Legible Religion. Books, Gods, and Rituals in Roman Culture. - MACRAE, D.,
Books, Gods, and Rituals in Roman Culture
KORTE INHOUD
'As Duncan MacRae points out in his intensely thought-provoking debut, one of the many ways in which the ancient Romans were anomalous involved their relationship to the divine: temples abound in their cities, religious rites and offices abound in their societies on every level, and yet they had no sacred text. There were books of recorded prophecies, there were annual compilations like the Annales Maximi functioning as a kind of sacerdotal accounting of which celestial contracts were fulfilled and which weren?t, but there was nothing equivalent to the concept of a divinely-inspired sacred-in-jot-and-tittle central holy book like the Books of Moses were for the Jews or, later, the Koran would be for the Muslims. The Romans may have exhibited a ?rhetoric of rule-making,? but their peculiar brand of public religion, what MacRae winningly dubs their ?civil theology,? has none of the finger-of-God exclusivity to be found in virtually all other contemporary societies: Alongside these markers of sacredness, canoniz...
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2016Uitgever: Harvard University Press272 paginasTaal: EngelsISBN-10: 0674088719ISBN-13: 9780674088719Koop dit boek tweedehands
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Cambridge (Mass.) / London, 2016. 259p. Original grey cloth with dust wrps. Spine gilt titled. [New] [Auteur: MACRAE, D.,] [Uitgever: Harvard University Press] [Jaar: 2016] [Titel: Legible Religion. Books, Gods, and Rituals in Roman Culture.]
