Download or read book The Making of a Christian Aristocracy written by Michele Renee Salzman and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What did it take to cause the Roman aristocracy to turn to Christianity, changing centuries-old beliefs and religious traditions? Michele Salzman takes a fresh approach to this much-debated question. Focusing on a sampling of individual aristocratic men and women as well as on writings and archeological evidence, she brings new understanding to the process by which pagan aristocrats became Christian, and Christianity became aristocratic. Roman aristocrats would seem to be unlikely candidates for conversion to Christianity. Pagan and civic traditions were deeply entrenched among the educated and politically well-connected. Indeed, men who held state offices often were also esteemed priests in the pagan state cults: these priesthoods were traditionally sought as a way to reinforce one's social position. Moreover, a religion whose texts taught love for one's neighbor and humility, with strictures on wealth and notions of equality, would not have obvious appeal for those at the top of a hierarchical society. Yet somehow in the course of the fourth and early fifth centuries Christianity and the Roman aristocracy met and merged. Examining the world of the ruling class--its institutions and resources, its values and style of life--Salzman paints a fascinating picture, especially of aristocratic women. Her study yields new insight into the religious revolution that transformed the late Roman Empire.
Download or read book Through the Eye of a Needle written by Peter Brown and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2013-09-02 with total page 806 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A sweeping intellectual history of the role of wealth in the church in the last days of the Roman Empire Jesus taught his followers that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven. Yet by the fall of Rome, the church was becoming rich beyond measure. Through the Eye of a Needle is a sweeping intellectual and social history of the vexing problem of wealth in Christianity in the waning days of the Roman Empire, written by the world's foremost scholar of late antiquity. Peter Brown examines the rise of the church through the lens of money and the challenges it posed to an institution that espoused the virtue of poverty and called avarice the root of all evil. Drawing on the writings of major Christian thinkers such as Augustine, Ambrose, and Jerome, Brown examines the controversies and changing attitudes toward money caused by the influx of new wealth into church coffers, and describes the spectacular acts of divestment by rich donors and their growing influence in an empire beset with crisis. He shows how the use of wealth for the care of the poor competed with older forms of philanthropy deeply rooted in the Roman world, and sheds light on the ordinary people who gave away their money in hopes of treasure in heaven. Through the Eye of a Needle challenges the widely held notion that Christianity's growing wealth sapped Rome of its ability to resist the barbarian invasions, and offers a fresh perspective on the social history of the church in late antiquity.
Download or read book Be a Perfect Man written by Andrew J. Romig and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2017-08-28 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The life of an aristocratic Carolingian man involved an array of behaviors and duties associated with his gender and rank: an education in arms and letters; training in horsemanship, soldiery, and hunting; betrothal, marriage, and the virile production of heirs; and the masterful command of a prominent household. In Be a Perfect Man, Andrew J. Romig argues that Carolingian masculinity was constituted just as centrally by the performance of caritas, defined by the early medieval scholar Alcuin of York as a complete and all-inclusive love for God and for fellow human beings, flowing from the whole heart, mind, and soul. The authority of the Carolingian man depended not only on his skills in warfare and landholding but also on his performances of empathy, devotion, and asceticism. Romig maps caritas as a concept rooted in a vast body of inherited Judeo-Christian and pagan philosophies, shifting in meaning and association from the patristic era to the central Middle Ages. Carolingian discussions and representations of caritas served as a discourse of power, a means by which early medieval writers made claims, both explicit and implicit, about the hierarchies of power that they believed ought to exist within their world. During the late eighth, ninth, and early tenth centuries, they creatively invoked caritas to link aristocratic men with divine authority. Romig gathers conduct handbooks, theological tracts, poetry, classical philosophy, church legislation, and exegetical texts to outline an associative process of gender ideology in the Carolingian Middle Ages, one that framed masculinity, asceticism, and authority as intimately interdependent. The association of power and empathy remains with us to this day, Romig argues, as a justification for existing hierarchies of authority, privilege, and prestige.
Download or read book Jews Christians and the Roman Empire written by Natalie B. Dohrmann and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2013-11 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume revisits issues of empire from the perspective of Jews, Christians, and other Romans in the third to sixth centuries. Through case studies, the contributors bring Jewish perspectives to bear on longstanding debates concerning Romanization, Christianization, and late antiquity.
Download or read book Christian Homes written by Tine Van Osselaer and published by Leuven University Press. This book was released on 2014-09-29 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Christian ideas on family, religion, and the home in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries The cult of domesticity has often been linked to the privatization of religion and the idealisation of the motherly ideal of the ‘angel in the house’. This book revisits the Christian home of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and sheds new light on the stereotypical distinction between the private and public spheres and their inhabitants. Emphasizing the importance of patriarchal domesticity during the period and the frequent blurring of boundaries between the Christian home and modern society, the case studies included in this volume call for a more nuanced understanding of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Christian ideas on family, religion, and the home.
Download or read book Aristocratic Souls in Democratic Times written by Richard Avramenko and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2018-05-07 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Great statesmen and gentlemen, men of honor and rank, seem to be phenomena of a bygone Aristocratic era. Aristocracies, which emphasize rank, and value difference, quality, beauty, rootedness, continuity, stand in direct contrast to democracies, which value equality, autonomy, novelty, standardization, quantity, utility and mobility. Is there any place for aristocratic values and virtues in the modern democratic social and political order? This volume consists of essays by political theorists, historians, and literary theorists that explore this question in the works of aristocratic thinkers, both ancient and modern. The volume includes analyses of aristocratic virtues, interpretations of aristocratic assemblies and constitutions, both historic and contemporary, as well as critiques of liberal virtues and institutions. Essays on Tacitus, Hobbes, Burke, Tocqueville, Nietzsche, as well as some lesser known figures, such as Henri de Boulainvilliers, John Randolph of Roanoke, Louis de Bonald, Konstantin Leontiev, Jose Ortega y Gasset, Richard Weaver, and the Eighth Duke of Northumberland, explore ways of preserving and adapting the salutary aspects of the aristocratic ethos to the needs of modern liberal societies.
Download or read book The Rise of Western Christendom written by Peter Brown and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-02-04 with total page 741 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This tenth anniversary revised edition of the authoritative text on Christianity's first thousand years of history features a new preface, additional color images, and an updated bibliography. The essential general survey of medieval European Christendom, Brown's vivid prose charts the compelling and tumultuous rise of an institution that came to wield enormous religious and secular power. Clear and vivid history of Christianity's rise and its pivotal role in the making of Europe Written by the celebrated Princeton scholar who originated of the field of study known as 'late antiquity' Includes a fully updated bibliography and index
Download or read book Christianity and the Roman Empire written by Ralph Martin Novak and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2001-02-01 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The rise of Christianity during the first four centuries of the common era was the pivotal development in Western history and profoundly influenced the later direction of all world history. Yet, for all that has been written on early Christian history, the primary sources for this history are widely scattered, difficult to find, and generally unknown to lay persons and to historians not specially trained in the field. In Christianity and the Roman Empire Ralph Novak interweaves these primary sources with a narrative text and constructs a single continuous account of these crucial centuries. The primary sources are selected to emphasize the manner in which the government and the people of the Roman Empire perceived Christians socially and politically; the ways in which these perceptions influenced the treatment of Christians within the Roman Empire; and the manner in which Christians established their political and religious dominance of the Roman Empire after Constantine the Great came to power in the early fourth century CE. Ralph Martin Novak holds a Masters Degree in Roman History from the University of Chicago. For: Undergraduates; seminarians; general audiences
Download or read book The Making of Christian Communities in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages written by Mark F. Williams and published by Anthem Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Making of Christian Communities sheds light on one of the most crucial periods in the development of the Christian faith. It considers the development and spread of Christianity between Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, and includes analysis of the formation and development of Christian communities in a variety of arenas, ranging from Late Roman Cappadocia and Constantinople to the court of Charlemagne and the twelfth-century province of Rheims, France during the twelfth century. The rise and development of Christianity in the Roman and Post-Roman world has been exhaustively studied on many different levels, political, legal, social, literary and religious. However, the basic question of how Christians of Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages formed themselves into communities of believers has sometimes been lost from sight. This volume explores the idea that survival of the Christian faith depended upon the making of these communities, something that the Christians of this period were themselves acutely - and sometimes acrimoniously - aware.
