The Coda revisits the book’s principal arguments about theatrical profanation while carrying these claims forward to the twentieth-century stage. It centers on Lee Breuer’s late opus La Divina Caricatura (2013), a theatrical adaptation of Dante’s Divine Comedy performed as a musical featuring Bunraku-style puppets. Breuer’s production metabolizes Dante’s theology and charges it with elements of the Sanskrit epic the Mahabharata as well as other world religious traditions, ostentatiously defiling sacred iconography. La Divina Caricatura instantiates the profaning theater discussed across the book, while moving beyond my twentieth-century case studies to imagine the life of the artist as a profane form of pilgrimage. This work affirms that religious narratives and practices in the theater do work as theater, producing effects on the spectator that develop on essentially artistic terms. It ends with a short account of the author’s own religious positionality.

Late insertion is a hypothesis central to the framework of Distributed Morphology in which syntax operates on phonology-free formatives and structures composed of formatives, until a point in the derivation, “spell-out,” at which phonological exponents are inserted, i.e., associated with formatives. Late insertion has some consequences for the organization of grammar, for example for underspecified exponents appearing in different contexts, for portmanteau exponents associating with more than one formative, for a structural approach to class-based allomorphy, and for a feature valuation approach to Agree. Empirical motivation for late insertion can be found in outward sensitive phonologically conditioned suppletive allomorphy, which arguably exists. The data used here to illustrate these points is drawn from Icelandic.

If “modernism” labels the aesthetic mode of relating to modernity and modernization, this chapter posits that a modifier is needed for thinking about and understanding Turkish modernism: syncretic. For painters in the late Ottoman Empire and Turkish Republic, learning to speak the language of easel painting – the ultimate lingua franca they aspired to communicate through – was a laborious and gradual process, let alone participating in or contributing to what might be considered its modernist manifestations. Understanding and appreciating the modernism their artworks came to embody requires the historian as well as the onlooker to embrace the mispronunciations, the direct translations, the awkward appropriations, and the envious emulations, as much as highlighting the more fluent and effortless instances of speaking the language of oil painting that these artists eagerly adopted. Rather than evaluating the aesthetic worth of these artistic endeavors through the lens of formal affinity to their Western counterparts, it is crucial to see these paintings as a series of negotiations and articulations that evince larger societal and cultural transformations.

Chapter 1 is a detailed guide to the multifaceted historical backdrop of the Safavids, charting their first transformation, from a Sufi order to a potent Shiʿi empire in Iran. In this exploration, Anatolia holds particular importance, illuminating the region’s significant impact on the Safavid journey and unveiling the movement’s origins within Ottoman territories. This chapter also contends that a rigid understanding of sects and sectarianism does not adequately capture the nuanced emergence of the early Safavid movement and its spread into neighboring regions. Instead, it posits that the Safavid order (and later the state) was the product of a syncretic and turbulent religious, cultural, and political landscape in Southwest Asia during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. This perspective is particularly pertinent when connecting Safavid history to recent scholarship that highlights the coexistence and long-term transformations of religious identities in regions such as Anatolia and the Iberian Peninsula, rather than reducing the narrative to one of perpetual tension and abrupt ruptures.

The Conclusion focuses on three of the book’s recurring themes. First is the impact that broad historical forces have had on theatre history. Theatre’s nature as a social art explains why these forces weigh so heavily. Sudden social change (often interregional in scope) presents theatre artists with opportunities to expand their existing audiences or to develop new ones. Second is the frequency with which theatre forms have been shaped by syncretism. New theatre forms use whatever might be available and of interest; their ongoing development similarly takes advantage of whatever might seem appealing. Cultural appropriation is a recurring fact of theatre history. Although one can deplore disrespectful appropriations, no one “owns” a given theatre form or theatrical trait. The third theme is the depth of attraction that dramatic theatre has exerted upon people through the centuries and around the world. The development of drama presented via electronic media only reinforces the idea that “make-believe” performance has a universal appeal.

The introduction provides a brief introduction to violín performance and history. It describes the little that has been written on the topic to date and describes the practice as a complex amalgam of distinct religious and musical practices. It introduces Fred Moten’s concept of fugitivity and its relation to violín aesthetics. Later, it explores terminology associated more specifically with Black diasporic religions such as syncretism, hybridity, transculturation, and creolization, and considers their applicability to violín performance.

