Local and Overseas Saints and Religious Identity in Vandal Africa, SE 52 (2013) (original) (raw)
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Christianity in Roman Africa, I: Communities and Religious Movements
The Palgrave Handbook of African Christianity from Apostolic Times to the Present. Andrew Barnes and Toyin Falola, eds. London: Palgrave, 2024. ISBN: 9783031482694, 2024
This study presents an outline of the history of Christianity in the Maghreb during “long late antiquity,” roughly 180-700 CE. In examining this history through the lenses of movements and community, it centers attempts at building community, consensus, and identity alongside responses and reactions to those attempts. In surveying the various controversies that contested them—Donatism, Arianism, the Three Chapters—the study follows a central thread at the heart of these early African Christian communities: the martyrs and their legacy. By approaching this history through the work of post-colonial scholars, this study examines these communities within the colonized landscape of the Roman Empire in the Maghreb. The picture that emerges presents a set of robust, assertive, and self-confident communities, firmly rooted in African identities, seeking to delineate their collective belonging while navigating a colonial (and then post-colonial) landscape defined by the memories and narratives of persecution. As such, readers will find an introduction to the major events and figures situated within an up-to-date understanding of the history of the late antique Maghreb.
Local Religions in Roman North Africa on the Eve of the Middle Ages
REVISTA DE HISTORIOGRAFÍA (RevHisto), 2021
This paper considers how late antique Latin authors (mainly Augustine and Corippus) dealt with ancestral rites and practices of probable autochthonous (i. e. Berber) origin and provided an ideological resemantisation. Although motivated by anti-pagan pleas and also allowing for some exaggeration, they nevertheless provide reliable information, which can be compared against epigraphic evidence, and offer further contributions that enrich the knowledge of the North African local pantheon, otherwise largely documented by epigraphical evidence. It might therefore be surmised that, notwithstanding the deep Christianisation of the region, at the end of the Roman Empire, North Africa still witnessed the survival of residual and isolated pagan fringes.
Contesting the Legacy and Patronage of Saint Cyprian in Vandal Carthage
Studia Patristica, 2017
The Vandal period of African Christianity has long existed as a sort of Dark Ages in which the primary narratives of the Church are flush with persecution, exile, and destruction. Nevertheless, a notable surge of interest in the history of the Vandals in recent decades has prompted revisionist work that has broadened the purview of scholarship well beyond the paradigm Victor of Vita offers. Amid such work, the state-supported Homoian Church has begun to emerge as something more than a one-dimensional body of heretical barbarian persecutors. Some recent studies have highlighted how the Homoian Church sought to establish itself as a genuinely ‘African’ communion that appealed to a broad cross-section of the population. Along these lines, this study explores a selection of homilies from three anonymous preachers of the Vandal period (a Homoian bishop and two Nicene clerics) which provide a first-hand glimpse into an ecclesial rivalry in which both churches sought to leverage the legacy and authority of Saint Cyprian as each strived to establish its communion as the rightful heir of the African Christian tradition. As this study offers fresh testimony to our understanding of religious life in Vandal Carthage, it will ultimately contend that conventional characterisations of the Vandal kingdom as an era of decline and persecution for African Christianity must yield to interpretations that are more attentive to the growing evidence for the prosperity, credibility, and popularity of the Homoian church in North Africa.
The ‘Lived Ancient Religion’ approach has generated outstanding results in the analysis of how people in antiquity entangled their local and pre-existing beliefs with Roman religious traditions, and embedded both in their lives. This paradigm is now being implemented by two further projects: ‘LARNA’ (Madrid, 2018-2022) is now testing this perspective within the very promising context of religious transformations in ancient North Africa, from the Hellenistic period to Late Antiquity; ‘Urban Religion’ (Erfurt, 2018-2023) goes even beyond this enterprise, by focusing on the spatial dimension of religious communication. Following H. Lefebvre on the production of social space and E. Soja on ‘thirdspaces’, we see space as condition, medium and outcome of social relations that fostered mutual changes of urbanity and religion likewise. On the one hand, religion played an eminent role in the process of formation of a city and shaping of its urbanity (founding rituals, selection of tutelary deities, etc.); on the other hand, the massive movement and interaction of diverse social actors within cities and urban spatial settings, together with the concentration and circulation of a multitude of objects, had tremendous impacts on religious dynamics. By combining these two projects, we invite speakers to answer to questions like: How far did the specific spatiality of cities in North Africa influence the religious actions of their inhabitants and the shaping of their urban environment? How far did the different and newly emerging religions impact on the urban space and the city planning? We welcome papers from ancient religious studies, ancient history, archaeology and related disciplines focusing on North African antiquity and dealing with every religious tradition documented during the Roman occupation between the 2nd century BCE until the 5th century CE.
The session claims to explore how, in the Roman provinces of North Africa, local religious preferences were strongly influenced by shifting social networks, changing over time according to specific historical contexts. The historical issue at the core of this panel is the process of integration of the pre-Roman gods within the Roman ‘pantheon’ and, at the same time, the permeability of the ‘traditional’ Roman deities in encounters with the cults problematically labelled ‘Oriental’. Speakers will be asked to approach the study of these ‘cults in motion’ not from the perspective of the civic religion as the dominant structure (based on the static and standardised performance of public, collective rites, and on elite-driven ideology), but of the individual as an active (often unpredictable) actor, capable of situational and creative innovation. This line of research is interested in the single cultic agents, not as ‘normalising’ actors (viz. representatives of institutional entities or local oligarchies), but as individuals who (independently of their social position) act as decision-makers and conscious modifiers of established religious patterns. Papers will deal with the archaeological evidence attesting the social dimension of this religious practice, including variety, creativity, religious multiplicity, fluidity and flexibility of identities, changes in forms of individuality, and spaces for individual distinction. The goal is to examine empirically religion as a practical resource available to emergent or self-styled religious providers, and explore how this resource was selected and instrumentalised by other agents, whether individuals, families, cities, or other social groupings.