Material Religion in Byzantium and Beyond

The theoretical framework known as Material Religion has emerged as a vibrant and profoundly influential approach within religious studies over the past two decades. Originating in the first decade of the 21st century from currents within cultural anthropology, Material Religion challenges a foundational assumption of much modern Western thought: that matter and spirit — materiality and religion — are fundamentally opposed. Rather than conceiving religion primarily as a system of ideas, doctrines, and beliefs, this framework accords equal significance to behaviours, practices, and objects. It reorients the study of religion towards the physical world, while simultaneously highlighting the capacity of tangible environments to mediate between humans and extraordinary powers.

This volume introduces the insights of Material Religion to the field of Byzantine studies. It presents Material Religion as a new theoretical lens to Byzantinists, who have long explored religious life through behaviours, practices, and material culture, and who have long recognised their significance. A series of case studies — encompassing individual sites, urban spaces, landscape features, and categories of objects — illustrates the relevance and analytical power of the framework across the full span of Byzantine material culture, from Late Antiquity to the Fall of Constantinople, including instances of cultural exchange within and beyond the Empire’s heartland.

Material Religion in Byzantium and Beyond will appeal to a broad audience, from students of Byzantium to established scholars who may be unfamiliar with the Material Religion framework.

Author Biography

Ine Jacobs is the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Associate Professor of Byzantine Archaeology and Visual Culture at the University of Oxford. She works on Roman and Byzantine architecture and urbanism, the experience and perception of built environments and their ornamentation, the longue durée of display and reception of sites, statuary and artifacts, as well as material religion. She has undertaken archaeological fieldwork in Belgium, Italy, North Macedonia, and Turkey, and has been the Field Director of the Aphrodisias Excavations since 2016.

Jaś Elsner is Professor of Late Antique Art at Oxford and Visiting Professor of Art and Religion at the University of Chicago. He has worked all his life on Greco-Roman, early Christian and Byzantine art in the context of changing religious culture and its material phenomena, such as pilgrimage. He has more recently extended his range of expertise in the same themes across Eurasia to look at similar issues in early Buddhist art.

Julia M. H. Smith retired from the Chichele Professorship of Medieval History at the University of Oxford in 2025, before which she held the Edwards Chair of Medieval History at the University of Glasgow. Her research explores the instrumental use of small material objects in late antique and early medieval Christian practice from a variety of perspectives, and offers a new analysis of the origin and growth of relic cults. She also works with palaeographers and materials scientists to explore the practices of writing, wrapping and labelling associated with the curation of relics in the medieval Latin West.