Religion in the Roman Empire (RRE)

Katell Berthelot, Jan Dochhorn, Maren Niehoff, Rubina Raja, Jörg Rüpke, Christopher Smith, Chiara Ombretta Tommasi, Markus Vinzent, Annette Weissenrieder

Religion in the Roman Empire

Abstract
‘Religion in the Roman Empire’ (RRE) aims to advance and document new and integrative perspectives on religion in the ancient world, combining multidisciplinary methodologies. Committed to interdisciplinarity and new approaches to the study of religion, it offers a space to take up recent, but still incipient, research to modify and cross the disciplinary boundaries of the History of Religion, Archaeology, Anthropology, Classics, Ancient History, Jewish History, Rabbinics, New Testament, Early Christianity, Patristics, Coptic Studies, Gnostic and Manichean Studies, Late Antiquity and Oriental Languages. We hope to stimulate the development of new approaches that can encompass the local and global trajectories of the multi-dimensional pluralistic religions of antiquity. 

Looking back
‘Religion in the Roman Empire’ (RRE) started in 2015 with three, mostly thematic, issues per year and is now entering its second decade of existence.¹  It was founded on a critical observation: For the ancient circum-Mediterranean world, the history of religion – much more than other fields of history for that period – is divided between several disciplines. This was and is due to the fact that many of the phenomena identified as religious are seen as an integral part of the history of active religious groups and their academic activities. This fragmentation has produced a highly variegated and very lively academic field but one that is also characterised by narrow foci, antagonisms, and a lack of conceptual and historical work across what is often seen as boundaries between group identities that are often projected by modern researchers into the ancient ‘origins.

Against this background, two intentions have dominated the agenda: The first was to offer a platform and to invite scholars to work between and across those established and cherished historiographical constructions and disciplinary categories. The list of disciplines comprised History of Religion, Archaeology, Anthropology, Classics, Ancient History, Jewish History, Rabbinics, New Testament, Early Christianity, Patristics, Coptic Studies, Gnostic and Manichean Studies, Late Antiquity and Oriental Languages and remains as valid today as it was ten years ago. Across all changes in the composition of the editorial and the advisory boards, the aim has always been to include experts in all of these fields.

The second intention was not unrelated to the first, as it suggested approaches that did not start from the assumption of a highly fragmented field of religious groups and highly separated memberships and practices. Instead and positively, the journal aspired ‘to take a new perspective on the religious history of Mediterranean antiquity, starting from the individual, spontaneous, short-lived or organised groups, and “lived” religion instead of simply presupposing the existence of neatly separated organised “cults” and “religions” and a premature “parting of the ways” between such groups.’²

The first issues were characterised by a series of themes that started from the notion of ‘lived ancient religion’, thus offering articles that explored the experiential dimension of rituals and objects, as seen in issues such as Individual Appropriation in Lived Ancient Religion (1.1). Right from the start, materiality and objects formed an important concern, e.g., The Role of Objects (1.2), or, The Significance of Objects: Considerations of Agency and Context (2.3), without excluding textual focuses. The profile of the journal led guest editors, however, to focus again on the experiential dimension and practices rather than merely intra-textual concerns, e.g., Narratives as a Lens into Lived Ancient Religion (1.3), Discourse and Narratives, Experiences and Identities (2.2). Religious groups were not ignored but considered in the perspective of their dynamics and processes of group formation, e.g., Creating Groups and Individuals in Textual Practices (2.1), Groups in Lived Ancient Religion (3.1). The same aims hold true for the issue that focused on Early Christian Rituals (8.3), programmatically adding Resetting to this title. Issue 9.2 explored the concept of resilience in textual and historical analyses (Strategies and Practices of Resilience in Roman Religion) without essentialising the notion of a ‘Roman’ religion. Religion at Work (10.1) and Law: Textual Representations and Practices in the Ancient World (10.2) have continued and further developed the notion of ‘lived religion’ and its focus on practices and social contexts.

