This volume examines ancient and early medieval libraries, handbooks, and encyclopedias as interrelated types of knowledge repositories by investigating their embeddedness in religious contexts and their religious functions or connotations. Selected case studies illuminate interactions between education and religion and sharpen the focus on how religion functions in ancient and medieval contexts.
Libraries, handbooks, and encyclopaedias collect, arrange, and present books, texts, and/or information. This is reflected not least in the polysemy of the term 'library' (βιβλιοθήκη,
bibliotheca ) in Roman and later times: it can denote public institutions functioning in representative architectural spaces, physical book collections, but also collections of texts, regardless of the actual physical books that contain them, and even works that condense whole physical libraries into new texts. The present volume explores this range of knowledge repositories from physical spaces and objects to the virtual level of texts by enquiring into their religious connotations, functions, and contents. How can we interpret the spatial integration of libraries into sanctuaries or monasteries? How do religious conceptions of education shape the perception of knowledge, books, and libraries? What roles do knowledge repositories play in projects of religious or spiritual formation? By asking these questions for selected case studies, the contributors highlight crucial aspects of the interplay between learning and religion from Hellenistic to Carolingian times and offer a more nuanced understanding of how religion works in ancient and medieval contexts.
Table of contents:
Ilinca Tanaseanu-Döbler: Introduction -
Gaëlle Coqueugniot: Le contenu des bibliothèques était-il consacré ? Les dons d'ouvrages dans les bibliothèques publiques de la Méditerranée orientale hellénistique et romaine -
Lilian Balensiefen: Bibliothek und
templum . Zum Kultbezug öffentlicher Bibliotheken im kaiserzeitlichen Rom -
Gabriela Ryser: Hinc prima diabolo fides aedificatur ab initiis eruditionis . Some Remarks on Literary Education and the Non-/Religious in Tertullian's
De idololatria -
Jörg von Alvensleben: Theologisieren - systematisieren: Darstellung und Kohärenz philosophischer Bildung in Salustios'
De deis et mundo -
Philippe Hoffmann: ζάθεοι βίβλοι. Livres et religion savante dans le néoplatonisme tardif (Ve-VIe siècles) -
Ilinca Tanaseanu-Döbler: Knowledge about the Divine in Late Antique Handbooks: Stobaeus,
Anthologium 1,1 -
Marietta Horster: On Language and Faith - Cassiodorus' Institutiones -
Andreas Streichhardt: Die Darstellung der Philosophie in den Etymologiae Isidors von Sevilla. Präsentation und Kontextualisierung philosophischer Inhalte als religiöses und religionsbezogenes Bildungswissen -
Hedwig Röckelein: Medicine and Religion in Carolingian Discourses and Libraries -
Silviu Ghegoiu: Religious and Non-Religious in Carolingian Computistical Manuscripts.
Prognostica among other Encyclopaedic Material
