I returned from holiday today to find proofs for a forthcoming chapter in an edited volume in my inbox. My chapter, entitled ‘Putting the sacer in sacerdos? Re-asserting the “Sacred” for Roman Priesthoods’, challenges the notion that the category of the ‘sacred’ is irrelevant to our understand of Roman priests, and posits that we might wish to understand degrees of ‘sacredness’ for Roman priests, depending on their qualities and virtues. The chapter is being published in the edited volume Meanings and Values of the Sacred in Greco-Roman Antiquity: Proceedings from the Penn-Leiden Colloquia on Ancient Values XII, edited by Kim Beerden, Jeremy McInerney and Irene Polinskaya, and can be found here. I’m excited for the volume to finally be out in the world at the end of this year/early next year, particularly as the conference at which I originally presented this research was held in Pennsylvania all the way back in 2023. My contribution can be found alongside those of scholars I greatly admire, including Celia E. Schulaz, Françoise Van Haeperen, and Eric M. Orlin.