Further fields and analytical concepts, which followed the basic line of de-compartmentalising people and practices, found a place in the journal, e.g., Embodying Religion (3.2) or Ascetism in the Late Roman Empire (4.1). Classic topics like ‘mysteries’ were re-contextualised, as in Mystery Cults and Heresies in the Roman Empire (4.3) or in Curses in Contexts (5.3 and 7.1). Transformations of Value: Lived Religion and the Economy (5.1) was an important step to include economic perspectives, Architexture: Textual Representation and Practices of Sacred Spaces in the Ancient World (9.1) brought textual and spatial approaches together.

As the very name of the journal suggests, the Roman Empire has been taken seriously not only as a loose indicator of spatial and chronological boundaries but also as a significant factor in shaping a horizon of imaginations and functioning as a political and religious actor at the level of both the provinces and the Imperium as a whole. The Revival or Reinvention of Non-Roman Religion under Roman Imperial Rule (3.3) engaged with the local as well as the imperial throughout the Eastern Mediterranean, while Imperial Religion versus Local Beliefs. Case Studies from the Iberian Peninsula and North Africa (10.3) looks to the Western reaches of the empire.

Spatial approaches found a new focus in the cities of the Mediterranean world and the very question of the relationship of religion and the urban. This is indicated by issues such as Religion of Quarters (6.1), Urban Religion at the Neighbourhood Level Across the Mediterranean (6.2), An Urban Archaeology of Ancient Religion (7.2), Urban Religion in the Desert: Perspectives form Palmyra (8.2) or Urban Representations of Religion (9.3). 

By the fourth volume in 2018, even more theoretical and methodological discussions had found their way into the journal, for instance, Religious Terminology (4.2). Issue 8.1 was centred on an unpublished text with an interest in the history of scholarship (Georg Wissowa on Roman Religion of the Imperial Period). Individual papers submitted outside thematic issues were published in non-thematic issues or combined with slimmer thematic volumes. Thematic issues were typically instigated by guest editors and assessed for quality, relevance, and connectedness before their individual articles were submitted to the same rigorous review process as articles that had not been commissioned. 

Establishing routines
The editors’ diverse disciplinary backgrounds were as much a challenge as an asset throughout the work on the journal. Coordinating double-blind reviews with the schedules of mostly teams of guest editors (drawn not infrequently from among the editorial boards themselves) and managing disappointment and rejection as well as improvement and encouragement through transparent procedures has been one of the achievements of this collaboration. Maintaining high standards of academic ‘excellence’ (a word already compromised by its inflationary use) without abusing authors, rejecting submissions, or asking for yet more revisions without undermining the recognition of junior and senior colleagues has been a demanding and rewarding task, sometimes taking a toll on the perseverance of members of the board and external reviewers – and this is one of the opportunities to cordially thank the latter for their laborious and irreplaceable work. Nicole Belayche (Paris), Robyn Le Blanc (Greensboro, NC), John Curran (Belfast), Richard L. Gordon (Erfurt), Gesine Manuwald (London), Volker Menze (Wien), Blossom Stefaniw (Oslo), Miguel John Versluys (Leiden), and Greg Woolf (New York, NY) now form an advisory board that participates in the editorial burdens. 

Peer-review is a debated and debatable process. Across the disciplinary boundaries we believe it to be indispensable. Being committed to high academic standards, we feel our rate of papers rejected to be an indicator of how challenging it is to move beyond one’s comfort zone to address and engage with an audience outside of one’s own, more narrowly defined, discipline. We admire the honesty and rigour with which our reviewers suggest improvements to the articles submitted. Revision is frequently requested, for scholars of all stages of their academic careers, and revisions have improved articles substantially even if acceptance was not ultimately guaranteed. We continue to encourage diversity in authors and approaches, without compromising our standards of quality.

From the beginning, Dr Elisabeth Begemann has carried out intensive and extensive editorial work. The efficient flow of manuscripts and reviews, and the transparency of the process are entirely due to her, the human voice in this process. Establishing a submission site and anonymous procedures for manuscripts has not been a priority, and the process seems still manageable without such an automated system, as many authors are willing to follow guidelines without being forced to do so by automated rejection routines. This flexibility has allowed for special languages, forms of documents, images, and graphs, for variations in length, and will continue for the foreseeable future. 

