Inscribing Faith In Late Antiquity Between Reading And Seeing Sean V Leatherbury by Sean V. Leatherbury 1472459180 instant download after payment.

Challenging the idea that late antique inscriptions in religious contexts were only vehicles for the communication of information or simple prayers for divine help, this book considers these texts as verbal and visual documents that were both read and viewed by the audiences who wrote and interacted with them. The author draws on Christian mosaic inscriptions in order to rewrite the ways in which scholars have examined these texts thus far, comparing the Christian examples (the largest corpus that survives from the period) with late pagan, Jewish and early Islamic inscriptions that perform similar functions. By following inscriptions in sacred buildings as they encourage certain visual, intellectual, and physical responses from readers, embrace their own materiality as painted, carved, or mosaic texts, embed sacred speech in the form of biblical quotations within images and interiors, and frame experience of space and human relationships with the divine, this book is the first to reconstruct the holistic aesthetic-cultural-religious experience generated by these inscriptions.