SBL 2023 Review Panel | Staging the Sacred: Theatricality and Performance in Late Ancient Liturgical Poetry, by Laura LieberFor the first three essays in the series and some background on the author's work, see here and links.... All this is to say that this book panel offered me an opportunity to reflect on the fact that the area in which I work did not exist as a field when I was coming up as a scholar: it is not Jewish Studies, or Rabbinics, or Biblical Studies. My book, Staging the Sacred, and the reviewers who so generously review it here represent at least a new corner in the field of Late Antiquity, if not a new field of study, one that is not Bible (Old Testament or New); not Liturgy or Ritual Studies but impossible without those areas; not Judaism or Christian or Islam, but perhaps all of the above; not necessarily Religious Studies but perhaps Art History and Architecture, or Classics, or Literature, or a mixture of several disciplines into one. It can feel like a very old field in its enthusiastic, omnivorous openness and very new, through its transgressive, almost aggressive desire to cross borders. ...
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