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This article focuses on the western cult of two saints, Cyrus and John, which was founded in Egypt – where Sophronios of Jerusalem composed the anargyroi 's hagiographic dossier in the seventh century – and quickly spread to Italy. The analysis of the manuscripts containing the Latin translations of Sophronios's texts allows us to trace the diffusion of this hagiographic corpus in Rome, and to link its transfer and first reception in Italy to a broad Mediterranean migration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The name Bian Que, like that of the Yellow Emperor (Huangdi), has reverberated through the development of Chinese medicine since the time of the Warring States. The discovery of a human figurine showing channels and strategic points, together with a number of medical texts, during the excavation of the Laoguanshan Han tomb in Chengdu, Sichuan, in 2012–13 has reignited controversies about whether it is correct to speak of a specific Bian Que school, or whether, as this paper argues, these texts were written by the Han physicians who used Bian Que as a mouthpiece to record their own medical expositions. The paper begins by examining the main characteristics of the Laoguanshan human figurine and discusses what this excavated artifact reveals about the early history of Chinese medicine. It questions the existence of the so-called Bian Que school and, obliquely, the suggested relationships between the school and the figurine and between the school and medical texts found in the same tomb. The paper shows how diverse the disjointed knowledge of medicine was and that the idea of a "school" does not accurately reflect what was happening in the transmission of medical knowledge during the Warring States, Qin, and Han periods (475 BCE–220 CE). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The origin of Attic reduplication (AR) in Greek, the phenomenon whereby roots beginning with VC- sequences copy the entire sequence in reduplication, is poorly understood. Contrary to the usual approach, which starts from the perfects of roots beginning with *HC- clusters (e.g., ἐλυθ - 'go out' < *h 1 lud h - ; perf. ἐλήλ (ο) υθα < *h 1 leh 1 l(ó)ud h - ?), it is argued here that AR began in the reduplicated aorist, where intensive reduplication was a shared innovation with Armenian (Gk. inf. ἀραρεῖν 'fit together' = Arm. 3 sg. arar 'made' < *h 2 er-h 2 r-e / o-). From here AR spread first to the weak forms of the perfect, leaving relic forms like the feminine participle ἀρᾰρυῖα , and then to the perfect paradigm more generally. The historical origin of AR was thus quite different from what might have been supposed from its descriptive profile in a synchronic grammar—a point to which a final discussion is devoted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Despite the historians' growing interest in material culture, collections of sacred objects have largely been overlooked by scholars of religious history and art history alike. While the former tend to reduce church artifacts to their religious function, the latter focus mostly on individual items of singular artistic import. This essay examines a collection of displaced relics from the perspective of their shifting meanings and multiple uses as ritual objects, offerings, gifts, and commodities. Charting the parallel displacements of objects and people during the Polish-Ottoman wars of 1672–1699, I argue that the mutability of the relics shaped the refugees' attempts to deal with the conflicting social obligations and economic pressures of exile. Drawing on the church inventories and trial records of the Armenian communities in Poland-Lithuania, this essay offers a wider analytical framework with which to approach the problems of migration, displacement, and collective possessions in the early modern world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historical studies have indicated that African religions, in the pre-colonial period, were dynamic and multilayered with long histories of contradictions, contestations, and synthesis. Using the Pokot of north-western Kenya as a case in point, this contribution attempts to demonstrate the fluidity that was inherent in African religions. The Pokot originally were an agro-pastoral group inhabiting the Cherang'any and the Sekerr ranges. During the first half of the nineteenth century, a section of them descended the hills to pursue pastoralism. In their pastoral excursions, they came into contact with Plain Nilotes, especially the Karimojong. What followed was cross-cultural bartering of religious artefacts, both ideological and material, in which process the Pokot adopted selected religious aspects from the Karimojong and fused them with their previous beliefs to formulate syncretism. This contribution not only highlights the religious concepts that were fused but, also, attempts to explain the process of fusion itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From a diachronic perspective, and considering both textual and visual evidence, this article traces the relic cult of SS Gregory Nazianzen and John Chrysostom. It focuses on two historical contexts, hitherto not compared with each other, in which both the relics and the architectural frame in which they were placed acquired significant additional meaning and value: tenth-century Constantinople and sixteenth- century Rome. I will show how Emperor Constantine VII, in the Holy Apostles, and Pope Gregory XIII, in St. Peter's, used the same relics as an instrument in a process of meaning-making, thereby asserting their own authority and prestige. