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Altars are powerful symbols, fraught with meaning, but during the early modern period they became a religious battleground. Attacked by reformers in the mid-16th century because of their allegedly idolatrous associations with the Catholic sacrifice of the mass, a hundred years later they served to divide Protestants due to their reintroduction by Archbishop Laud and his associates as part of a counter-reforming programme. Moreover, having subsequently been removed by the victorious puritans, they gradually came back after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660. This book explores these developments over a 150 year period, and recaptures the experience of the ordinary parishioner in this crucial period of religious change. Far from being the passive recipients of changes imposed from above, the laity is revealed as actively engaged from the early days of the Reformation, as zealous iconoclasts or their Catholic opponents — a division later translated into competing protestant views. This book integrates the worlds of theological debate, church politics and government, and parish practice and belief, which are often studied in isolation from one another. It draws on hitherto largely untapped sources, notably the surviving artefactual evidence comprising communion tables and rails, fonts, images in stained glass, paintings and plates, and examines the riches of local parish records — especially churchwardens' accounts.

This paper examines the relationship between the Book of Kings and the Book of Chronicles through a focused case study: the depiction of the altar(s) in Solomon’s temple. While scholarly models vary—some positing a shared source, others viewing Chronicles as a revision of Kings—this analysis supports the view, associated with Wellhausen, that Chronicles reinterprets the Deuteronomistic History in line with the Pentateuch, particularly its Priestly layer. In Kings, Solomon’s two altars function within a hierarchical system that distinguishes between the royal and communal spheres. Chronicles, by contrast, aligns the temple’s cultic architecture with the Tabernacle model, presenting a single sacrificial altar alongside a golden altar with a different function. The Chronicler’s account reveals its secondary nature through both expansion and abbreviation of the Kings narrative, shaped by a theological agenda to harmonize Israel’s cultic past with the normative framework of priestly law.

The Altar Stone at Stonehenge in Wiltshire, UK, is enigmatic in that it differs markedly from the other bluestones. It is a grey–green, micaceous sandstone and has been considered to be derived from the Old Red Sandstone sequences of South Wales. Previous studies, however, have been based on presumed derived fragments (debitage) that have been identified visually as coming from the Altar Stone. Portable X-ray fluorescence (pXRF) analyses were conducted on these fragments ( ex situ ) as well as on the Altar Stone ( in situ ). Light elements ( Z <37) in the Altar Stone analyses, performed after a night of heavy rain, were affected by surface and pore water that attenuate low energy X-rays, however the dry analyses of debitage fragments produced data for a full suite of elements. High Z elements, including Zr, Nb, Sr, Pb, Th and U, all occupy the same compositional space in the Altar Stone and debitage fragments, and are statistically indistinguishable, indicating the fragments are derived from the Altar Stone. Barium compares very closely between the debitage and Altar Stone, with differences being related to variable baryte distribution in the Altar Stone, limited accessibility of its surface for analysis, and probably to surface weathering. A notable feature of the Altar Stone sandstone is the presence of baryte (up to 0.8 modal%), manifest as relatively high Ba in both the debitage and the Altar Stone. These high Ba contents are in marked contrast with those in a small set of Old Red Sandstone field samples, analysed alongside the Altar Stone and debitage fragments, raising the possibility that the Altar Stone may not have been sourced from the Old Red Sandstone sequences of Wales. This high Ba ‘fingerprint’, related to the presence of baryte, may provide a rapid test using pXRF in the search for the source of the Stonehenge Altar Stone.

Biblical ritual texts reflect a distinction between “consumptive” fires, for the incineration of sacred materials upon an altar, and “destructive” fires, for the incineration of leftovers at a distance from the cultic center. The dichotomy is evidenced by differences in terminology, geography, and legal detail, such that the former are characterized by a high degree of ritualization, and the latter by a low degree of ritualization. Yet this dichotomy reveals an instability inherent in ritual sacrifice: offering materia sacra inevitably generates leftovers, which occupy an ambiguous place within the ritual domain—they are not offerable, but they cannot be disposed of in any which way. The texts examined here responded to this instability with a conceptual shift, whereby destructive fires assimilated many of the features that initially characterized consumptive fires. From the earliest pentateuchal priestly strata through Ezekiel, the Temple Scroll, the Epistle to the Hebrews, and beyond, the data reflect a gradual gravitation toward a new way of thinking about “destructive” fires. They were reconceptualized as mirror-images of the “consumptive” type and were modeled after them in terms of language, geography, and legal detail. From the perspective of a history of ritual, the process analyzed here is part of a larger trajectory whereby ritual residues are reconceptualized as essential components of the cult.

