David Frankfurter
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 379942 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | David Frankfurter |
| NOMBRES | David |
| APELLIDO | Frankfurter |
| FIRMA | FRANKFURTER D |
| AFILIACIONES | Boston University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4849-1884 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 63 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 48 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 61 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 2 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1990 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 4 |
Magic as the Agency of Things, Words, and Sounds
This essay reviews biases and confusions in applying the term “magic,” then turns to magic as the efficacious quality of ritual speech and as the agencies conveyed by materials in assemblage, with two historical examples of artifacts
Syncretism and the Localization of New Religious Authorities
Developing religious institutions are ultimately products of local environments despite their every effort to appear trans-regional and eternal. As I showed in Christianizing Egypt (2017), the production of Christian religion on the ground always involved a negotiation between local traditions, habitus and immediate landscapes (on the one hand), and new idioms of authority and charisma, including textuality (on the other hand) - a negotiation pla…
Ritual and the Enemy Body
The concept of ritual has been all too loosely applied to violence and atrocity with assumptions of repetitiveness, mythic symbolism, and religious overtones. This paper examines a selection of modern cases of atrocity for specific ritual elements: attention to body and spaces as frames for meaning; a prescripted mode of action; and performative enaction of a new millennial or transgressive order. Focal cases include American lynching (nineteenth…
The Fiction of the Seven Letters in the Apocalypse
While scholars have traditionally taken Revelation’s “letters to the seven churches” (Rev 2–3) as documentation for the experiences of the Christ-movement in those cities, this article argues that the letters amount to a fictional device—that the Apocalypse appropriates epistolary forms in response to the increasing authority of early Pauline collections among the late first-century Asia Minor Christ-movements. With its divine epistolary authorit…
Above, Below, Before, and After
The research of Martha Himmelfarb has pushed scholars to re-examine what we thought we knew about the formative histories of Judaism and Christianity. In studies on such topics as apocalypses, pseudepigrapha, and messianism, Himmelfarb opened up new perspectives on Second Temple Judaism and its legacy within its late antique and medieval successor communities. Inspired by the sweeping breadth of her learning and scholarship, this volume explores …
Titlepages
The Dwindling and Haunting Persistence of Ancient Religions
Considering recent ‘Death of Religion’ literature, this essay concludes that ‘death’ is not a particularly helpful metaphor to describe historical changes in the area of religion. A human lifespan metaphor is inappropriate for understanding the transformation of religion on the ground. The question should rather center on the transformation of religion as a feature of real, historical cultures. This essay explores what this means for the study of…
Restoring “Syncretism” in the History of Christianity
Mastrocinque, Attilio, Sanzo, Joseph E. & Scapini, Marianna (2020). Ancient Magic. Then and Now. Potsdamer Altertumswissenschaftliche Beiträge 74. Stuttgart
Starting in the late 1980s, scholars of antiquity began to see an increasing flow of "magic volumes" emitting from various academic presses. "magic volumes" are simply collections of papers that carry titles that relate to "magic, " broadly conceived. Partly stimulated by the publication of Greek Magical Papyri in English, 1 the earliest such collections 2 represented initial explorations of the parameters of a "field" of
“As I Twirl This Spindle, …”
In Mediterranean antiquity the ritual acts of binding and charming were often associated with ordinary domestic tasks reoriented through accompanying incantations and sometimes the adjustment of the task's gestures. Drawing on theories of ritualization (Bell, Humphrey, and Laidlaw) and extending the classical evidence with medieval and modern comparative materials, this article addresses how mundane economic practices are brought into service for…
Well-being in trainee and faculty physicians
Background: Physician well-being remains a critical topic with limited information concerning the impact of the progression of training and duty hours. To date, our knowledge and interventions have not adequately addressed these issues. We assessed differences in well-being across the USA: (1) between all post-graduate trainees and their academic core faculty; (2) between all obstetrics and gynecology trainees and their academic core faculty and …
