Slaves and Religions in Graeco-Roman Antiquity and Modern Brazil

1. Auflage 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4438-3736-1
Verlag: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Buch, Englisch, 335 Seiten

Slaves have never been mere passive victims of slavery. Typically, they have responded with ingenuity to their violent separation from their native societies, using a variety of strategies to create new social networks and cultures. Religion has been a major arena for such slave cultural strategies. Through participation in religious and ritual activities, slaves have generated important elements of identity, shared humanity, and even resistance, within their lives.

This volume presents papers from a conference of the University of Nottingham’s Institute for the Study of Slavery – the only UK centre studying its history from antiquity to the present. It breaks new ground by juxtaposing slave strategies within the diverse religious cultures of Graeco-Roman antiquity and modern Brazil. After a wide-ranging historiographical survey, eleven experts examine how in both societies slave religious activities involved both constraints and opportunities, shedding particular new light on the neglected religious strategies of Graeco-Roman slaves.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Hodkinson, Stephen

Geary, Dick

Über Autor(innen)

Stephen Hodkinson is Professor of Ancient History at the University of Nottingham and Director of its Institute for the Study of Slavery (ISOS). His extensive publications on Spartan helotage and agrarian economy include Property and Wealth in Classical Sparta (2000). He is co-editing The Oxford Handbook of Greek and Roman Slaveries.

Dick Geary is Emeritus Professor of Modern History at the University of Nottingham and former Director of ISOS. After researching and publishing on European labour history, including European Labour Protest, 1848–1939 (1981) and European Labour Politics from 1900 to the Depression (1991), he is now researching comparisons of slave and free labour in Brazil and Western Europe.