Nicola Denzey Lewis
Sandra Blakely
Wiley-Blackwell Compass is excited to introduce the new Graeco-Roman Religions section of Religion Compass. Religion in the Greek and Roman contexts has been the subject of significant rethinking in the past two decades. At the same time that researchers increasingly integrate the data, models and methodologies of such diverse disciplines as archaeology, art history, literary studies and anthropology, specialized bibliographies and subdisciplines have expanded exponentially. Religion Compass is uniquely positioned to support scholarship and pedagogy in this multidisciplinary environment. Compass provides topical articles which articulate the boundaries, direction and current state of critical questions, and provide fresh perspective on the complex discipline of religious studies. Articles are accessible to specialists working beyond their own academic specialization, as well as to advanced students; they encourage and enable methodologically sophisticated work across disciplinary boundaries.
Although the title for this section, Graeco-Roman Religions, may suggest a corporate identity that goes by this name, we include articles that address Greek and Roman Religion(s) as separate enterprises and worldviews, just as we also devote due consideration to what is meant by the modern academic construction “Graeco-Roman.” The history of scholarship on Greek religion has followed a different path than that for Roman religion: both have experienced a renaissance, articulated in terms of their relationship to other disciplines. Greek religious studies incorporated the insights of such pathbreaking thinkers as Jane Harrison and Walter Burkert, and continues to emphasize its relationship to ancillary fields. Roman religious studies have rejected an earlier scholarly tradition which defined it by its distance from Greek traditions on the one hand, Christian on the other, and judged it as legalistic, unduly concerned with empty ritualism, and merely political. Revisionist work is being done in other areas as well: a rejection of the focus on “myth” in both Greek and Roman religions, as if religion were defined by traditional cultural narratives; a new attention to the active role of women as full participants in civic religious life; new focus on the meaning and place of ritual and sacrifice; an increasing discomfort with terms such as “Mystery Religion” and “Oriental Religions”; an growing awareness of “big picture” issues such as Empire and colonialism in the construction and perpetuation of religious movements, groups, and actions. Interests in the historical interplay between Greece and Rome, as well as between these religious traditions and those of their Mediterranean neighbors, the great empires of Egypt, Anatolia and the Near East, as well as indigenous local traditions, offer frameworks for careful comparative analyses which move beyond the search for origins and influences which defined an earlier, though foundational, era of scholarly history.
As Religion Compass editors, we seek and encourage articles which respond to the vast scope of the field today. Authors will simultaneously provide balanced critical accounts of the state of their question, and – perhaps most excitingly – point the way to new directions and methodologies which will help ensure the continued vitality of the field.
Nicola Denzey Lewis
Sandra Blakely
September, 2010
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