Download or read book On Roman Time written by Michele Renee Salzman and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1991-03-25 with total page 437 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Because they list all the public holidays and pagan festivals of the age, calendars provide unique insights into the culture and everyday life of ancient Rome. The Codex-Calendar of 354 miraculously survived the Fall of Rome. Although it was subsequently lost, the copies made in the Renaissance remain invaluable documents of Roman society and religion in the years between Constantine's conversion and the fall of the Western Empire. In this richly illustrated book, Michele Renee Salzman establishes that the traditions of Roman art and literature were still very much alive in the mid-fourth century. Going beyond this analysis of precedents and genre, Salzman also studies the Calendar of 354 as a reflection of the world that produced and used it. Her work reveals the continuing importance of pagan festivals and cults in the Christian era and highlights the rise of a respectable aristocratic Christianity that combined pagan and Christian practices. Salzman stresses the key role of the Christian emperors and imperial institutions in supporting pagan rituals. Such policies of accomodation and assimilation resulted in a gradual and relatively peaceful transformation of Rome from a pagan to a Christian capital.
Download or read book Aristocracy A Very Short Introduction written by William Doyle and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2010-11-25 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Aristocracies or nobilities dominated the social, economic, and institutional history of all European counties until only a few generations ago. The relics of their power, in traditions and behaviour, in architecture and the arts, are still all around us. This short introduction shows how ideas of aristocracy originated in ancient times, were transformed in the middle ages, and have only fallen apart over the last two centuries. The myths in which aristocracies have always sought to shroud themselves are stripped away, but the true sources of their enduring power are also revealed. Their outlook and behaviour affected the rest of society in innumerable and sometimes surprising ways, but perhaps most surprising was the way in which a centuries-old aristocratic hegemony crumbled away over the last two hundred years. In this Very Short Introduction William Doyle considers why this happend and what remains today. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.
Download or read book A Companion to Religion in Late Antiquity written by Josef Lössl and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2018-05-22 with total page 711 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive review of the development, geographic spread, and cultural influence of religion in Late Antiquity A Companion to Religion in Late Antiquity offers an authoritative and comprehensive survey of religion in Late Antiquity. This historical era spanned from the second century to the eighth century of the Common Era. With contributions from leading scholars in the field, the Companion explores the evolution and development of religion and the role various religions played in the cultural, political, and social transformations of the late antique period. The authors examine the theories and methods used in the study of religion during this period, consider the most notable historical developments, and reveal how religions spread geographically. The authors also review the major religious traditions that emerged in Late Antiquity and include reflections on the interaction of these religions within their particular societies and cultures. This important Companion: Brings together in one volume the work of a notable team of international scholars Explores the principal geographical divisions of the late antique world Offers a deep examination of the predominant religions of Late Antiquity Examines established views in the scholarly assessment of the religions of Late Antiquity Includes information on the current trends in late-antique scholarship on religion Written for scholars and students of religion, A Companion to Religion in Late Antiquity offers a comprehensive survey of religion and the influence religion played in the culture, politics, and social change during the late antique period.
