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Department of History and Cultures - DISCI

Lecture Meeting with Luca Arcari ("Federico II" University of Naples)

28 April 2026

Visionary Texts and Bodies: Jewish and Proto-Christian Apocalypses between Experience and Textuality

Albrecht Dürer, Apocalypse, 04 The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, woodcut, 1497–98
  • 11:00 AM - 01:00 PM
  • In person : Aula C, via Centotrecento 18 (piano terra), Bologna
  • Society & Culture In Italian

How to partecipate

Free admission - Seats available: 40

Program

Seminar lecture delivered by a visiting lecturer, valid for the course 27280 – Seminars (G.E.) in Anthropology, Religions, and Oriental Civilizations, A.Y. 2025-2026

Speakers

  • Luca Arcari

    Professor of the History of Christianity and the Churches (HIST-04/B), University of Naples "Federico II", Department of Humanities
    His research interests lie mainly in the field of Jewish (and proto-Christian) visionary texts, Jewish-Hellenistic literature, New Testament and Early Christian Apocrypha and/or Pseudepigrapha. He is also interested in reception studies (mainly the reception of ancient Jewish and Early Christian texts in European historiography between the Nineteenth and the Twentieth cent.); in the theories for the study of Religion/s; and in methodologies for the analysis of ancient religious groups in the Hellenistic-Roman world. Prominent among his publications are the monographs "Una donna avvolta nel sole..." (Apoc 12,1). Le raffigurazioni femminili nell'Apocalisse di Giovanni alla luce della letteratura apocalittica giudaica (EMP: Padova, 2008), Visioni del figlio dell'uomo nel Libro delle Parabole e nell'Apocalisse (ANT 19; Morcelliana: Brescia, 2012), Vedere Dio. Le apocalissi giudaiche e protocristiane (IV sec. a.C.-II sec. d.C.) (Frecce 291; Carocci, Roma 2020) and the edited book Beyond Conflicts. Religious and Cultural Cohabitations in Alexandria and Egypt between the 1st and the 6th cent. CE (STAC 103; J.C.B. Mohr Siebeck: Tübingen, 2013). Luca Arcari has also co-edited, with Alessandro Saggioro, the book Sciamanesimo e sciamanesimi. Un problema storiografico (Sapienza sciamanica 3; Bulzoni: Roma, 2012) and, with Maria Amodio and Raffaella Pierobon Benoit, the proceedings of the international conference Signs of Cohabitations in the Urban Spaces of the Roman Near East (1st-6th cent. CE), in "La parola del passato" 71/1-2, 2016. Currently, he is preparing a commentary on the Greek version of the Book of Watchers (1 Enoch 1-36) for Carocci editore.

Contacts

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Attachments

Event Within the Framework of:

The Grammar of the Body

from

The seminar will focus on the theme of the body, understood as a social “product” and, as such, subject to processes and dynamics of historical and cultural construction. The proposed topic will therefore be examined along three lines of inquiry: memory, identity, and culture. Through the analysis of the body as a historical product, the seminar will seek to identify the social function associated with corporeality, conceiving the body as a semiotic medium with high semantic potential, at the center of complex discourses of identity formation (both individual and collective) and the transmission of memory (historical and cultural). Particular attention will be devoted to the role assumed by the body in ritual and performative contexts in the definition of the social self, as well as to the perception of the body in specific historical settings and cultural situations, from classical antiquity to modernity.

  • Meeting with Luca Arcari ("Federico II" University of Naples)
  • Meeting with Gianmarco Chiari ("Federico II" University of Naples – Universidad de Cantabria)