Title Information
Title
"A Land Cleansed of Heretics”: Cult Practice and Contestation in the Christianization of Late Antique Constantinople
Name: Personal
Name Part
Falcasantos, Rebecca Stephens
Role
Role Term: Text
creator
Origin Information
Copyright Date
2015
Physical Description
Extent
8, 263 p.
digitalOrigin
born digital
Note
Thesis (Ph.D. -- Brown University (2015)
Name: Personal
Name Part
Harvey, Susan
Role
Role Term: Text
Director
Name: Personal
Name Part
Kraemer, Ross
Role
Role Term: Text
Reader
Name: Personal
Name Part
Papaioannou, Stratis
Role
Role Term: Text
Reader
Name: Corporate
Name Part
Brown University. Religious Studies
Role
Role Term: Text
sponsor
Genre (aat)
theses
Abstract
In November 324 CE the Roman emperor Constantine founded a new city soon to become the center of a Christian empire. At its inception, however, Constantinople was not a Christian city; it was an imperial city, and its religious frameworks accommodated both traditional patterns of religion and various forms of Christianity. This situation created profound contestation regarding the proper expression of civic religion. Over the following century Christian bishops progressively dominated the city’s religious frameworks as non-Christians were expelled from the civic landscape, and indeed, from its historiographic tradition, as well. During the 380s the head of a new imperial dynasty, Theodosios I, patronized those Christian bishops who supported the doctrinal formulations of the Council of Nicaea (namely, that Christ, the Son of God, is of one substance with God the Father). Theodosios’ son and grandson reaffirmed this commitment to Nicene Christianity, leading a campaign to transform Constantinople into an unmistakably Christian city and the standard-bearer for defining Christian orthodoxy. This dissertation analyzes the ritual and rhetorical processes contributing to the changes in Constantinople’s religious frameworks during the fourth and fifth centuries CE. Approaching the complex Constantinopolitan cult landscape in conversation with modern discussions of memory politics, ritualization, and violence, I examine how the construction of memory and the public performance of ritual contributed to the eventual elision of Nicene Christianity with imperial structures to form a new civic and cultural identity. During this period, imperial officials, ecclesiastical authorities, and the city’s Christian elite utilized the memorialization of violence, the communal habits of ritual, and imperial legislation to restrict, and eventually eliminate, the practices of competing religious groups. These moves were paired with the development of a rhetoric of imperial Christian identity that focused on the religious integrity of the emperor and his capital and recast historical narratives about the previous century in a light favorable to Nicene Christianity. Together, communal engagement in and rhetoric about the rituals of civic religion provided crucial mechanisms for the production of a new Constantinopolitan religious identity as invested cultural agents worked to construct, solidify, and reconfigure social boundaries.
Subject
Topic
Late antique Christianity
Subject
Topic
Religious Competition
Subject
Topic
Constantinople
Subject
Topic
Religious Violence
Subject (FAST) (authorityURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast", valueURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast/1098241")
Topic
Ritual
Subject (FAST) (authorityURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast", valueURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast/1167248")
Topic
Violence--Religious aspects
Record Information
Record Content Source (marcorg)
RPB
Record Creation Date (encoding="iso8601")
20150601
Language
Language Term: Code (ISO639-2B)
eng
Language Term: Text
English
Identifier: DOI
10.7301/Z05H7DNX
Access Condition: rights statement (href="http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/")
In Copyright
Access Condition: restriction on access
Collection is open for research.
Type of Resource (primo)
dissertations