The volume The Christian and the Supernatural in Late Antiquity, edited by Ryan Denson and Charlotte Spence, has been officially published digitally this month – physical copies are scheduled to be printed shortly. The editors have brought together a great collection of contributions exploring the topic. Here is their description of the project:
The supernatural is an elusive category of ideas. Elusive both in terms of the considerable difficulties in even defining such a category, but also the fact that such phenomena seem to entirely evade modern empirical science and its framework for reality. Yet, such ideas have had considerable impact upon human culture, history, and lives with no small share of believers in both modern and ancient cultures. Such ideas are naturally paired with conceptions of religious thought, particularly as many definitions of religion are dependent upon the supernatural. The transitional period of Late Antiquity, a bridge between the classical Greco-Roman and the Christianized medieval period, then, serves as an apt era in which we may study transforming cultural conceptions of the supernatural and their influence.
This volume, comprised of twelve chapters on a variety of topics that range from the second to the eighth centuries CE, engages with how Late Antique Christians thought about and lived with varying conceptions of the supernatural, such as demons, angels, miracles, and magic. For a Late Antique Christian, engaging with the supernatural was often a matter of wrestling with elements of an inherited cultural capital of their society’s thoroughly non-Christian past, but also forging ahead with new means of considering reality in line with their faith’s balance between the natural and supernatural. Living in an era of such transition from earlier accepted conceptions of knowledge, there were varied responses as to how best to orient the supernatural to make sense of the natural world within which they lived. With this volume, we hope to shed further light on the constantly shifting nature of such ideas, and their impacts upon Christians of the Late Antique period.
I contributed one of the book’s twelve chapters, titled “Talisman or Conduit? Beliefs about Statuary and Miracles” (pp. 241-274). The abstract for my contribution reads:
Writing in the early decades of the eighth century CE, the writers of the Parastaseis Syntomoi Chronikai grappled with problems arising from two Late Antique Christian paradigmatic ways of thinking about art – especially statuary art – and its relationship with the supernatural. In this chapter, close readings of passages from the Parastaseis contextualize other written and archaeological sources and provide a fixed starting point for exploring the internal contradictions of these paradigms. The discussion situates these art historical developments within broader historical trends, including evolving attitudes towards the occult, developments in legal history, and the material culture of statuary found in archaeological contexts.
I’d like to restate my acknowledgements and thanks (which appear at the end of the chapter), first to the editors who were a pleasure to work with, to the publishers for their great work, and to my colleagues at the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the University of Cologne who have supported this research. While some of my inspiration for the chapter goes back to my graduate studies at the University of Cambridge, the specific examples and analysis largely took shape while I was teaching graduate seminar courses on medieval Roman art history and material culture at the Institute for History of Ancient Civilizations (IHAC) at Northeast Normal University, Changchun, from 2021 through 2024. I would therefore like to especially acknowledge and thank the MA and PhD students who attended those courses, contributed to discussion, and helped me refine my thinking about these topics.
October 26th, 2026 by DC Whalin