From amulets and pilgrimage tokens to love spells and miracle-working icons, the lines which separate ‘Christian’ and magical behaviours are often hazy and indistinct. Our course will examine religious practices and ideas about ritual efficacy in the 1st-12th century eastern Roman world. We will explore the relationships between what we now call magic, religion and culture within their religious and socio-political contexts with an emphasis on the lived experience of everyday Christians. We will begin with the emergence of early Christ-groups in Late Antiquity and trace the development of ‘deviant’ practices around the periphery of Orthodox Christianity.
This course will emphasize reading primary texts (in translation) and examining material sources. To interpret this evidence, we will draw from the adjacent disciplines of religious studies, art history, anthropology and sociology. Our course will culminate in a creative project wherein students will ‘re-create’ a primary source that has been lost to history. This could take the form of an amulet recipe, instructions for a ritual, a folk tale, diagrams of a ritual space or a magical object. The possibilities are endless! Through reconstructing objects from magical texts in the lab, seminar activities, and group discussions we will immerse ourselves in the embodied (and often magical) religious lives of Roman Christians.