Going forward into the second decade
Diversity of disciplines, gender, and backgrounds has turned out to be one of the success factors of the journal, and we continue to promote this. ‘Lived ancient religion’ served as a guiding principle in the first years of the journal and is today fully implemented as a tool or lens for those studying ancient religion. The very term ‘religion’ is not just a burdensome legacy of a previous epistemological category but is advocated by the journal as a helpful tool to inquire into what is shared in varying sets of practices addressing agents conceptualised as gods, demons, angels, or ancestors in singular and plural forms. 

Yet, if such a vague term as ‘religion’ opens up comparative perspectives on practices, ideas, roles, and organisations as well as objects and spaces, we also need to invest in concepts that allow for differentiation and meaningful statements of likeness within certain parameters. Religion in the Roman Empire invites to explore, test, and reject such concepts, whether imported from different epochs, regions, disciplines, or languages. We insist, however, that the focus should be a methodological one. As much as we welcome and encourage theory-driven research (as we do not believe that the ancient sources carry the relevant questions somehow within them, just waiting to be discovered), we do not see this journal as a platform for the development of theory as such. It is methodology, and above all multidisciplinary methodology, that we want to further and see generating new answers based on existing, as well as newly recovered, materials.

Religion in the Roman Empire favours a perspective on religious practices and beliefs that pays attention to actors in their social (and not least, power-)contexts, on the emplacement and temporality of religious action, on the materiality and performative quality of such practices and those objects and texts that result from, or refer to, them, and on the affective and sensorial qualities of religious experiences. We do not embark on metaphysics but suppose that the study of religion takes the intellectual dimension of actors as seriously as their material and corporeal existence in the ecology of a wider world – even a world transcending tangibly organisms in the eyes of those actors that we focus on. 

We are happy to conclude with a quotation from the opening editorial and the implicit admission and expression of continuity: ‘Within a spatial continuum from the primary space of individuals in family, domestic spaces of everyday production to the shared space of public institutions and trans-local literary communication, the journal intends to open and link different research fields, presenting new or reviewing well-known complexes of evidence in different parts and different periods of the ancient to the late antique world, concentrating on the Roman imperial period without excluding earlier developments in the Western and Eastern parts of the ancient Mediterranean and the adjacent areas. “Roman Empire” is meant as a focus, rather than a criterion for exclusion.’ After its first ten years, we would like to underline this last sentence. Theory-driven and innovative research should not be stopped by either disciplinary or geographical conventions. Thematic issues embarking on comparison will be allowed and encouraged to take a view beyond the conventional spatial and temporal limits of ‘the Roman Empire’ and we continue to encourage contributors to submit such work to the journal and its readership. In addressing and catering to an audience that is beyond one’s discipline, authors and readers will face the same challenges as those primarily addressed by our journal. A large conference on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of our journal in June 2024 was the chance to add to the research agenda by combining the study of classical ‘sources’ such as text, ritual tools, or coinage with the questions of the genesis, stability, and instability of processes of grouping shaped by such materialities. Editors, the members of the advisory board, and the participants all hope that the resulting thematic issues reach an even wider audience.

One of the instruments for achieving this goal is the transition to Open Access publication, which the publishing house and the editorial board have implemented at the end of the first decade. ‘Subscribe to open’ (S2O) offers a way to maximise accessibility without incurring the costs attained in the world of publication fees, whether in the form of ‘article processing charges’ or ‘deals’ between huge publishing enterprises and national consortia. ‘Subscribe to open’ is based on the idea of university or research libraries and university- or research institute-based authors collaborating with regard to the quality of individual journals and supporting journals that do not exclude authors whose institutions are not able to subscribe to expensive periodical publications. We are grateful to the many libraries that engage in this form of sustainable market exchange.

¹The founding editors were Reinhard Feldmeier, Karen L. King, Rubina Raja, Christoph Riedweg, Annette Yoshiko Reed, Jörg Rüpke, Seth Schwartz, Christopher Smith, and Markus Vinzent.

²Feldmeier et al. 2015, 1.

Bibliography
Feldmeier, Reinhard et al. 2015. ‘Editorial’, Religion in the Roman Empire 1 (1). 1–7.