Ritual and the East Roman Home 451-842 CE

Abstract

This dissertation traces the development of domestic ritual in the Eastern Roman Empire from the Council of Chalcedon (451 CE) to the end of Iconoclasm (842 CE), arguing that the home was a primary and influential site of ritual praxis. Challenging the scholarly tendency to privilege ecclesiastical and monastic spaces, this project focuses on the home as a legitimate ritual sphere, largely administered by women, which was not merely in conversation with official religious life but also served as a driver of ritual innovation. This study finds that a deep integration of religion into daily life, reminiscent of the older Graeco-Roman model, persisted and flourished within the domestic setting. Unfortunately, few sources represent domestic ‘lived religion’ in a direct or sustained manner. Therefore, we are required to knit together a variety of material and textual sources to reconstruct these practices. This project stitches together offhand mentions in homilies, treatises, ecumenical council canons with peripheral, background details from the lives of saints, and fleeting glimpses of ‘unofficial’ rites in ritual manuals. It also weaves through the material culture of the home; the architectural structures, decorative elements, and household objects which provide us with a window into the practices and priorities of the people who lived there. The project is structured thematically, exploring the central ‘goals’ of domestic ritual: the protection of the home and its inhabitants from spiritual and physical harm; the sanctification of daily labor like spinning and food preservation; and the weaving of social and spiritual kinship through daily, yearly, and seasonal patterns and lifecycle rites. Ultimately, I argue that taking the home seriously as a ritual site necessitates a re-working of our definitions of ‘ritual’, requires us to recognize the profound religious agency of laywomen, and prompts us to rethink the traditional binaries of magic/religion, orthodox/superstitious, and public/private. In its place, we are left with a perspective that recognizes the flow of ideas and practices between the church, the monastery, and the home in the East Roman world.