben Sira), Paul, the Gospel of Mark, the Letter of James, ancient epistolography, theory and
history of hermeneutics and Biblical interpretation.

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