Jörg Rüpke Book order

Ritual and ritualization have become central concepts in cultural and social studies. This book shows why it is productive neither to equate ritual and religion, nor to simply abandon the concept of religion. Conceiving of religion as communicative action allows ritual to be understood as a form of listening to the world and as a form of changing the world. The book's primary intention is not to make a contribution to theory, but rather to demonstrate - through case studies for representative fields of a wide variety of rituals - the fruitfulness of an approach that links elements of classical theories of ritual to more recent concepts of religion and to the basic idea of the mutual constitution of subjects and objects.

Focusing on the interplay between contemporary religious practices and historical analysis, this work presents a comprehensive framework for understanding religion. It aims to reconcile modern interpretations with historical contexts, offering innovative approaches that challenge traditional assumptions about the study of religion. The book encourages readers to explore the dynamic relationship between current beliefs and their historical developments, fostering a deeper understanding of the complexities of religious phenomena.

From one of the world's leading authorities on the subject, an innovative and comprehensive account of religion in the ancient Roman and Mediterranean world In this ambitious and authoritative book, Jörg Rüpke provides a comprehensive and strikingly original narrative history of ancient Roman and Mediterranean religion over more than a millennium—from the late Bronze Age through the Roman imperial period and up to late antiquity. While focused primarily on the city of Rome, Pantheon fully integrates the many religious traditions found in the Mediterranean world, including Judaism and Christianity. This generously illustrated book is also distinguished by its unique emphasis on lived religion, a perspective that stresses how individuals’ experiences and practices transform religion into something different from its official form. The result is a radically new picture of Roman religion and of a crucial period in Western religion—one that influenced Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and even the modern idea of religion itself.

This book demonstrates how important changes of religion can be better understood as a result of the dialectic of urban life and religion. This general claim is argued in an exemplary manner for the ancient Mediterranean world from the Hellenistic period to the late imperial period and the city of Rome in particular. Many features of ancient religion would be more plausibly viewed as the outcome of specific effects and uses of space and their social and cognitive bases rather than as inherent features of a specific 'religion'.

Warfare is one of the defining elements that drove the development of the city of Rome from a small territory into a Mediterranean Empire. Religion is identified as having played an important part in this. Never done before, this book undertakes a survey of all rituals, and religious institutions in a broader sense, along with discourses related to peace and warfare. Priests and senators, generals and soldiers, men and women are acknowledged as agents with very different competencies, interests, and experiences, but also different opportunities to leave material traces or textual reflections of their activities. Throughout, the author pays attention to developments in time as well as space. He seeks to reconstruct the religious construction of peace and war at Rome as a tool and an attitude caught up in a process of change. The book persists in addressing the ways in which specific religious concepts might further or impede the pursuit of power and obedience to power, sharpen or mitigate internal competition, be conducive or not to the integration of allied powers, without ever claiming to „explain“ military success or expansion.

Emerging from a decade of research, 'From Jupiter to Christ' demonstrates that the decisive change within the Roman imperial period was not a growing number of religions or changes in their ranking and success, but a modification of the idea of 'religion' and a change in the social place of religious practices and beliefs.

Jorg Rupke addresses the similarities and differences of religions in antiquity, tracing their sometimes complex lineage into modern systems of belief. Greek and Roman religion is discussed not in isolation, but in the broader context of western Asia and Egypt.

Did new senses of the self emerge in the High Roman Empire, and if so what were the religious corollaries? Were such changes connected to processes of institutional change? Could they usefully be described as „individualisation“? These are the key concerns of the authors of this volume. They address the field of Hellenistic philosophy, medical texts and the literature of the so-called Second Sophistic, which all have been recruited to this debate. Most important, however, religious phenomena are included and brought to the fore. Thus the analysis of concepts of the self in Plutarch and Epictetus is followed by studies of the „Shepherd of Hermas,“ Clement of Alexandria and Ptolemaeus of Rome, Justin Martyr and the Corpus Hermeticum. Notions of the „self“ are traced in concepts of body and soul, I and god(s), but also in practices like dressing and ideas about political identity. Lucian of Samosata, a central author of the Second Sophistic, is shown to be involved in such discourses and practices in a sequence of studies. It is this kind of institutional setting which turns out to have been of central importance for the development of concepts of the „self“ in the period under consideration. Thus, in a final section, the authors address philosophical advice on dealing with sick friends, the individuality implied in votive practices, and institutions for religious educations within the field of Christian practices.

This volume will concentrate its search for religious individuality on texts and practices related to texts from Classical Greece to Late Antiquity. Texts offer opportunities to express one’s own religious experience and shape one’s own religious personality within the boundaries of what is acceptable. Inscriptions in public or at least easily accessible spaces might substantially differ in there range of expressions and topics from letters within a sectarian religious group (which, at the same time, might put enormous pressure on conformity among its members, regarded as deviant by a majority of contemporaries). Furthermore, texts might offer and advocate new practices in reading, meditating, remembering or repeating these very texts. Such practices might contribute to the development of religious individuality, experienced or expressed in factual isolation, responsibility, competition, and finally in philosophical or theological reflections about “personhood” or “self”. The volume develops its topic in three sections, addressing personhood, representative and charismatic individuality, the interaction of individual and groups and practices of reading and writing. It explores Jewish, Christian, Greek and Latin texts.

This magisterial compilation personalizes and historicizes the history of religion in the city of Rome. After introductory essays on the documentary sources for the various Greek, Roman, Oriental, Jewish, and Christian cults in question, there are yearly lists of religious office-holders of various kinds, followed by 4,000 biographies of individuals who fulfilled ritual, organizational, or doctrinal roles. Concluding chapters discuss important aspects of Roman religion and its relationship with the state. The data assembled here will open up many new perspectives: on the social place of religion and certain cults, on the interplay between different religious groups, and on the organizational history of individual cults. The volume as a whole signifies a major advance in our understanding of ancient religions.