Contested Cures: Identity and Ritual Healing in Roman and Late Antique Palestine
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Description
In the ancient Mediterranean world, individuals routinely looked for divine aid to cure physical afflictions. Contested Cures argues that the inevitability of sickness and injury made people willing to experiment with seemingly beneficial techniques, even if they originated in a foreign cultural or religious tradition. With circumstances of close cultural contacts, such as prevailed in Palestine, the setting was ripe for neighboring Jews, Samaritans, Christians, Greeks and Romans to borrow rituals perceived to be efficacious and to alter them to fit their own religious framework. As a result, they employed related means of seeking miraculous cures. The similarities of these rituals, despite changes in the identity of the divine healers that they invoked, made them the subject of polemical discourse among elite authors trying to police collective borders. Contested Cures investigates the resulting intersection of ritual healing and communal identity.
This innovative study synthesizes evidence for the full range of healing rituals that were practiced in the ancient Mediterranean world. Examining both literary and archaeological evidence, it considers ritual healing as a component of identity formation and deconstructs the artificial boundary between ‘magic’ and ‘religion’ in relation to ritual cures. [Amazon.com]
ISBN
9781399502733
Publication Date
11-2022
Publisher
Edinburgh University Press
City
Edinburgh, United Kingdom
Disciplines
Ancient History, Greek and Roman through Late Antiquity | Jewish Studies | Near and Middle Eastern Studies | Religion
Recommended Citation
Nutzman, Megan, "Contested Cures: Identity and Ritual Healing in Roman and Late Antique Palestine" (2022). History Faculty Bookshelf. 55.
https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/history_books/55