- A recent analysis of baptism, the ritual through which Romans were integrated into Christian communities in the fourth and fifth centuries CE, revealed the careful staging of the experience. The ritual was designed by bishops who had been educated to become members of the Roman elite. Instead, they used the knowledge Graeco-Roman culture had accumulated on perception and the interconnectedness of mind, body, and emotion, to design awe-inspiring rituals. In order to provide a life-altering experience to those who joined the faith, they relied on physiological (e.g., fasting, lack of sleep) and psychological strategies (e.g., hints, threats, analogies, promises), which they combined with complex mises-en-scène. Hope, fear, and awe emerged from the analysis as central to the experience, with the study showing the need to further explore the ritual use of emotions in this context that saw the Christian faith spread across Roman society.
- Using the annual celebration of martyrs as a case study due to the emotional character of the celebrated event, the present initiative seeks to shed light on how emotions were used to in the ritual experiences designed by these bishops known as the Church Fathers. To this end, it uses methodologies developed across the Historical, Social, and Cognitive Sciences to produce a comprehensive analysis of late antique martyr celebrations. Developed in collaboration with the Department of Psychology of the University of Vienna, the project seeks to identify how the ritual’s mise-en-scène shaped the participants’ response, and how we can relate the observable features of the experience to something as subjective as individual emotional responses.
- The ultimate aim of the project is to develop an interdisciplinary model for the study of emotion manipulation in ritual contexts, while significantly advancing our understanding of Christian ritual experiences in Late Antiquity.
- The project was offered funding by both the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) and the European Commission (Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship).
