Empires of Faith in Late Antiquity: Histories of Art and Religion from India to Ireland
- Submitting institution
-
University of Oxford
- Unit of assessment
- 29 - Classics
- Output identifier
- 15954
- Type
- B - Edited book
- DOI
-
-
- Publisher
- Cambridge University Press
- ISBN
- 9781108473071
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- March
- Year of publication
- 2020
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- Yes
- Number of additional authors
-
0
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This book is one output of the Leverhulme Trust-funded Empires of Faith project between the British Museum and Wolfson College Oxford (of which I was PI), along with the Imagining the Divine exhibition at the Ashmolean. The aim of the project was to explore the place of material and visual culture in the writing of the history of religion in Afro-Eurasia in late antiquity (conceived as c. 100-800 CE). At stake is the issue of comparing different religions, with radically different historiographies (in quantity and quality) in the context of different colonialist and post-colonialist histories. The problems of Eurocentrism in comparative analysis and in changing attitudes across at least two centuries of research entailed the need to understand the range of different starting points at which we currently enter research on the different religions and hence the need for a historiographic book of this kind. The contributors were all members or associates of the project, either postdocs, research associates or doctoral students, none other than me was in a full-time senior post.
My own contributions involved framing the whole, developing and revising the papers with each author and writing a number of pieces myself: 1. The theoretical introduction to the book; 2. The chapter on the pre-World War I Viennese invention of late antiquity as a concept and of late antique Roman/early Christian art as a positive idea (rather than a degenerate moment of decline); 3. (jointly with Jesse Lockard) the chapter on the creation of Jewish art history following the discovery of material culture no one had imagined could exist in the early twentieth century, within the changing contexts of European antisemitism and the rise of Fascism, early Zionism in Mandate Palestine and the aftermath of the birth of the Jewish State.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -