I just received the author’s copy of the volume Violence in Antiquity: Religious Approaches to its Legitimation and Delegitimation, edited by Johannes Breuer and Jochen Walter, and published by Franz Steiner Verlag, in the series ”Hamburger Studien zu Gesellschaften und Kulturen der Vormoderne”.
I am happy to be along in this volume. My article is on ”Swords or Cudgels? Augustine, Petilianus and (De)legitimizing Religious Violence”. The volume is based on the conference, Tagung ”Religiöse (De-)Legitimationsansätze von Gewalt in der Antike” held in September 2019 in the Johannes-Gutenberg-Universität Mainz.
The abstract of the book: ”What is the role of religious aspects in legitimizing or delegitimizing violence? The articles of this volume provide an important contribution to this crucial social and scholarly debate. Analysing a broad spectrum of case studies from antiquity, they focus on religious justifications or evaluations of recommended, performed, or forbidden acts of violence – regardless of the question of their historicity. Not only late antiquity and Christianity are considered, but also pre-Christian Greek and Roman civilizations, Judaism, literary myth, and atheism. The case studies cover the period from the fifth century BCE to the fifth century CE and a broad geographical scope extending from Gaul to Israel and Egypt. This volume offers new insights into a highly topical issue.” The introduction of the editors Breuer and Walter can be read here.
