Urban Religion in Mediterranean Antiquity: Relocating Religious Change

The claim formulated in this article is that city-space and interaction with cityspace engineered the major changes that revolutionised ancient Mediterranean religions. Whereas previous research on ancient religion has stressed the role of religion for cities and urban topography, we are suggesting a new focus on the impact of cities on religion and on how the interaction with city-space changed religion. This side of the dialectic is what we call urban religion. This concept is paramount, since it encompasses the development of specific religious agencies and practices (e.g. neighbourhood shrines, theatrical processions; text production and supply of religious services), specific forms of religious knowledge and imaginaries (imaginative places; imagined communities, heavenly cities) and societal phenomena such as civic rituals or religious communities in the appropriation (and hence modification and formation) of urban space in cities of different size and character. The major questions that we propose are: how and to what extent is religion shaped by density, urban aspirations, diversity and conflict, city governance, heterarchical distribution of power and division of labour, and urban identity, that is urbanity? The basic assumption is that religious change needs to be investigated in terms of the ongoing interaction between the city-space and a variety of different agents, including residents, immigrants, and people who live off religion.