New Books in Late Antiquity
Interviews with authors of books about Late Antiquity. Sponsored by Ancient Jew Review.
Episodes
September 1, 2025 • 78 mins
Ancient Mediterranean Incarceration (open access) examines spaces, practices, and ideologies of incarceration in the ancient Mediterranean basin from 300 BCE to 600 CE. Analyzing a wide range of sources—including legal texts, archaeological findings, documentary evidence, and visual materials—Matthew D. C. Larsen and Mark Letteney argue that prisons were integral to the social, political, and economic fabric of ancient societies. A...
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August 25, 2025 • 59 mins
It’s easy to think that ancient history is, well, ancient history—obsolete, irrelevant, unjustifiably focused on Greece and Rome, and at risk of extinction. In What Is Ancient History?, Walter Scheidel presents a compelling case for a new kind of ancient history—a global history that captures antiquity’s pivotal role as a decisive phase in human development, one that provided the shared foundation of our world and continues to sha...
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Coptic Culture and Community: Daily Lives, Changing Times (American University in Cairo Press 2024) brings together fourteen contributions from global scholars all considering the theme of daily life and the Egyptian Coptic Christian minority community. The essays focus on ancient, late ancient, premodern, and contemporary questions about art and resistance, poverty and wealth, gender and ecclesiastical agency, dress and power, and...
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August 11, 2025 • 55 mins
Tatiana Bur, Technologies of the Marvellous in Ancient Greek Religion (Cambridge UP, 2025)
This open-access book investigates the ways that technological, and especially mechanical, strategies were integrated into ancient Greek religion. By analysing a range of evidence, from the tragic use of the deus ex machina to Hellenistic epigrams to ancient mechanical literature, it expands the existing vocabulary of visual modes of ancient...
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Christianity is often thought of as a tradition of belief, interpretation, teachings, and texts. However, a scholarly focus on ideas overlooks how early Christian doctrine interacted with social exchanges in lay spaces.
Author Caroline Johnson Hodge fills this gap, shifting our attention from liturgical settings to religion as it was lived outside the prescriptions of congregations. Through a careful reading of the material record...
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July 7, 2025 • 57 mins
Andrew Tobolowsky's Israel and Its Heirs in Late Antiquity (Cambridge UP, 2025) explores constructions of Israelite identity among Jewish, Samaritan Israelites, and Christian authors in Late Antiquity, especially early Late Antiquity. It identifies three major strategies for claiming an Israelite identity between these three groups: a 'biological' strategy, a 'biology plus' strategy, and an 'abiological' strategy, referring to the ...
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Jonathan Teubner, Charity After Augustine: Solidarity, Conflict, and the Practices of Charity in the Latin West (Oxford UP, 2025)
Through a unique blend of the personal and historiographical, Charity after Augustine is an exploration of why the Augustinian tradition’s attempts to build solidarity or social cohesion in the societies of the Latin West have ended in disaster just as often as they have brought about justice. The conce...
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Christianity is often considered prevalent when it comes to defining the key values of late antique society, whereas 'feeling connected to the Roman past' is commonly regarded as an add-on for cultivated elites.
Roman Identity and Lived Religion: Baptismal Art in Late Antiquity (Cambridge UP, 2025) demonstrates the significant impact of popular Roman culture on the religious identity of common Christians from the fifth to the sev...
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At the turn of the common era, the Jewish communities of Roman Palestine saw the organization of a small group of literate Jewish men who devoted their lives to the interpretation and teaching of their sacred ancestral texts. In How Rabbis Became Experts: Social Circles and Donor Networks in Jewish Late Antiquity (Princeton University Press, 2025), Krista Dalton shows that these early rabbis were not an insular specialist group but...
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Papyri Copticae Magicae: Coptic Magical Texts, Volume 1: Formularies (de Gruyter, 2023) offers an accessible repository of edited Coptic magical texts. The book is a careful and thorough edition and philological study of thirty-seven distinct Coptic manuscripts, covering a wide range of magical applications—from love spells, to curses, to exorcisms, and healing invocations. The volume makes available a rich set of evidence of every...