Religion in the Mirror of the Other
Cultures in the Roman Mediterranean world, including Christianity, conceptualized their most valuable and potent ceremonial elements not only through the occasionally learned abstraction or larger social categories but by imagining their perversion by others: sometimes witches or savages; sometimes intimate, conspiratorial enemies; and sometimes evil heathens and debauched heretics. These concerns with dangerous alterity cluster around areas of c…
The Association Between Race, Obesity, and Sperm Quality Among Men Attending a University Physician Practice in Washington, DC
A decades-long decline in sperm counts in Western countries has coincided with an increase in obesity rates, prompting study into their association. Few of these studies have incorporated men of color, the sperm health of whom is relatively unknown. The present exploratory study evaluated the association between body mass index (BMI), race, ethnicity, and sperm parameters among a diverse sample of U.S. men attending a Washington, DC physician pra…
Horrors of the Inner Chamber
This article addresses a pattern in the representation of the spaces of heathen practice in late antique Christian literature and in the conceptualisation of a necessary response to those spaces. I argue that Christian authors came to regard both temple structures and homes as suspicious enclosures, potentially concealing nefarious practices that could harm civic order and fortune. This view developed out of both a progressive suspicion of the do…
Documenting – and Rethinking – Liturgy in Early Christianity
Much current work on early Christianity depends, implicitly or explicitly, on the assumption that lay people actually attended church services (and, hence, listened to and considered sermons by major Church Fathers) more than a few times a year. Whether they attended as ‘Christians’, or simply to engage in various types of material devotion, or out of interest in the religious content to be found in a church, the assumption is that they came
Religion in Roman Egypt
This exploration of cultural resilience examines the complex fate of classical Egyptian religion during the centuries from the period when Christianity first made its appearance in Egypt to when it became the region's dominant religion (roughly 100 to 600 C.E.). Taking into account the full range of witnesses to continuing native piety - from papyri and saints' lives to archaeology and terra-cotta figurines - and drawing on anthropological studie…
Titelseiten
The Future of Comparison
Guide to the Study of Ancient Magic
The Magic of Writing in Mediterranean Antiquity
This chapter examines why and how the written word was so often credited with material power in antiquity. Much of the magic of the written word in Greco-Roman culture stems from Egyptian traditions of the hieroglyph as divine writing, an idea embraced by Greeks and Romans as a particularly exotic medium for materializing ritual procedures (binding tablets, amulets, etc.). The essay reviews the magic of the written word in Egypt, then moves to Gr…
The Spaces of Domestic Religion in Late Antique Egypt
Domestic religion-or family religion, or household religion-should be considered as a cluster of concerns and orientations, not just “religion in the home.” More importantly, the ritual resolution of these concerns is typically pursued- by the agents of domestic religion (more often women)-in a variety of places, not just in the home: that is, the local environment and neighborhood and even further afield. For example, a pilgrimage shrine is not …
Christianizing Egypt
How does a culture become Christian, especially one that is heir to such ancient traditions and spectacular monuments as Egypt? This book offers a new model for envisioning the process of Christianization by looking at the construction of Christianity in the various social and creative worlds active in Egyptian culture during late antiquity.As David Frankfurter shows, members of these different social and creative worlds came to create different …
The Great, the Little, and the Authoritative Tradition in Magic of the Ancient World
This paper develops “magic” as a category useful for describing local forms of an institutional or “great” tradition (using the classic terminology of Robert Redfield): ritual acts, symbols and materials, and constructions of local ritual expertise to interpret elements of a great tradition. Ultimately the paper contributes to the historical relationship between (centralized expressions of) “religion” and “magic” (as some quality or dimension of …
Scorpion/Demon
Female Figurines in Early Christian Egypt
This paper addresses the great diversity of female figurines produced during the Christian period (iv–vii ce) in Egypt, from Aswan to Karanis to the Abu Mina pilgrimage city. While not documented in any texts, by their sheer number the figurines offer important evidence of local religious practices performed under the aegis of Christianity (e.g., at saints’ shrines) yet without any ostensible connection to Christian liturgy or mythology. Their us…
