Making Amulets Christian: Artefacts, Scribes, and Contexts

ISBN-13: 9780199687886 / Angielski / Twarda / 2017 / 312 str.

Theodore De Bruyn

Opis

Making Amulets Christian: Artefacts, Scribes, and Contexts examines Greek amulets with Christian elements from late antique Egypt in order to discern the processes whereby a customary practice--the writing of incantations on amulets--changed in an increasingly Christian context. It considers how the formulation of incantations and amulets changed as the Christian church became the prevailing religious institution in Egypt in the last centuries of the Roman empire. Theodore de Bruyn investigates what we can learn from incantations and amulets containing Christian elements about the cultural and social location of the people who wrote them. He shows how incantations and amulets were indebted to rituals or ritualizing behavior of Christians.
This study analyzes different types of amulets and the ways in which they incorporate Christian elements. By comparing the formulation and writing of individual amulets that are similar to one another, one can observe differences in the culture of the scribes of these materials. It argues for 'conditioned individuality' in the production of amulets. On the one hand, amulets manifest qualities that reflect the training and culture of the individual writer. On the other hand, amulets reveal that individual writers were shaped, whether consciously or inadvertently, by the resources they drew upon-by what is called 'tradition' in the field of religious studies.

Recenzje

Making Amulets Christian: Artefacts, Scribes, and Contexts is an enjoyable book. Theodore de Bruyn sifts through a vast amount of material and curates a selection from which we can really get a sense of the rich cultural milieu that existed in Egypt in the Late Antique period. The book challenges us to move past envisioning Christianity and the earliest Christian practices in a monolithic manner and instead suggests an immense amount of nuance with variation by time, region, social positioning, and individual interpretation. This is a valuable and worthwhile read for anyone interested in the development of Christianity in Late Antiquity.

O autorze

Theodore de Bruyn is Associate Professor in the Department of Classics and Religious Studies at the University of Ottawa. He has studied aspects of Christianity from antiquity to the early modern period. He is the co-editor of Patristic Studies in the Twenty-First Century (Brepols, 2015).