Arcari (ed.), Beyond Conflicts

NEW BOOK FROM MOHR-SIEBECK: Beyond Conflicts. Cultural and Religious Cohabitations in Alexandria and Egypt between the 1st and the 6th Century CE. Ed. by Luca Arcari. 2017. XIII, 460 pages. Studien und Texte zu Antike und Christentum / Studies and Texts in Antiquity and Christianity 103.

Published in English.
That there were various ways of interaction between different groups in Graeco-Roman Egypt cannot be doubted, as a number of more or less recent regional studies have further reinforced. And as is well-known, Egypt emerges as a sort of exception in the study of ancient cultures and religions because it provides scholars with the opportunity to draw on a great number and variety of documents. Exploring interactively the diversity of documentary material is the main aim of this book. In socio-cultural terms, such an analysis corroborates the image of Egypt as a pervasive cultural system where for many centuries different elites coagulated themselves around a number of standard modalities to produce “cultural” and “religious” micro-systems. This shows that people, even when different languages and textual practices survive, respond to specific modalities of cohabitation under the umbrella of this hegemonic cultural “field."

Follow the link for the TOC. A number of the essays deal with Alexandrian Judaism.