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Marburg Center for the Ancient World
The Marburg Centre for the Ancient World is an association of disciplines from the faculties of Protestant Theology (FB05), History and Cultural Studies (FB06), and Foreign Language Philologies (FB10) at the Philipps-Univerisität Marburg, as well as relevant chairs from the faculties of Law (FB01) and Pharmacy/Medicine (FB16/FB20). These disciplines include Ancient History, Old Testament, Ancient Near Eastern Studies, Civil Law and Roman Law, Christian Archaeology and Byzantine Art History, History of the Early Church and the Christian Near East, History of Pharmacy and Medicine, Classical Greek and Latin, Historical-Comparative Linguistics, Classical Archaeology, New Testament, Semitic Studies, and Pre- and Protohistory. Scholars from the fields of economics, medicine, and religious studies are also associated with the Centre. The Marburg Centre for the Ancient World is thus a unique institution within the German university landscape and serves as the centre of excellence for ancient studies in Hesse.
The Marburg Centre for the Ancient World serves primarily as a forum for intensifying academic cooperation between the associated disciplines. It not only supports the development of joint research projects on topics relating to the ancient world but is also represented in the area of teaching through interdisciplinary lecture series and seminars.
Currently, the main focus of this interdisciplinary cooperation is the topic of ‘Religiosity in the Ancient World’. Our aim is to examine how the specific social, economic, and political – in short, cultural – structures of the various cultures influenced the form of expression of religiosity through the ages. Religious life-worlds are often caught between orthodoxy and hetropraxy, state cults and local cults, holidays and everyday life.
A common research theme currently being pursued by members of the MCAW is the question of the conscious shaping of religious experience in various ancient cultures. We would like to replace the idea that ‘the sacred’ was experienced as a sui generis category with the assumption that religious practice was instead shaped by the participants themselves and that religious experience can therefore be understood as a product of conscious efforts.
In 2019 we exchanged views on this topic, including its theoretical foundation and methodological relevance for our disciplines, in a series of workshops as well as in the context of a guest lecture on ‘Religion and Atmosphere – Sketches of a Field of Research’ by Dr. Martin Rademacher (Center for Religious Studies, Ruhr-Universität Bochum). Dr. Rademacher has also written on this topic in his article: ‘Atmosphere: On the Potential of a Concept for the Study of Religions’.
Various themes have proven relevant to the concept of religious atmosphere, such as the question of how people in antiquity felt in the first place and how we can access the sensations and experience of ancient peoples. This subject was recently addressed in our lecture series in the winter semester 2022/23: ‘Once again with feeling – accessing subjective feeling in antiquity’.
Another theme concerns the social framework within which religious practice in ancient cultures was situated. There are close interactions between, on the one hand, political power relations, authority, and social structures and, on the other hand, the design of public spaces and their use for public religious events. We look forward to continuing our intensive discussions on their topic.