Book Launch: Enchanted World by Michael Satlow

An Enchanted World: The Shared Religious World of Late Antiquity, a talk by Michael Satlow with respondents Shai Secundo and Cristiana Sogno

In Late Antiquity (ca. 200–600 CE), the world was alive with unseen forces—divine agents who influenced every aspect of daily life. For most ordinary people, religion was not found in temples, synagogues, and churches, but in lived experience as they interacted with the supernatural in a world of uncertainty and danger. The lecture offers a new account of religion in Late Antiquity—one centered less on institutions and theological divisions than on lived experience, shared fears, and common hopes.

Michael L. Satlow is professor of religious studies and Judaic studies at Brown University. He specializes in the history of Jews and Judaism in antiquity. His most recent books are An Enchanted World: The Shared Religious Landscape of Late Antiquity and How the Bible Became Holy. He is the founder and director of the “Inscriptions of Israel/Palestine” project, a digital corpus of ancient inscriptions from the region, and is now working with a research team in Israel on creating a networked approach to all of rabbinic literature. He has held fellowships from the NEH, ACLS, John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and the Fulbright program, among others.

Shai Secunda is Jacob Neusner Professor in the History and Theology of Judaism at Bard College. He received a bachelor’s degree from Ner Israel Rabbinical College, a master’s from Johns Hopkins University, and an MA/PhD from Yeshiva University. He is the author of The Iranian Talmud: Reading the Talmud in its Sasanian Context (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014) and The Talmud’s Red Fence: Menstruation and Difference in Babylonian Judaism and its Sasanian Context (Oxford University Press, 2020). His work uses philological analysis of the Talmud—the work which sits at the center of the classical Jewish canon—to reveal the rich cultural and religious worlds of late antique Babylonian Jewry and their neighbors in Sasanian Iran, especially the Zoroastrians. He has also published widely on Jewish studies scholarship and contemporary culture in the Jewish Review of Books, where he is a contributing editor.

Cristiana Sogno is a professor in the Department of English at Fordham University. Her research and teaching interests center on letter-writing, biography, and the reception and adaptation of Greek and Latin texts. She holds a BA from the Università degli Studi di Torino and a PhD from Yale University. Professor Sogno is the author of Q. Aurelius Symmachus: A Political Biography (Ann Arbor, 2006) and has written extensively about letter-writing and late antique letter collections. She is currently working on a biographical study of Serena, one of the Theodosian imperial women.