Christians and Their Many Identities in Late Antiquity, North Africa, 200-450 CE - by Éric Rebillard (Hardcover)

About the Book

Rebillard explores how Christians in North Africa between the age of Tertullian and the age of Augustine were selective in identifying as Christian, giving salience to their religious identity only intermittently.

Book Synopsis

For too long, the study of religious life in Late Antiquity has relied on the premise that Jews, pagans, and Christians were largely discrete groups divided by clear markers of belief, ritual, and social practice. More recently, however, a growing body of scholarship is revealing the degree to which identities in the late Roman world were fluid, blurred by ethnic, social, and gender differences. Christianness, for example, was only one of a plurality of identities available to Christians in this period.

In Christians and Their Many Identities in Late Antiquity, North Africa, 200-450 CE, Éric Rebillard explores how Christians in North Africa between the age of Tertullian and the age of Augustine were selective in identifying as Christian, giving salience to their religious identity only intermittently. By shifting the focus from groups to individuals, Rebillard more broadly questions the existence of bounded, stable, and homogeneous groups based on Christianness. In emphasizing that the intermittency of Christianness is structurally consistent in the everyday life of Christians from the end of the second to the middle of the fifth century, this book opens a whole range of new questions for the understanding of a crucial period in the history of Christianity.

Review Quotes

In Christians and their Many Identities in Late Antiquity, Éric Rebillard goes much further in problematizing group formation in late Roman Africa. [Rebillard] stridently critiques the widespread scholarly tendency to assume that 'Christians' (and, for that matter, 'pagans') represented an identifiable group in late Roman society. [He] stresses that religious affiliation was only one facet of these individuals' identities and did not translate automatically into participation within the 'internally homogeneous and externally bounded groups' (2) generally presumed by historical analysis.

It is certainly refreshing to have to consider 'the intermittency.. of Christianness' (p. 93) in the everyday lived experience of individual Christians during the vastly changing religious and social conditions prevailing in North Africa over these nearly three centuries. Rebillard acutely raises the pertinent questions of what exactly it meant to be a Christian over these years and what were the parameters of Christian identity. For this, Rebillard has done us a stimulating and innovative service.

The sensation one gets reading Rebillard's book is similar to donning a pair of 3D-glasses. Each lens filters properly so that in combinationwe see new and marvelous things.

About the Author

Éric Rebillard is Professor of Classics and History at Cornell University. He is the author of The Care of the Dead in Late Antiquity, also from Cornell.