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines a ḥadīth text that illustrates the complicated interactions between Christian and Islamic sacred spaces in the early period of Islamic rule in the Near East. In this narrative, the Prophet Muḥammad gives a group of Arabs instructions for how to convert a church into a mosque, telling them to use his ablution water for cleansing and repurposing the Christian space for Muslim worship. Contextualizing this narrative in terms of early Muslim-Christian relations, as well as late antique Christian religious texts and practices, my analysis compares this story with Christian traditions regarding the collection and usage of contact relics from holy persons and places. I argue that this story offers an example of early Islamic texts' engagement with, and adaptation of, Christian literary themes and ritual practices in order to validate early Islamic religious claims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines the conceptual framework that informs Marcus's distinction between history and theology, and considers what stands to be gained by this manner of classification. The essay observes that Marcus's classification hinges upon a theory of religion that views gospels as artifacts expressive of sincere belief and, further, suggests this approach serves to mystify the origins of the Christian theological metanarrative by replicating the explanation asserted within the gospels themselves. By reversing the conceptual framework and the explanatory priority, one could deploy a theory of religion that sees gospels as artifacts of persuasion and thereby argue that they aim to naturalize the initially unnatural truth claim that Jesus was the christ by connecting him to a known social type: John. From this approach, it would not be belief in Jesus as the christ that explains the modified constructions of John the Baptist; rather, modifications of John the Baptist would be precisely what construct belief in Jesus as the christ. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Orthodox theology teaches that people may participate in the fruits of Jesus Christ's mediation between God and humankind. The Holy Spirit enables people to become radiant with the divine energies as they embrace Christ's fulfillment of the human person in the likeness of God. The Theotokos , the saints, and spiritual elders play particular roles in interceding for people to share more fully in the life of Christ. The eucharistic worship of the church, marriage and the other sacraments, the prayer of the heart, ministry to the poor, and forgiveness of enemies provide opportunities for people to be transformed by the grace mediated to humanity by Jesus Christ. Such mediation extends to every dimension of the human person, including the physical body, as indicated by veneration of the relics of the saints and the sacramental nature of Orthodox worship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the history of religions, material artifacts have often played an important role as mediations of the 'sacred.' They were and are worshipped, venerated, and sometimes destroyed for their assumed supernatural powers. The article reviews theoretical concepts that engage with the charismatic capacities of objects ('fetish,' 'cultic image,' and 'aura') and discusses literature about 'charismatic objects.' It deals with the question of what kind of charisma objects may have and suggests that the term 'charisma,' when defined in a specific way, is a useful concept to describe and compare specific material objects from different religious traditions. These conceptual and methodological considerations are illustrated by a brief discussion of Christian relic veneration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From the tenth to the fifteenth centuries, medieval León possessed a thriving Jewish community whose presence can be traced via archaeological and documentary remains. As regards the treasury of San Isidoro de León, however, there is no evidence for the involvement of living Jews with its luxury objects—an involvement that has been documented in comparable centers elsewhere in Iberia and Europe. Apart from a possible but unproven relationship to its textiles, a Jewish connection to the Treasury of San Isidoro remains ideological and limited to the presence of Abraham's relics in a single treasury object. However, both living and ideological Jews can be associated with León's cathedral, where a portion of the Jewish community's annual taxes was earmarked to light its altars and where the sculptural program featured the blind synagogue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the origins of religious intolerance in two episodes from the early fifth century AD: the forcible conversion of 540 Jews in Minorca by Bishop Severus, and the failed attempt by the monk Fronto to uncover heterodox belief in Tarragona, northeast Hispania. With the newly discovered relics of St Stephen, the presbyter Paulus Orosius brought a peculiarly vehement and absolute intolerance of non-orthodox Christianity to Minorca. Intolerance was facilitated and communicated through a trans-Mediterranean network of Christians connected through letter-writing and the exchange of visitors, of which Orosius was a particularly mobile and dynamic participant. In contrast to previous criticism, this article identifies Orosius as a point of intersection within the controversies, and, in the dissemination of his ideology of intolerance, as a catalyst for conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to the Gospels, Jesus suffered the flagellation before his crucifixion. The texts do not clarify the form and materials of the scourge that was utilized. Since the beginnings of the modern era, several commentators have speculated about the scourge's form, on the basis of the Greek-Roman literary evidence and with reference to flagellation relics. In the last few centuries, scholars have provided new indications that are exemplified in great dictionaries and encyclopedic works of Greek-Roman archaeology and antiquities, as well as in the consultation works available to biblical scholars. However, a close re-examination of the whole evidence compels us to dismiss nearly all data and to conclude that we know almost nothing about the materials and form of the scourge used at