In the sanctuary of Kition-Kathari (Cyprus), a building with benches, identified as a temple (“Temple 4”), is characterized in its centre by a hearth pit next to a trapezoidal stone construction, constituting “Altar E”. The platform’s surface comprises a series of little cup-holes. Once labelled “table of offerings”, it has recently been interpreted as a gaming table. Besides clay gaming stones, this area has yielded knucklebones as well as several deposits of incised scapulae linked with divination practices. This Cypriot context gives us the opportunity to explore and also to put in light the influences and interactions between different regions of the Eastern Mediterranean at the turn of the 1st millennium BC.

This article challenges the increasingly popular view that Pausanias's description of Athens in the 2nd centurya.d.contains a reference to the Agora of the city in the Archaic period. Consideration of Pausanias's methods and his attitude toward the agoras of other Greek cities described in his work suggests that the “agora” mentioned in his description of Athens is most likely the so-called Roman Agora, paid for by Julius Caesar and Augustus. The discussion also casts light on the function and meaning of the agora in Greek cities of the Roman period, and on the ways in which Pausanias should be used as a historical source.

The maṣṣēḇāh /standing stone was the central object in public devotion in Ancient Israel and, together with the bāmâh /high place and the mīzbēaḥ /altar, formed the cultic complex used to perform ritual acts of worship to the deity. The maṣṣēḇāh tradition was characteristic of all Levantine religions since the Bronze Age and continued throughout the history of the Ancient Near East, extending into Byzantine spirituality and Islamic culture. The present research has analyzed the significance and usage of these artifacts based on archaeological findings from Hazor, Lachish, and Tel Arad, dating to the Iron Age – a period with a distinctly Israelite identity.

The subject of this communication is a funerary altar discovered in 2022 during archaeological field survey in the Sandanski area. The monument was found at site 58, situated in the locality “Saint Dimitria” near the village of Leshnitsa, municipality of Sandanski. The site is a settlement from the Roman period (2nd–4th c. AD) and the Middle Ages (13th–14th c. AD), occupying a natural, flat floodplain terrace north of the Leshnishka River, covering an area of 5.8 decares. The monument is a funerary altar, possibly exhibiting traces of an unfinished verse-inscription in Greek, dated to the second half of the 2nd c. or the beginning of the 3rd c. AD. The Leshnitsa funerary altar joins the small group of funerary epigraphy from the Middle Strymon region, whence two other examples of the same type from nearby Heraclea Sintica are also dated to the second half of the 2nd c. or the beginning of the 3rd c. AD. The funerary altar from Leshnitsa constitutes the first such example from the territory of Parthicopolis, a Trajanic or early Hadrianic foundation of AD 117–120.

The so-called “counterfeit monks and nuns” 僧尼偽濫 is regarded as an important reason for the “Huichang Persecution of Buddhism” 會昌滅佛, but it reflects the central views of the Tang Dynasty. When we delve into the local society of the Mid-to-Late Tang period, we find that they developed their own narrative logic. From the perspective of the imperial court, Li Deyu 李德裕 criticized Wang Zhixing 王智興 for establishing an ordination altar in Sizhou 泗州 for personal gain. However, in the biographical inscription of monk Mingyuan 明遠 in Sizhou, Wang Zhixing is portrayed as a key figure who collaborated with Mingyuan to ensure the survival of the Kaiyuan Monastery 開元寺, with the inauguration of the ordination altar 戒壇 serving as a necessary means to obtain financial resources. In fact, Mingyuan had previously undertaken a similar operation at the Lingju Monastery 靈居寺 in Liuhe County 六合縣, Yangzhou 揚州. The inscription of the Lingju Monastery Stele 大唐揚州六合縣靈居寺碑 reflects the cooperation between local monks and secular people at that time. During the process of rebuilding the monasteries, Mingyuan cleverly exploited the cult of the divine monk Sengqie 僧伽 within the Society of Jianghuai 江淮. The cult of Sengqie had become a national belief during the Mid-to-Late Tang period, and the existence of the Sengqie pagoda 僧伽塔 made the Kaiyuan Monastery in Sizhou uniquely significant. Later on, Youxuan 幽玄 also carried out similar initiatives by establishing an ordination altar for the restoration at the Baoli Monastery 寶曆寺 in Hongzhou 洪州. If we set aside the shadow of the overarching theme of the Huichang Persecution of Buddhism on the history of Buddhism during the Mid-to-Late Tang period, we may uncover a more vibrant picture of local Buddhism.