Group Identity and Religious Individuality in Late Antiquity ed. by Éric Rebillard, and Jörg Rüpke (review)

This edited volume contains the proceedings from a 2011 conference hosted by the research group on “Religious Individualization in Historical Perspective,” which is based at the Max Weber Centre at the University of Erfurt. The group’s research takes direction from a central question: to what extent are the real characteristics of individual actors from late antiquity clarified or obscured when considered in the framework of the religious tradition to which those actors ostensibly belong? Following this general direction, Group Identity and Religious Individuality offers ten essays, stellar to a one, that join the recent bloom of books and edited volumes exploring the analytical category of the individual.

Although all of the essays are detailed examinations of localized religious traditions or practitioners, that is not all they are. For, as the introduction explains, these pieces are not meant to serve solely as examples of individuality on display, exhibits 1 through 10 made to add coloration to our otherwise unchanged picture of late antiquity (although they certainly accomplish this). Their function is far more radical. Implicitly or, in many cases, explicitly, their authors persuade that the individual, rather than the religious tradition, must be the historian’s focus of attention. As the editors argue, “only occasionally is group identity the decisive factor in understanding individual behavior” (p.11) and to see the group first is to import a set of assumptions—about motivations, expectations, and causes—that may obscure rather than clarify.

Methodologically, what does this mean? For many of the essays, it means that each actor’s religious group membership is no more or less significant a characteristic than is his education and economic status, his network of his peers, and his intellectual formation. Writers, stories, and spaces that could be seen as important because of the position they occupy in the story of major religious traditions—like Christianity, Judaism, or Roman religion—are removed from their obligation to confirm something about the tradition to which they belong, and thus are more clearly to be seen in their own eras and contexts. The volume’s contributors are outstanding scholars in their particular fields (Éric Rebillard and Jörg Rüpke both have essays beyond their introduction, alongside Jason David BeDuhn, Kim Bowes, Susanna Elm, Kristine Iara, Karl Leo Noethlichs, Judith Perkins, Rubina Raja, Tessa Rajak, and Wolfgang Spickermann), and their collective effort advocates greater attention to the varieties of religious experience and practice in late antiquity than what can be found by simply thinking of the larger traditions as the prime category of analysis.

As this is a new contribution to a developing area of research, it does raise some questions that must be considered. The first is posed by Kristine Iara, in her essay on the senatorial aristocracy: can a research method focused on the individual capture “religion” at all, which is easiest seen as a social phenomenon? (p. 192). Second is the question raised by Rubina Raja in her contribution on the Church of St. Theodore at Gerasa. She points out that inscriptions (and other works of the public good) are acts of self-representation, which require the historian’s keen and often skeptic eye if they are not to be taken as simple records of reality (p. 273). Would not the issue of self-representation and its attendant problems adhere to most evidence about individuals from late antiquity, and how should the historian balance questions about authenticity and singularity in such cases?

These are difficult, although not impossible, questions; they will require careful methodological attention from researchers who want to adopt the category of the individual as a prime category of analysis. Based on the vigor and brilliance of the scholarship in this volume, however, the community of scholars working in this emerging area of research is not only capable of...