Rhetoric and Religious Identity in Late Antiquity

Abstract

This chapter provides an overview of scholarly trends and approaches to this topic and outlines the place of this volume and its individual chapters within recent developments. In doing so, it considers a number of linked issues, including what was perceived as falling within the sphere of ‘the religious’ in late antiquity; how religious identities were constructed, activated and expressed; how the notion of late-antique religious identity should be understood and classified by scholars; where ‘rhetoric’ can be located within methods of cultural expression including, but not limited to, traditional literary forms and paideia; and how these methods were employed for the creation and reshaping of concepts of religious identity.