Sanctuaries and Experience

Knowledge, Practice and Space in the Ancient World

Greg Woolf, Ilaria Bultrighini, Camilla Norman

• Publisher: Franz Steiner Verlag GmbH
• Year: 2024
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9783515134071
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

Ancient religion is traditionally understood in terms of myths, rituals and institutions, as transmitted in ancient texts. The studies gathered here focus instead on the lived experience of ancient cult and the places in which that experience was formed. They build on recent explorations of Lived Ancient Religion and also on new approaches to Material Ancient Religion. All ancient societies constructed elaborate sanctuaries. Their architecture and the collective rituals that took place there shaped collective experiences. Through case studies drawn from Ancient Egypt, the Greek World and the Roman Empire these themes are explored and elaborated. Together they indicate new ways of approaching ancient religious experience, collective and individual.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Greg Woolf / Ilaria Bultrighini / Camilla Norman: Introduction
• Jörg Rüpke: Sacralization and Focalization. Agentic Perspectives on Sanctuaries
• Thomas Gamelin: How Does Architecture Help One Feel Part of the Divine World? Looking for Movements and Perceptions in Egyptia Temples
• Erica Angliker / Yannos Kourayos / Kornilia Daifa: Experiences and Individual Practices at the Sanctuary of Apollo at Despotiko. A Case Study of Dances and Travelling
• Camilla Norman: The Ritual Ecology of Archaic Italy. A View from Daunia
• Giovanni Mastronuzzi / Davide Tamiano / Giacomo Vizzino: Food Offerings and Ritual Meals in pre-Roman Apulia Contexts
• Esther Eidinow: ‘Travel Stories’. Some Semantics of Ancient Sacred Space
• Marco Serino: Iera Oikia. Archaeological Evidence of Religious Experience in a ‘Sacred House’ of a Sicilian Greek Colony
• Ilaria Bultrighini: Worshipping Imported Deities in Attika. The Case of Artemis Amarysia
• Rita Sassu: The Human Dimension of Divine Space. Some Remarks on Worshippers’ Religious and Secular Actions Performed inside Greek Sanctuaries
• Julietta Steinhauer: The Sanctuary of the Syrian Gods on Delos and the Experience of Female Foreigners
• Katja Sporn: Private Portraits in Temples. Greek and Roman in Comparison
• Marlis Arnhold: Images of Gods in the Sanctuaries of Imperial Rome
• Anna-Katharina Rieger: Pathways of Religious Experience in the Urban Fabric of Roman Pompeii
• Elena Franchi: Making Delphi Happen. Walking, Memories, and Intellectual Experience in Roman Central Greece
• Georgia Petridou: Between Pergamum, Athens and Eleusis. Illness and Initiation in Aelius Aristides
• Dominic Dalglish: God and Temple. Jupiter Optimus Maximus Heliopolitanus at Baalbek
• Csaba Szabó: Sacralisations of Space in the Danubian Provinces during the Principate
• Jaime Alvar Ezquerra / José Carlos López-Gómez: The First Slump in Temple Building in Roman Hispania
• Julia Kindt: Afterthought. Sacred Space, Sanctuaries, and Religious Experience in the Ancient World
• Index of Sites