Jesus' time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1599 Valencia celebrated the arrival of an ancient Christian martyr whose remains were the latest addition to the collection of the city's archbishop, Juan de Ribera (1532-1611). Through an examination of some of Archbishop Ribera's relic acquisitions, I explore the inner workings of the early modern sacred economy of relics. Ribera's collection strategies blended distinct modes of exchange and linked him to a clandestine economy of relic theft. These transactions reflected the relic's own uncertain ontological status as both person and object. This ambivalence became a factor that fostered an atmosphere of anxiety around the early modern relic economy, as did Protestant reformers' critiques and their upending of the traditional Christian symbolic order. The reaffirmations of the cult of relics by the Tridentine Church stabilized the value of the sacred commodities. The economy of relics illustrates how the sacred constitutes a heretofore underexamined area of inquiry for commodity studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyzes the miracles described in the biographies of two «founder- saints» who were active in Kãzarün, a small village of Fãrs during the ioth and 14th centuries. These miracles happened before the birth of them and anticipate their future sanctity. Their actions are inscribed in the Prophet Mutiammad tradition, they have also a pedagogical worth for the disciples. They anticipate the death of both holy men to immortalize their work as founders of the order. Finally these miracles, happen over the tombs of the saints attracting in this way the pilgrims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Regardless of the Reformation's attack on the allegedly superstitious practices of later medieval Catholicism, during the Counter Reformation the reverence of holy relics became ever more pronounced. This article looks at the theology behind relic making and the scientific processes by which body parts were preserved, making special reference to Luisa de Carvajal's activities in Jacobean London. It places the traffic in relics in the anthropological context of gift-exchange, and especially recent discussions of "the free gift". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines the phenomenon of group pilgrimage in early twentieth-century Russia. Made possible by modern advances in technology and transportation, parish pilgrimages represented a new form of spiritual travel at the end of the imperial era, allowing greater numbers of Orthodox men and women to visit and venerate sacred sites across the length and breadth of the Russian empire. Undertaken with the blessing of Orthodox bishops and often underwritten by local merchants and entrepreneurs, organized parish pilgrimages also afforded new pedagogical opportunities for the Orthodox clergy to instruct their flock in the articles of faith, to supervise and give structure to lay devotional practices, and to assert the continued meaningfulness of the Orthodox faith against the rival claims of sectarians, secularists, and socialists alike. In adapting an age-old practice for present-day purposes, the clerical organizers of parish pilgrimages sought a spiritual solution to the crises engendered by Russia's passage into modernity. Just as mass pilgrimages by rail and steam could accommodate greater numbers of participants, so too did they invite a wide range of multiple meanings from the Orthodox men and women who took part in them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Museality' and 'museal' can be viewed as perceptible qualities of a social-and thus also religious-complex of forms of expression, representation, and action, which have become consolidated in modern times in Europe in the institution of the 'museum,' but which are not restricted to it as group-specific and individual representation patterns. The basic aim of this article is to show that there is a 'museal principle' which, like theatrality, permeates both social and individual action, which is not restricted to the European tradition, and which can described by the term 'museality.' Taking a combined perspective of cultural anthropology and the aesthetics of religion the following study understands the 'museal principle' as a social practice, a perceptible and productive gesture and habitus centred around the collecting and exhibiting of artifacts. The prototype of museality is the modern European institution of the 'museum' that is found also in premodern and religious contexts: cathedral treasures, church interiors, cemeteries are types of museal practice and aesthetics, as well as home altars, private collections, or ensembles of sacred buildings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces prominent issues that surround the Christian use of reliquaries, first discussing examples from Trier made by the renowned Archbishop Egbert in the tenth century, then turning to early Christian texts to investigate the beginnings of relic practice and belief. Of special interest are the letters and poems of Paulinus of Nola, but also the commentaries of Augustine, Ambrose, Victricius of Rouen and others that flesh out an understanding of how reliquaries were essential to the project of creating an appropriate reverentia for relics (Peter Brown's term). The materiality of reliquaries, their creation of social relations, particular issues of enclosure and beauty, and questions of potential visibility are given special consideration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines some of the implications of cross-cultural and cross-tradition comparison in the study of religion as they emerge from an analysis of religious practices associated with relics. It also identifies some key comparative themes highlighted in the articles that comprise this special issue on relic practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on literary and inscriptional evidence from Sri Lanka and mainland Southeast Asia, this essay examines the place of Buddha-relics — potent traces of a Buddha — in the life cycle of southern Asian political formations. In the formation of new polities and/or new dynasties, relics were drawn into the physical landscape and literary memory of the state, in order to provide protection and to claim desirable lineage and authority. At times of heightened military and political activity, when kingdoms were at risk, the protection and deployment of relics, and their ritual engagement, formed part of the state's central technologies. During periods of victory and restoration, relic festivals and the enhancement of a landscape embedded with relics, were used to display, affirm, and protect the royal court. