Yesterday I received this beautiful book, Rhetoric & Religious Identity in Late Antiquity, edited by Richard Flower and Morwenna Ludlow and published by Oxford University Press.

My contribution is the article on the relationship between magic and Christians, titled as ‘”A Christian Cannot Employ Magic”: Rhetoric Self-fashioning of the Magicless Christianity in Late Antiquity’. It seems that I return to the research topic of magic again and again – there is certain enchantment here in the theme.

The articles in the volume are super-fascinating, see the table of contents:

1:Introduction, Richard Flower and Morwenna Ludlow
PART I: THE NATURE OF RELIGIOUS IDENTITIES AND THEIR REPRESENTATION
2:Approaching ’Religious Identity’ in Late Antiquity, Éric Rebillard
3:The Rhetoric of Pagan Religious Identities: Porphyry and his First Readers, Aaron P. Johnson
4:The Maccabees, ’Apostasy’ and Julian’s Appropriation of Hellenismos as a Reclaimed Epithet in Christian Conversations of the Fourth Century C.E., Douglas Boin
PART II: AGENTS OF THE REPRESENTATION OF RELIGIOUS IDENTITY
5:Julian the Apologist: Christians and Pagans on the Mother of the Gods, Shaun Tougher
6:Bodies, Books, Histories: Augustine of Hippo and the Extraordinary (civ. Dei 16.8 and Pliny, HN 7), Susanna Elm
7:Classical Decadence or Christian Aesthetics? Libanius, John Chrysostom, and Augustine on Rhetoric, Raffaella Cribiore
8:’Very great are your words’: Dialogue as Rhetoric in Manichaean Kephalaia, Nicholas Baker-Brian
9:’A Christian Cannot Employ Magic’: Rhetorical Self-fashioning of the Magicless Christianity of Late Antiquity, Maijastina Kahlos
PART III: MODES OF THE REPRESENTATION OF RELIGIOUS IDENTITY
10:The Rhetorical Construction of a Christian Empire in the Theodosian Code, Mark Humphries
11:What Happened after Eusebius? Chronicles and Narrative Identities in the Fourth Century, Peter Van Nuffelen
12:The Rhetoric of Heresiological Prefaces, Richard Flower
13:Constructing Identity in the Tomb: The Visual Rhetoric of Early Christian Iconography, Robin M. Jensen
14:Renunciation and Ascetic Identity in the Liber ad Renatum of Asterius Ansedunensis, Hajnalka Tamas
15:Christian Literary Identity and Rhetoric about Style, Morwenna Ludlow

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