Jörg Rüpke – författare

In Religion, Ritual, and the Urban Development of Ancient Rome, Jörg Rüpke explores how religious practices shaped the city's expansion from the third century BCE to the second century of the Christian era. Using the concept of 'urban religion,' his study looks beyond short-term adaptation to urban environments to track and understand long-term changes in religious practices and beliefs, and how they were urbanized. Bringing together religious, sociological, political, historical, epigraphical, and philological evidence, he makes the abstract notion of the city comprehensible as the interplay between different interests in and imagination of living in an urban environment. His study enables new insights into the temporal, spatial, moral orders, and mobilities that were at play in the development of Rome over several centuries. Rüpke's book thus demonstrates the critical role that religion played in the urbanization of Rome.

In Religion, Ritual, and the Urban Development of Ancient Rome, Jörg Rüpke explores how religious practices shaped the city's expansion from the third century BCE to the second century of the Christian era. Using the concept of 'urban religion,' his study looks beyond short-term adaptation to urban environments to track and understand long-term changes in religious practices and beliefs, and how they were urbanized. Bringing together religious, sociological, political, historical, epigraphical, and philological evidence, he makes the abstract notion of the city comprehensible as the interplay between different interests in and imagination of living in an urban environment. His study enables new insights into the temporal, spatial, moral orders, and mobilities that were at play in the development of Rome over several centuries. Rüpke's book thus demonstrates the critical role that religion played in the urbanization of Rome.

Religious individuality is not restricted to modernity. This book offers a new reading of the ancient sources in order to find indications for the spectrum of religious practices and intensified forms of such practices only occasionally denounced as 'superstition'. Authors from Cicero in the first century BC to the law codes of the fourth century AD share the assumption that authentic and binding communication between individuals and gods is possible and widespread, even if problematic in the case of divination or the confrontation with images of the divine. A change in practices and assumptions throughout the imperial period becomes visible. It might be characterised as 'individualisation' and informed the Roman law of religions. The basic constellation - to give freedom of religion and to regulate religion at the same time - resonates even into modern bodies of law and is important for juridical conflicts today.

All major continental empires proclaimed their desire to rule 'the entire world', investing considerable human and material resources in expanding their territory. Each, however, eventually had to stop expansion and come to terms with a shift to defensive strategy. This volume explores the factors that facilitated Eurasian empires' expansion and contraction: from ideology to ecology, economic and military considerations to changing composition of the imperial elites. Built around a common set of questions, a team of leading specialists systematically compare a broad set of Eurasian empires - from Achaemenid Iran, the Romans, Qin and Han China, via the Caliphate, the Byzantines and the Mongols to the Ottomans, Safavids, Mughals, Russians, and Ming and Qing China. The result is a state-of-the art analysis of the major imperial enterprises in Eurasian history from antiquity to the early modern that discerns both commonalities and differences in the empires' spatial trajectories.