Christianizing Egypt: Syncretism and Local Worlds in Late Antiquity (Martin Classical Lectures, 34)

by David Frankfurter

Hardcover, 2017

Status

Available

Call number

200.932

Genres

Classics

Religion & Spirituality

History

Nonfiction

Collection

Whealton

Publication

Princeton University Press (2017), 336 pages

Description

How does a culture become Christian, especially one that is heir to such ancient traditions and spectacular monuments as Egypt? This book offers a new model for envisioning the process of Christianization by looking at the construction of Christianity in the various social and creative worlds active in Egyptian culture during late antiquity. As David Frankfurter shows, members of these different social and creative worlds came to create different forms of Christianity according to their specific interests, their traditional idioms, and their sense of what the religion could offer. Reintroducing the term "syncretism" for the inevitable and continuous process by which a religion is acculturated, the book addresses the various formations of Egyptian Christianity that developed in the domestic sphere, the worlds of holy men and saints' shrines, the work of craftsmen and artisans, the culture of monastic scribes, and the reimagination of the landscape itself, through processions, architecture, and the potent remains of the past. Drawing on sermons and magical texts, saints' lives and figurines, letters and amulets, and comparisons with Christianization elsewhere in the Roman empire and beyond, Christianizing Egypt reconceives religious change--from the "conversion" of hearts and minds to the selective incorporation and application of strategies for protection, authority, and efficacy, and for imagining the environment.… (more)

Media reviews

Bryn Mawr Classical Review

Since the publication of Religion in Roman Egypt (Princeton University Press, 1998), David Frankfurter has produced an impressive body of scholarship oriented around the challenge of characterizing Egypt’s transition from a pagan society centered on its temples to a Christian landscape of

churches, monasteries, saints’ shrines, and a variety of Christian actors. His latest book, Christianizing Egypt, is in many ways the culmination of these decades of study of Roman Egypt at the local and regional levels, as Frankfurter acknowledges (xiii); yet it also represents a significant step further, which readers of his past work will be delighted to find. Much like his 1998 book, Christianizing Egypt is not a comprehensive survey, but rather a series of interconnected studies of particular aspects—in this case, “discrete religious worlds or ‘social sites’” (xiv)—of late antique Egyptian society and culture, each applying important insights from anthropological and sociological models to the analysis of ancient artifacts; but whereas the former stressed the continuity of Egyptian religious tradition among Christians and their institutions over the course of the Roman period, the present volume seeks to clarify the process by which certain forms of religious expression in Egypt became Christian up to the seventh century. How, and to what extent, does an ancient culture such as Roman Egypt render an object, text, place, or practice as “Christian”?

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