Ancient Religion and Cognition

This book series seeks to take advantage of a critical moment in the development of the study of ancient religion. This is one in which previous models (especially the sharp oppositions frequently drawn between ritual and belief, or between the social and in the individual) are increasingly being questioned, and in which scholars of the ancient world are more and more drawing on cognitive approaches in the search for new paradigms. The 'cognitive science of religion' draws on insights developed in a wide range of fields: cognitive and evolutionary psychology, social anthropology, and neurobiology, amongst others. In essence, however, it seeks to understand religious experience as rooted in the ordinary cognitive capacities of the human brain. The series covers not only Greek and Roman religion but a range of ancient cultures from the Mediterranean and Near East, including Greece, Rome, Egypt, Babylonia, Persia, and Phoenicia, as well as cultures from Iron Age Europe. It will also explore the implications for the study of these cultures of a range of different cognitive approaches to religion and will include work by scholars from a wide range of disciplines in anthropology, the study of religion, evolutionary psychology and neuroscience, in addition to that by historians and archaeologists of the ancient world.

General Editors: Esther Eidinow, University of Bristol; Thomas Harrison, University of St Andrews