From Sun-Day to the Day of the Lord. The career of a special day in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, University of Vienna, October 10–12, 2019
The Christian Sunday as a day of rest is one central identity marker of a society shaped by Christianity. However, the development of a Christian Sunday culture took several centuries until the early Middle Ages, although already in 321 AD, Constantine had decreed a law to rest on the sacred Sun-Day. One reason was probably an intentional distancing from both Jewish Sabbath observation and beliefs in pagan Tagwählerei (unlucky days) and comparable astrological practices. Later on, when this anti-pagan issue diminished, and when pagan cults and calendars lost importance, a Sunday observance and veneration emerged as one element among other aspects of Christianization and sacralization of the Christian society in Late Antiquity, including holy places and holy people. Especially the sixth century seemed to be an important “watershed” in this respect, when new apocryphal literature and pseudo-epigraphy dealing with the Sunday was produced. The elevation of Sunday reflected a unification of feasts that were formerly variously celebrated within different social and religious groups. However, this estimation above is a first suggestion because the history of Sunday veneration after Constantine is a neglected subject in research. In addition, former studies rely on now obsolete decline theories of church life and theology (Legalism, Judaization, Germanization). New insights into the process of Christianization of the Roman Empire, the relationship between East and West and the centuries of the Migration Period have to be taken as a new basis for understanding the emergence of Sunday veneration.
The presentations at the conference deal with various aspects of this development.