The model of popular religion that is usually presented by scholars of late antiquity has the disadvantage that it assumes “popular religion” can be understood only from the viewpoint of the elite. “Popular religion” is presented as in some ways a diminution, a misconception or a contamination of “unpopular religion.” Whether it is presented, bluntly, as “popular superstition” or categorized as “lower forms of belief,” it is assumed that “popular religion” exhibits modes of thinking and worshipping that are best intelligible in terms of a failure to be something else.2

In the long, run, I expect that scholars will find the concept [i.e., popular religion] so ambiguous and unhelpful that they will abandon it.3

For some years now historians of religion in Late Antiquity, as of other periods, have largely rejected the concept of “popular religion.” The problems inherent in such a definition have been persuasively rehearsed...

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