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A richly illustrated account of how premodern botanical illustrations document evolving knowledge about plants and the ways they were studied in the past.
Botanical Icons: Critical Practices of Illustration in the Premodern Mediterranean (U Chicago Press, 2024) traces the history of botanical illustration in the Mediterranean from antiquity to the early modern period. By examining Greek, Latin, and Arabic botanical inquiry in this ...
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April 30, 2025 • 63 mins
The Babylonian Talmud and Late Antique Book Culture (Cambridge UP, 2023) argues that the Talmud must be read and understood in the broader context of late ancient discursive and material contexts of books, rhetoric, and technology. As Dr. Amsler’s work reveals, the structure and form of the Talmud point to knowledge and mastery of rhetorical training and book production technologies they share with other late ancient books and lite...
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The institution of slavery permeated the ancient world, such that the realities of slavery and its long shadows pervade the New Testament and other early Christian texts. Yet enslavement remains an under-taught aspect of the context of the New Testament and early Christianity, leaving pastors, laypersons, and neophyte college students alike to fill knowledge gaps about enslaved persons, enslavers, living and laboring conditions, an...
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April 28, 2025 • 71 mins
Living With Risk in the Late Roman World (U Pennsylvania Press, 2025)explores the ever-present experiences of risk that characterized the daily existence of individuals, communities, and societies in the late Roman world (late third century CE through mid-sixth century CE). Recognizing the vital role of human agency, author Cam Grey bases his argument on the concept of the riskscape: the collection of risks that constitute everyday...
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April 21, 2025 • 42 mins
In The Nero-Antichrist: Founding and Fashioning a Paradigm (Cambridge UP, 2020), Shushma Malik reconstructs the means by which the emperor Nero came to be identified with the New Testament's antichrist. Malik surveys the first four Christian centuries to show how Nero mythology developed, often in ways that were much more positive than we might expect, and how early Christians appropriated this tradition as an apologetic weapon, to...
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The city was one of the central and defining features of the world of the Greek and Roman Mediterranean. Challenging the idea that the ancient city 'declined and fell', Andrew Wallace-Hadrill argues that memories of the past enabled cities to adapt and remain relevant in the changing post-Roman world. In the new kingdoms in Italy, France and Spain cities remained a key part of the structure of control, while to contemporary authors...
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Syriac Lexis and Lexica: Compiling Ancient and Modern Vocabularies (Gorgias Press, 2024) publishes the papers presented at the round table on Syriac lexicology and lexicography held at the 13th Symposium Syriacum (Paris, 2022). An international group of scholars approaches this field from several new angles and shows how much remains to be done, from the creation of new lexical databases to the update of previously existing ones an...
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March 31, 2025 • 77 mins
How do we best see and understand the art of late antiquity? One of the perceived challenges of so doing is that this is a period whose visual production has been defined as stylistically abstract and emotionally spiritual, and therefore elusive.
But this is a perception which – in her path-breaking new book – Sarah Bassett boldly challenges, offering two novel lines of interpretative inquiry. She first argues, by focusing on the ...
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March 17, 2025 • 48 mins
While scholars of ancient Mediterranean literature have focused their efforts heavily on explaining why authors would write pseudonymously or anonymously, less time has been spent exploring why an author would write orthonymously (that is, under their own name).
The Author in Early Christian Literature (Cambridge UP, 2025) explores how early Christian writers began to care deeply about 'correct' attribution of both Christian and no...
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This book tells the remarkable life of Balthild of Francia (c. 633-80), a seventh-century Anglo-Saxon slave who became a queen of France. Described in contemporary sources as beautiful and intelligent, she rose to power through her marriage to the short-lived King Clovis II. As regent for her young son, she promoted social and political reforms in Francia that included the rescue and rehousing of Christian slaves who, like Balthild...
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