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article gives an overview of recent findings on the thriving cult of bone relic stūpas in contemporary Jaina culture. Although Jaina doctrine rejects the worship of material objects, fieldwork in India on the hitherto unstudied current Jaina mortuary rituals furnished clear evidence for the ubiquity of bone relic stūpas and relic veneration across the Jaina sectarian spectrum. The article discusses a representative case and assesses the significance of the overall findings for the history of religions. It also offers a new theoretical explanation of the power of relics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The account of the 'Uthmānic mushaf of Córdoba, which passed from generation to generation across the western shores of Islam, has played a prominent role in the history of al-Andalus and the Maghrib. The prized codex appears throughout historiographical and literary discourses, stretching from the Hispano-Umayyad caliphate to the dynasty of the Banū Marīn in North Africa. Brought into battle against Christians and fellow Muslims, decorated with ornate coverings, and made into the object of countless panegyrics, the 'Uthmānic codex of al-Andalus offers a glimpse into a sustained network of meaning and power. The codex came symbolically to align successive Muslim dynasties to the early history of Islam. Drawing attention to the parallel phenomena of the furta sacra and the translatio of relics in medieval Christian tradition, this article explores the broader political, religious, and literary dimensions which silhouette the veneration toward the 'Uthmānic codex. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the effort of the Antiquity Commission to preserve relics and monuments with inscriptions in Denmark. In its 3rd report, the commission claims that it will continue to preserve and protect monuments and relics. Moreover, it claims that one concern of the commission is to incorporate the large runic stones scattered in the country. The commission also reported that it has searched for runic stones in churches in the country.

In Tibet, certain categories of Buddhist sacra are ascribed the power to liberate through sensory contact. No less than “buddhahood without meditation” is promised, offering an expedient means to salvation that seemingly obviates the need for a rigorous regime of ethical, contemplative, and intellectual training. This article investigates two such categories of sacra, substances that “liberate through tasting” and images that “liberate through seeing” as found in a mode of revelation particular to Tibet and culturally related areas, in which scriptures and sacred objects are reportedly embedded in the landscape as terma or “treasures” (gter ma). The author argues that charisma invested in these substances and images — through an amalgamation of relics and special means of consecration — provides the grounds for the soteriological benefits claimed as a result of sensory contact with them. The question is whether these benefits suggest a notion of grace in Tibetan Buddhism, and if so how it might contravene without contradicting the law of karma. Exploring this question sheds light on the role of the senses and the nature of Buddhist soteriology as it developed in Tibet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Relics of Sāriputta and Moggallāna, two of the Buddha's closest disciples, were discovered by Fred. C. Maisey and Alexander Cunningham in a stūpa at Sānchī in 1851 and were re-enshrined at the same place in November 1952. The exact whereabouts of the relics between these two dates has been uncertain, partly because both Buddhists and scholars have assumed, incorrectly, that the relics that were brought back to India had been in the possession of Mr Cunningham. The purpose of this article is to give a detailed account ot the relics of Sāriputta and Moggallāna found at Sānchī. The account is based on correspondence and notes about the relics found in archives of the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, and on relevant sources published by the Maha Bodhi Society. I argue that the quarrel over the relics was an important part of the revival of Buddhism from the end of the nineteenth century. I also discuss how the relics of the two saints were used by the government of India as nationalist symbols. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A new fossil leaf-toed gecko, Euleptes gallica sp. nov., is described from the early Miocene locality Montaigu, France. The species is the third record of leaf-toed geckos in the early Miocene of Europe. A palaeobiogeographical interpretation suggests that the modern form is a relic endemite of the western Mediterranean region which survived the extinction of its congeneric relatives by being isolated on the Corso-Sardinian microplate, which left its former position at the beginning of the Miocene. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several abstracts of articles related to Buddhism are presented which include "Bones of Contention: Buddhist Relics, Nationalism and the Politics of Archaeology," by Torkel Brekke, "Soteriology of the Senses in Tibetan Buddhism," by Holly Gayley and "The formation of Early Buddhist Visual Culture," by Klemens Karlsson.