Download or read book The Rich and the Pure written by Daniel Caner and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2021-09-07 with total page 437 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A portrait of history’s first complex Christian society as seen through the lens of Christian philanthropy and gift giving As the Roman Empire broke down in western Europe, its prosperity moved decisively eastward, to what is now known as the Byzantine Empire. Here was born history’s first truly affluent, multifaceted Christian society. One of the ideals used to unite the diverse millions of people living in this vast realm was the Christianized ideal of philanthrōpia. In this sweeping cultural and social history, Daniel Caner shows how philanthropy required living up to Jesus’s injunction to “Give to all who ask of you,” by offering mercy and/or material aid to every human being, regardless of their origin or status. Caner shows how Christian philanthropy became articulated through distinct religious ideals of giving that helped define proper social relations among the rich, the poor, and “the pure” (Christian holy people), resulting in new and enduring social expectations. In tracking the evolution of Christian giving over three centuries, he brings to the fore the concerns of the peoples of Early Byzantium, from the countryside to the lower levels of urban society to the imperial elites, as well as the hierarchical relationships that arose among them. The Rich and the Pure offers nothing less than a portrait of the whole of early Byzantine society.
Download or read book Foundations of Christianity written by Karl Kautsky and published by . This book was released on 1925 with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Pagans and Christians in Late Antique Rome written by Michele Renee Salzman and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 439 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book sheds new light on the religious and consequently social changes taking place in late antique Rome. The essays in this volume argue that the once-dominant notion of pagan-Christian religious conflict cannot fully explain the texts and artifacts, as well as the social, religious, and political realities of late antique Rome. Together, the essays demonstrate that the fourth-century city was a more fluid, vibrant, and complex place than was previously thought. Competition between diverse groups in Roman society - be it pagans with Christians, Christians with Christians, or pagans with pagans - did create tensions and hostility, but it also allowed for coexistence and reduced the likelihood of overt violent, physical conflict. Competition and coexistence, along with conflict, emerge as still central paradigms for those who seek to understand the transformations of Rome from the age of Constantine through the early fifth century.
Download or read book Making Aristocracy Work written by Andrew Adonis and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 1993 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of the political role and activities of the peerage both inside and outside Parliament, the late 19th and early 20th century. Andrew Adonis reassesses the strengths and weaknesses of the House of Lords, and shows how its members were able to justify themselves by their work.
Download or read book Creating Christ written by James S. Valliant and published by Crossroad Press. This book was released on 2016-09-07 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exhaustively annotated and illustrated, this explosive work of history unearths clues that finally demonstrate the truth about one of the world’s great religions: that it was born out of the conflict between the Romans and messianic Jews who fought a bitter war with each other during the 1st Century. The Romans employed a tactic they routinely used to conquer and absorb other nations: they grafted their imperial rule onto the religion of the conquered. After 30 years of research, authors James S. Valliant and C.W. Fahy present irrefutable archeological and textual evidence that proves Christianity was created by Roman Caesars in this book that breaks new ground in Christian scholarship and is destined to change the way the world looks at ancient religions forever. Inherited from a long-past era of tyranny, war and deliberate religious fraud, could Christianity have been created for an entirely different purpose than we have been lead to believe? Praised by scholars like Dead Sea Scrolls translator Robert Eisenman (James the Brother of Jesus), this exhaustive synthesis of historical detective work integrates all of the ancient sources about the earliest Christians and reveals new archeological evidence for the first time. And, despite the fable presented in current bestsellers like Bill O’Reilly’s Killing Jesus, the evidence presented in Creating Christ is irrefutable: Christianity was invented by Roman Emperors. I have rarely encountered a book so original, exciting, accessible and informed on subjects that are of obvious importance to the world and to which I have myself devoted such a large part of my scholarly career studying. In this book they have rendered a startling new understanding of Christianity with a controversial theory of its Roman provenance that is accessible to the layman in a very powerful way. In the process, they present new and comprehensive archeological and iconographic evidence, as well as utilizing the widest and most cutting edge work of other recent scholars, including myself. This is a work of outstanding and original scholarship. Its arguments are a brilliant, profound and thorough integration of the relevant evidence. When they are done, the conclusion is inescapable and obviously profound. Robert Eisenman, Author of James the Brother of Jesus and The New Testament Code "A fascinating and provocative investigative history of ideas, boldly exploring a problem that previous scholarship has not clearly or credibly addressed: how (and why!) the Flavian dynasty wove Christianity into the very fabric of Western civilization." -Mark Riebling, author of Church of Spies: The Pope's Secret War Against Hitler
