Intersecting Religion and Urbanity in Late Antiquity

Even in focusing on the interdependency of city and religion and the many different forms it can take, the textual analyses and the archaeological case studies presented in this volume reflect the shared awareness that ‘city’ and ‘religion’ are vastly unevenly distributed (re‐)sources. The history of cities has often been conceptualised as change of rulers or of ideological regimes and resulting in internal changes. The history of religions, instead, has been seen as diffusion (or contraction) of rather stable beliefs that constitute the very identity and continuity of the subject. Engaging in relating city and religion needs to take the very different traditions of conceptualising the two poles into consideration. Therefore, the authors did not start from shared concepts of ‘city’ or ‘religion’, but rather from the shared perspective of urban religion as a lens into historical change in late antiquity. It turned out that this approach offered a view right into the centre of late ancient change – and a new perspective onto the mutual constitution as mutual critique of the urban and the religious.