IMC 2024: Sessions

These three sessions explore responses to late ancient experiences of disaster both “natural” and human-made. They seek to forge new paths and develop new interdisciplinary connections between the study of late ancient culture, thought, and practice on the one hand, and the physical environment on the other.  Late ancient authors and actors clearly mediated catastrophic events through distinctly religious frames of reference and explanation. Nonetheless, many questions remain unanswered regarding early Christian perceptions and responses to disasters, and there is need to complicate modern explanatory models oriented too narrowly around providentialism, apocalypticism and/or fatalism. The goal of these sessions, therefore, is to reassess how late ancient authors and actors engaged with their destructive physical environments through religious frames of reference, and to reconsider how disasters did and did not fit within emergent religious worldviews.  All ten papers examine various agents and forms of material ruin at different stages of its unfolding and at different scales of impact, with some studying the anticipation of disaster (what we might today call risk), and others its manifold outcomes, which were differentially experienced according to variables like social position, gender, and ecclesiastical status.