Marianne Moyaert tackles the timely issue of the encounter between Christian liturgy and the world’s religions. She puts forward the idea that there is no way back to a time before the dialogical turn. Even more so, the dialogue should not refrain from ritual and liturgical aspects. In that respect, comparative theologians are inevitable and evident partners for liturgical scholars.

Unlike many other forms of ‘heresy’, Manichaeism is not a polemical construct but an independent and organised church within the Christian tradition originating in Mesopotamia and Iran in the third century CE. It had its own heresiology against other communities such as the western Catholic-Orthodox church, identifying key points of difference and deviance from the ‘faithful and true Christianity’ of Manichaean doctrine and practice.

The introduction deals with the problematic concept of ‘paganism’ and the nature and variety of Europe’s pre-Christian religions, examining concepts such as animism, religious creolisation, ‘shamanism’, syncretism, and the ‘Christianesque’, as well as exploring the difference between conversion and Christianisation. The introduction argues for the use of the term ‘unchristianised peoples’ as the best one to describe its subject. It surveys the historiography of the last pre-Christian peoples and delineates and justifies the book’s chronological and geographical scope. The introduction critiques the concept of ‘pagan survivals’ in the traditional historiography of European religions, arguing for a tighter definition of pre-Christian religions, and outlines the nature and limitations of the sources available for studying pre-Christian cults.

Chapter 2 argues that syncretism, a form of eclectic union, is temporal as well as spatial. As a temporal form, syncretism consolidates historical events, daily individual experiences, and social practices onto a shared plane. This chapter analyzes syncretism in Risorgimento Florence, examining how the city adapts to serve modern Italy while maintaining its historical significance. I read Florence through the travel narratives of Susan Horner, two guidebooks (Walks in Florence, which Horner coauthored with her sister Joanna; and Mornings in Florence by John Ruskin), and a forgotten novel (Isolina, which I attribute to Susan Horner). Across these genres, syncretism emerges as a temporal form capable of defining liberty democratically so that Florence potentially serves as a model of egalitarianism internationally in response to nineteenth-century revolutions and wars.

This chapter challenges the supposed transformation “from Baal Hammon to Saturn” in North Africa one of the chief grounds upon which narratives of cultural continuity are predicated. It argues that instead of simple syncretism or the persistence of a god, the material signs used to construct and identify the deity to whom stelae were dedicated underwent important transformations in the second and third centuries CE, changes closely tied to the experiences and practices of empire. Stelae of the third and second centuries BCE made a god present indexically; stelae of the imperial period embraced iconicity in ways that were entangled with empire, including new divine epithets tied to imperial authority and new road systems in the province. And by the end of the second century CE, this iconic system could even work to perpetuate clear social hierarchies.

Born in the year of the liberation Korea from Japanese colonisation, Younghi Pagh-Paan (*1945) grew up during the Korean war and the subsequent division of her homeland. Although she trained in Seoul, her career as a composer properly started with her move to Freiburg in Germany in 1974. The result was a culture shock, and, throughout much of her career, Pagh-Paan struggled with her displacement and endeavoured to reconcile her gender and cultural identity as an Asian woman with Western modernism; vowing, in her own words, ‘[n]ot [to] write music that distances me from what […] I perceive inside me as the root of our culture’. This chapter discusses Pagh-Paan’s career and her aesthetic beliefs, such as her commitment to the student movement and democratic opposition in her country and her syncretistic religiosity that embraces the different spiritual traditions of her country, such as Shamanism and Taoism, as well as her fervent Catholicism. Analysing the reflection of these ideas in her music I conclude that, transcending notions of cultural contrast or ‘East-meets-West fusion’, Pagh-Paan’s work is a response to more than a century of intimate entanglements between Western and Korean culture.

This chapter surveys the market for popular works on world religions that exploded in Britain during the 1890s. Critics have explored how scholars like the Oxford Sanskritist F. Max Müller laid the groundwork for religious studies in the twentieth century by mapping global religions onto a global hierarchy of languages and cultures. Such work tends to confirm our view of Orientalism as an extension of imperial power-knowledge. However, middle-class liberals, evangelical missionaries, and occult enthusiasts all had their own reasons for exploring the religions of the world. Their fascinations unfolded against the backdrop of imperial power but were seldom reducible to it. In addition, studying these publications can challenge our association of the “Naughty Nineties” with radicalism and subversion by showing the importance that middlebrow religious culture played in broadening religious horizons. Popular Victorian publications on Buddhism, Islam, Zoroastrianism, and Hinduism would lay the basis on which Anglo-American religious liberalism could flourish into the postwar period.