Where the Spirits Dwell
With its clear-glass, brightly-lit, whitewashed interior, Harvard Divinity School's Andover Chapel reflects all the values of elite Protestant culture in New England history: quiet prayer, thoughtful sermons, an approach to God through the heart rather than the senses, and a minimum of iconic reminders that the space is Christian. And it was here, in April 2007, that this author beheld the Voudoun spirits Danbala and Ogoun arrive through several …
Christianizing Egypt
How does a culture become Christian, especially one that is heir to such ancient traditions and spectacular monuments as Egypt? This book offers a new model for envisioning the process of Christianization by looking at the construction of Christianity in the various social and creative worlds active in Egyptian culture during late antiquity.As David Frankfurter shows, members of these different social and creative worlds came to create different …
Things Unbefitting Christians
Near the end of the fifth century C.E. , the new abbot of Shenoute's monastery in Atripe, Besa, was called upon to pacify local villagers who had been "fighting for nothing over a piece of wood." Using Besa's sermon as a starting point, this paper explores the possibility that the village strife addressed here revolved around Egyptian religious images and their dwindling community of devotees. Papyri, inscriptions, and Coptic sources show Egyptia…
The Consequences of Hellenism in Late Antique Egypt
Hagiography and the Reconstruction of Local Religion in Late Antique Egypt
Scholars interested in the continuing vitality or decline of traditional religion in the late antique Mediterranean world often find themselves dependent on hagiographical texts, which inevitably depict traditional heathenism as a foil to their Christian heroes and thus cannot be used as simple documentation for historical realia. This paper proposes ways of drawing historical evidence for real, continuing local religion from hagiographical texts…
Ritual as Accusation and Atrocity
Religion in the Mirror of the Other
Cultures in the Roman Mediterranean world, including Christianity, conceptualized their most valuable and potent ceremonial elements not only through the occasionally learned abstraction or larger social categories but by imagining their perversion by others: sometimes witches or savages; sometimes intimate, conspiratorial enemies; and sometimes evil heathens and debauched heretics. These concerns with dangerous alterity cluster around areas of c…
Religion in Roman Egypt
This exploration of cultural resilience examines the complex fate of classical Egyptian religion during the centuries from the period when Christianity first made its appearance in Egypt to when it became the region's dominant religion (roughly 100 to 600 C.E.). Taking into account the full range of witnesses to continuing native piety - from papyri and saints' lives to archaeology and terra-cotta figurines - and drawing on anthropological studie…
Religious studies and claims of satanic ritual abuse
L'A. se propose de montrer le lien qui existe entre les etudes religieuses et les pretentions de l'abus du Rituel satanique de nos jours en etudiant la riposte de Stephen Kent. Les rumeurs se repandent sur le retour de pratiques sataniques particulierement atroces et perverses a notre epoque (et notamment aux USA). L'A. s'interroge sur ces rumeurs et reprend a son compte les idees de Stephen Kent a ce sujet
Scorpion/Demon
Do You See What I See? The Mythic Landscape in the Immediate World
This paper approaches relationships between visual and verbal aspects of performance in the rites of the tietj, an ethnic ritual specialist, recorded in Archangel Karelia. The focus is on the manipulation of motifs in the activation of mythic images which utilize features of the natural landscape. It will take a 'thick corpus' approach, attempting to contextualize these rites as much as possible within broader systems of cultural activity. Two ex…
Curses, Blessings, and Ritual Authority
The Binding of Antelopes
The Satanic Ritual Abuse Panic as Religious-Studies Data
Rumors and alleged memories of Satanic cult activity swept through the U.S. and U.K. during the 1980s and 1990s, confounding scholars of religion, as well as jurists and psychologists, with their combination of tantalizing ritual scenes and dubious forensic evidence. This essay discusses the work done on these Satanic cult claims since the early 1990s in a variety of academic fields; and it critiques some of the scholarly responses from the field…
Stylites and Phallobates
Il semble que le probleme de la relation, a 100 kms et a 3 siecles de distance, entre le stylite chretien et le phallobate paien dont nous parle Lucien (De Dea Syria 28-29) ait ete mal pose : il ne s'agit pas de la reviviscence d'un culte paien mais de la continuite d'une expression symbolique. Le phenomene stylite doit etre etudie dans une perspective diachronique, comme tradition, et dans une perspective synchronique, comme rupture
