Friends of ASOR present the next webinar of the 2024-2025 season on March 19, 2025, at 7:00 pm EDT, presented by Dr. Megan Nutzman. This webinar will be free and open to the public. Registration through Zoom (with a valid email address) is required. This webinar will be recorded and all registrants will be sent a recording link in the days following the webinar.

Medical treatments in the ancient Mediterranean world were rudimentary and often unsuccessful, and so individuals routinely looked for divine aid to cure their afflictions. This lecture considers one of the most common forms of ritual healing employed in Roman and late antique Palestine: amulets. A variety of amulets will be considered in this talk. For example, some amulets contained longer texts written on thin metal sheets or pieces of papyrus, which were then rolled and placed in a case that could be attached to a person’s body. Other amulets took the form of rings, bracelets, pendants, and gemstones, which typically had shorter texts, often accompanied by vivid illustrations.

With circumstances of close cultural contacts—such as prevailed in Palestine—the setting was ripe for Jews, Samaritans, and Christians to borrow forms of ritual healing that were perceived to be efficacious and to alter them to fit their own religious framework. This is particularly true for amulets, which employed similar techniques including the quotation of biblical passages and the use of magical symbols and names. As a result of these overlapping amulet traditions, it can be difficult in some cases even to be certain about the religious community to which the person who created the amulet or the person who wore the amulet belonged. The cultural and religious interactions revealed by amulets demonstrate the porousness of the boundaries that separated these communities, and made them the subject of polemical discourse among elite authors trying to police collective borders.

Megan Nutzman is Associate Professor of History at Old Dominion University. She received her PhD in Classics from the University of Chicago and holds an M.T.S. and a Th.M. from Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology. Her research focuses on the history and material culture of Greek and Roman cults, Jews, and Christians in the eastern Mediterranean, and especially on interactions among them. Her 2022 book, Contested Cures: Identity and Ritual Healing in Roman and Late Antique Palestine, received the Frank Moore Cross book award in 2023. It examines the various methods that people used to seek divine healing and the rhetoric of elite authors who used the acceptance or avoidance of certain healing rituals as markers of group identity. Some of her other publications have considered Jewish epitaphs from Rome, hot springs as sites of ritual healing, the relationship between amulets and tefillin, and the portrayal of Mary in the Protevangelium of James. She has received funding for her research from the Albright Institute for Archaeological Research in Jerusalem, from the Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan, from the American Council of Learned Societies, and from the National Endowment for the Humanities. At ODU, she teaches courses on ancient Greece and Rome and on early Christianity.

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