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Franz Joseph Dölger-Institut

zur Erforschung der Spätantike

Introduction. The rhetorical migrant and migration in rhetoric in Late Antiquity

JbAC 63 (2020) Seiten: 111-117

This special volume of »Jahrbuch für Antike und Christentum« examines the relationship between migration and religious identity in the late antique Mediterranean world, and how this relationship was described and occasionally manipulated in our surviving sources. The contributions, which began as papers presented at two workshops organized by András Handl (KU Leuven) and Samuel Cohen (Sonoma State University) entitled »Migration. Rhetoric and reality in Late Antiquity« held at the XVIII International Conference on Patristics Studies at Oxford University in the summer of 2019, explore how religious ideas spread through the movement of men and women across the Mediterranean; the reception of new arrivals by religious authorities and the influence migrants had upon their host communities; and how the emerging landscape of Christian sacred topography transformed assumptions about boundaries. What unites these different approaches is a shared interest in the rhetorical strategies employed in both artistic and textual sources to describe migrants and migration. ...

András Handl / Samuel Cohen