Stylites and Phallobates
Lest Egypt's City Be Deserted
The Cult of the Martyrs in Egypt before Constantine
Religious studies and claims of satanic ritual abuse
L'A. se propose de montrer le lien qui existe entre les etudes religieuses et les pretentions de l'abus du Rituel satanique de nos jours en etudiant la riposte de Stephen Kent. Les rumeurs se repandent sur le retour de pratiques sataniques particulierement atroces et perverses a notre epoque (et notamment aux USA). L'A. s'interroge sur ces rumeurs et reprend a son compte les idees de Stephen Kent a ce sujet
The Cult of the Martyrs in Egypt Before Constantine
L'A. entend conduire son analyse du culte chretien des martyrs a partir d'une nouvelle approche: celle de Smith qui presente ce culte comme une localisation d'un type de piete utopique. En Egypte, ce culte trouve son origine dans les traditions indigenes de la region. Le christianisme egyptien devient ainsi une religion egyptienne christianisee. L'Apocalypse d'Elie incarne a elle seule le caractere regional du premier culte des martyrs
Narrating Power
Diabolic Debates
Native Egyptian Religion in its Roman Guise
A propos de 1) Francoise PERPILLOU-THOMAS, «Fetes d'Egypte prolemaique et romaine d'apres la documentation papyrologique grecque», Studia Hellenistica 31, louvain : Studia Hellenistica, 1993 et 2) «Aufstieg und Niedergang des romischen Welt», teil II: Principat, Band 18 : Religion, 5. Teilband : Heidentum : die religiosen Verhaltnisse in den Provinzen. Ed. Wolfgang Haase. Berlin : De Gruyter, 1995
Apocalypses Real and Alleged in the Mani Codex
The florilegium of revelations that Mani adduces as proof of his own authority in the Cologne Mani Codex has stimulated research into the circulation and influence of Jewish apocalypses among the various Jewish-Christian sects of late antiquity. But it has also proved frustrating, since not one of the apocalyptic “texts” that Mani quotes matches extant apocalypses in the name of Enoch, Adam, Seth, or Enosh. Considering the breadth of the Enoch li…
Barbarian Philosophy
Things Unbefitting Christians
Near the end of the fifth century C.E. , the new abbot of Shenoute's monastery in Atripe, Besa, was called upon to pacify local villagers who had been "fighting for nothing over a piece of wood." Using Besa's sermon as a starting point, this paper explores the possibility that the village strife addressed here revolved around Egyptian religious images and their dwindling community of devotees. Papyri, inscriptions, and Coptic sources show Egyptia…
The Consequences of Hellenism in Late Antique Egypt
Ancient Greek Love Magic
Preface Introduction The Ubiquity of Love Magic Definitions and a New Taxonomy The Advantages of a Synchronic and Comparative Approach Spells for Inducing Uncontrollable Passion (Eros) If Eros Is a Disease, Then Erotic Magic Is a Curse Jason's Iunx and the Greek Tradition of Agoge Spells Apples for Atlanta and Pomegranates for Persephone The Transitory Violence of Greek Weddings and Erotic Magic Spells for Inducing Affection (Philia) Aphrodite's …
Pilgrimage and Holy Space in Late Antique Egypt
Ritual as Accusation and Atrocity
Religion in Roman Egypt
The Religious Context of Early Christianity
The Satanic Ritual Abuse Panic as Religious-Studies Data
Rumors and alleged memories of Satanic cult activity swept through the U.S. and U.K. during the 1980s and 1990s, confounding scholars of religion, as well as jurists and psychologists, with their combination of tantalizing ritual scenes and dubious forensic evidence. This essay discusses the work done on these Satanic cult claims since the early 1990s in a variety of academic fields; and it critiques some of the scholarly responses from the field…
Moral Purity and Persecution in History. Barrington Moore, Jr
The Binding of Antelopes
Curses, Blessings, and Ritual Authority
Evil Incarnate
Hagiography and the Reconstruction of Local Religion in Late Antique Egypt
Scholars interested in the continuing vitality or decline of traditional religion in the late antique Mediterranean world often find themselves dependent on hagiographical texts, which inevitably depict traditional heathenism as a foil to their Christian heroes and thus cannot be used as simple documentation for historical realia. This paper proposes ways of drawing historical evidence for real, continuing local religion from hagiographical texts…
Christianity and paganism, I
To understand the Christianisation of Egypt as well as the conflicts with native religion that this process entailed, we need to make some tentative distinction between the Christianity of texts and the Christianities assembled locally in villages. If the ancient gods and their shrines were often demonised, the new Christian worldview also depended upon familiar notions of harmful and beneficial power, ritual efficacy, and communication with divi…
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