This volume will concentrate its search for religious individuality on texts and practices
related to texts from Classical Greece to Late Antiquity. Texts offer opportunities to express
one's own religious experience and shape one's own religious personality within the boundaries
of what is acceptable. Inscriptions in public or at least easily accessible spaces might
substantially differ in there range of expressions and topics from letters within a sectarian
religious group (which at the same time might put enormous pressure on conformity among its
members regarded as deviant by a majority of contemporaries). Furthermore texts might offer
and advocate new practices in reading meditating remembering or repeating these very texts.
Such practices might contribute to the development of religious individuality experienced or
expressed in factual isolation responsibility competition and finally in philosophical or
theological reflections about personhood or self. The volume develops its topic in three
sections addressing personhood representative and charismatic individuality the interaction
of individual and groups and practices of reading and writing. It explores Jewish Christian
Greek and Latin texts.
