The early medieval secular

This special issue seeks to fill a gap by taking the first steps towards locating the early Middle Ages in the broader history of the secular. While it has generally been assumed that a division between religion and secular was impossible to make in the early medieval period, taken together the articles in this collection show a variety of early medieval seculars, all arising from a general assumption that distinctions could, indeed had to, be made between what was secular and what was not. The introduction proposes that scholars should think in terms of a spectrum of secularity; key to determining what sits within this spectrum must be the identification of secularizing strategies, i.e. attempts to draw a distinction between religious and secular in a particular context. Such an approach offers the possibility of a history of the secular that does not privilege one time or place

Aesthetics · Ancient history · Archaeology · Context (archaeology · Genealogy · Middle Ages · Period (music · Political science · Politics · Privilege (computing · Secular education · Secular state · Secular variation · Secularity · Sociology · Statistics · Variety (cybernetics · Demography · Historical and Religious Studies of Rome · History · Law · Mathematics · Medieval and Early Modern Iberia · Medieval Literature and History · Philosophy

• The Conceptualization of Religion and Incipient Secularity in Late Sasanian Iran

  Thomas Benfey•History of Religions•2023

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