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For too long, the study of religious life in Late Antiquity has relied on the premise that Jews, pagans, and Christians were largely discrete groups divided by clear markers of belief, ritual, and social practice. More recently, however, a growing body of scholarship is revealing the degree to which identities in the late Roman world were fluid, blurred by ethnic, social, and gender differences. Christianness, for example, was only one of a plurality of identities available to Christians in this period. InChristians and Their Many Identities in Late Antiquity, North Africa, 200-450 CE, Éric Rebillard explores how Christians in North Africa between the age of Tertullian and the age of Augustine were selective in identifying as Christian, giving salience to their religious identity only intermittently. By shifting the focus from groups to individuals, Rebillard more broadly questions the existence of bounded, stable, and homogeneous groups based on Christianness. In emphasizing that the intermittency of Christianness is structurally consistent in the everyday life of Christians from the end of the second to the middle of the fifth century, this book opens a whole range of new questions for the understanding of a crucial period in the history of Christianity.

In this provocative book Éric Rebillard challenges many long-held assumptions about early Christian burial customs. For decades scholars of early Christianity have argued that the Church owned and operated burial grounds for Christians as early as the third century. Through a careful reading of primary sources including legal codes, theological works, epigraphical inscriptions, and sermons, Rebillard shows that there is little evidence to suggest that Christians occupied exclusive or isolated burial grounds in this early period. In fact, as late as the fourth and fifth centuries the Church did not impose on the faithful specific rituals for laying the dead to rest. In the preparation of Christians for burial, it was usually next of kin and not representatives of the Church who were responsible for what form of rite would be celebrated, and evidence from inscriptions and tombstones shows that for the most part Christians didn't separate themselves from non-Christians when burying their dead. According to Rebillard it would not be until the early Middle Ages that the Church gained control over burial practices and that \"Christian cemeteries\" became common. In this translation ofReligion et Sépulture: L'église, les vivants et les morts dans l'Antiquité tardive, Rebillard fundamentally changes our understanding of early Christianity.The Care of the Dead in Late Antiquitywill force scholars of the period to rethink their assumptions about early Christians as separate from their pagan contemporaries in daily life and ritual practice.

An article published in this journal in 2019 proposes to identify a fragmentary papyrus containing a Greek record of court proceedings from Roman Egypt (P.Mil.Vogl. VI 287) as the only known authentic transcript of a trial of Christians by a Roman governor. The present article reassesses the problem from the perspective of Christian sources and papyrological evidence and presents a revised text and new interpretation of the papyrus in question.

Pierre Batcheff was a prominent cinema star of the 1920s, a French Valentino best-known to modern audiences as the protagonist of the avant-garde classic, Un chien andalou (1929). Unlike other stars, Batcheff moved within intellectual circles, especially the Surrealists. This biography places the silent screen star within the context of 1920s popular cinema and its male stars.

La non-participation des chrétiens aux sacrifices et fêtes publics est souvent présentée comme une des causes principales des accusations portées contre eux et de leurs exécutions aux trois premiers siècles. Un examen attentif de la documentation montre toutefois qu’une telle participation n’est pas clairement attendue de la population et encore moins contrôlée. Il apparaît aussi que ce grief contre les chrétiens n’apparaît que dans des textes écrits par des chrétiens. Cette contribution suggère que c’est là une stratégie poursuivie par ces chrétiens pour imposer leur point de vue sur la participation aux sacrifices. En faisant de la question de la non-participation un des motifs centraux de la persécution, ces chrétiens présentent en quelque sorte la question comme adjugée.

La non-participation des chrétiens aux sacrifices et fêtes publics est souvent présentée comme une des causes principales des accusations portées contre eux et de leurs exécutions aux trois premiers siècles. Un examen attentif de la documentation montre toutefois qu'une telle participation n'est pas clairement attendue de la population et encore moins contrôlée. Il apparaît aussi que ce grief contre les chrétiens n'apparaît que dans des textes écrits par des chrétiens. Cette contribution suggère que c'est là une stratégie poursuivie par ces chrétiens pour imposer leur point de vue sur la participation aux sacrifices. En faisant de la question de la non-participation un des motifs centraux de la persécution, ces chrétiens présentent en quelque sorte la question comme adjugée. Traditional scholarship often presents Christians' non-participation in public sacrifices and festivals as one of the main charges against them and one of the main causes of their condemnation to death during the first three centuries. A careful examination of the source materials, however, shows that participation in these sacrifices and festivals was not explicitly expected from the population, much less monitored. This grievance against Christians appears only in texts written by Christians. It seems that Christians thus pursued a deliberate strategy to impose their point of view in regard to participation in sacrifices. By claiming non-participation to be one of the central motives for the persecution, these Christians in a way adjudicated the issue of participation. La no participación de los cristianos en los sacrificios y festivales públicos se suele presentar como una de las principales causas de las acusaciónes contra ellos y sus ejecuciones en los primeros tres siglos. Un examen atento de la documentación muestra, sin embargo, que dicha participación no esta esperada de la población y aún menos controlada. También parece que este agravio contra los cristianos aparece solo en textos escritos por cristianos. Esta contribución sugiere que esta es una estrategia seguida por estos cristianos para imponer su punto de vista sobre la participación en sacrificios. Al hacer que el tema de la no participación sea una de las razones centrales de la persecución, estos cristianos de alguna manera plantean la cuestión como adjudicada.

In the Historia ecclesiastica, Eusebius describes a succession of periods of persecution and periods of peace corresponding to the reigns of different emperors. However, Eusebius’s view of these events is skewed by his contemporary circumstances, and his narrative of the persecutions is, as a result, distorted by a number of erroneous assumptions (Barnes 1985:149). There is now general agreement among historians that before the reign of Decius there was no imperial legislation against the Christians (De Ste. Croix 1963; Barnes 1968),¹ and that Decius himself did not even have the Christians in mind when he issued his edict (Rives 1999).

In his magisterial study of Tertullian, Timothy Barnes notes: “It can surely be no accident that Tertullian’s three earliest extant works are De Spectaculis, De Idololatria and what appears in modern editions as the second book of De Cultu Feminarum. All three address themselves to similar problems: how ought Christians to live out a life of faith in a pagan society?” (1985: 93). To present the conciliation of Christian faith and social life in Carthage at the end of the second century as a problem is to implicitly adopt Tertullian’s own point of view. Indeed, most scholars have underestimated how