1st Edition
Everyday Religion and Sacred Work in Roman Antiquity and Medieval Societies
Acknowledgments
List of Figures
List of Contributors
Introduction: Everyday Religion and Sacred Work
MARTHA G. NEWMAN AND TONY KEDDIE
1 “Anyone Unwilling to Work Should not Eat” (2 Thessalonians 3:10b): Cautionary Tales for Research on Capitalist Labor and Religion
STEVEN J. FRIESEN
2 The Sacred Work of Ephesian Silversmiths and the Discourse on Idolatrous Professions in Acts of the Apostles
TONY KEDDIE
3 Visual Representations Tying Religion and Worship to Work: Pompeii and Ostia Antica (First to Third Centuries ce)
JOHN R. CLARKE
4 Work, Wealth, and Worship in Roman Africa: The Cuttinus (Boglio) Stele
MATTHEW M. MCCARTY
5 Wealth, Poverty, Worker Bees, and Sluggards in John Chrysostom’s Commentaries on the Sages
JACLYN MAXWELL
6 The Dangers of Monastic Domestic Work: Intimate Economies in a Monastic Kitchen
DARLENE L. BROOKS HEDSTROM
7 “Is It Religion to Dig the Ground?” Monastic Work and Religion in Twelfth-Century Europe
MARTHA G. NEWMAN
8 Rabbinic Wages and the Provision of Justice in the Medieval Islamic World
PHILLIP I. LIEBERMAN
9 Worship as Work: Proxy Pilgrimage Contracts in Islamic Legal Thought
MARION HOLMES KATZ
10 Women’s Work, Interfaith Contact, and Labor Politics in the Late Medieval Mediterranean
SARAH IFFT DECKER
Afterword: Revisioning the Dreams of Everyday Work and Religion
SARAH E. BOND
Index
Biography
Tony Keddie is Associate Professor of Ancient Mediterranean Religions and Fellow of the Ronald Nelson Smith Chair in Classics and Christian Origins at the University of Texas at Austin, USA. His publications include Class and Power in Roman Palestine (2019), The Struggle over Class (2021), and Revelation and Material Religion in the Roman East (2024).
Martha G. Newman is Mary Helen Thompson Centennial Professor in the Humanities and Professor of History, emerita, at the University of Texas at Austin, USA. Her publications include Cistercian Stories for Nuns and Monks (2020) and The Boundaries of Charity (1996).
