Empires of Faith in Late Antiquity: Histories of Art and Religion from India to Ireland

Cambridge University Press, 3/19/2020
EAN 9781108473071, ISBN10: 1108473075

Hardcover, 530 pages, 24.9 x 19 x 2.8 cm
Language: English
Originally published in English

This book reveals the rewards of exploring the relationship between art and religion in the first millennium, and the particular problems of comparing the visual cultures of different emergent and established religions of the period in Eurasia - Buddhism, Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, Islam, Judaism, Christianity and the pagan religions of the Roman world. Most of these became established and remained in play as what are called 'the world religions'. The chapters in this volume show how the long traditions of studying these topics are caught up in complex local, ancestral, colonial and post-colonial discourses and biases, which have made comparison difficult. The study of Late Antiquity turns out also to be an examination of the intellectual histories of modernity.

1. Introduction JaÅ› Elsner
Part I. The Imperial Context
2. The Gandharan problem Robert Bracey
3. Writing the art, archaeology and religion of the Roman Mediterranean Philippa Adrych and Dominic Dalglish
4. Mystery cult and material culture in the Graeco-Roman world Philippa Adrych and Dominic Dalglish
5. The Viennese invention of late antiquity
between politics and religion in the forms of late Roman art JaÅ› Elsner
6. The rise of Byzantine art and archaeology in late Imperial Russia Maria Lidova
7. Ferdinand Piper's Monumentale Theologie (1867) and Schleiermacher's legacy
the attempted foundation of a Protestant theology of art Stefanie Lenk
Part II. After Imperialism
Orientalism and its Resistances
8. The road from decadence
agendas and personal histories in the rise of early Islamic art Nadia Ali
9. Connecting art and Zoroastrianism in Sasanian studies Rachel Wood
10. 'Hindu' art and the primordial Ã…Å¡iva Robert Bracey
Part III. Post-colonialist, Old Colonialist and Nationalist Fantasies
11. Jewish art
before and after the Jewish state (1948) Jesse Lockard and JaÅ› Elsner
12. Whose history is it anyway? Contests for India's past in the twentieth century Robert Bracey
13. Acculturated natives who rebel
revivalist, Ottomanist and Pan-Arabist engagements with early Islamic art (1876–1930s) Nadia Ali
14. Barbarians at the British Museum
Anglo-Saxon art, race and religion Katherine Cross.