As a category, “Mediterranean religion” echoes a recent global turn in the academic humanities. While this turn goes back at least as far as such twentieth-century foundations as Arnold Toynbee’s civilizational typology or Max Weber’s sociology of religion, the worldwide humanities have been especially prominent since the new millennium. The Harvard Institute for World Literature, directed by David Damrosch, makes use of seminars and publications to study literature in a “globalizing world.”1 The H-World discussion list is an example of platforms that globalize the study of history.2 Outlets like the Journal of Transcultural Medieval Studies and the newly founded University of California project “The Middle Ages in the Wider World” aim to push medieval studies beyond western Europe.3 Monographs and campus centers dedicated to the study of world religions have proliferated across North American universities.4
All these individual projects reveal a broader concern for putting into...
