Want to create an interactive transcript for this episode?
Podcast: Exchanges: A Cambridge UP Podcast
Episode: Laura Salah Nasrallah, "Ancient Christians and the Power of Curses: Magic, Aesthetics, and Justice" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
Description: Ancient Christians and their non-Christian contemporaries lived in a world of 'magic.' Sometimes, they used curses as ritual objects to seek justice from gods and other beings; sometimes, they argued against them. Curses, and the writings of those who polemicized against curses, reveal the complexity of ancient Mediterranean religions, in which materiality, poetics, song, incantation, and glossolalia were used as technologies of power.Laura Nasrallah's book Ancient Christians and the Power of Curses: Magic, Aesthetics, and Justice (Cambridge UP, 2023) reframes the field of religion, the study of the Roman imperial period, and the investigation of the Ne...