Michael L. Satlow, "An Enchanted World: The Shared Religious Landscape of Late Antiquity" (Princeton UP, 2026)

The modern world has become a 'buffered self'—a bounded, rational space where belief is optional and religion is compartmentalized. But in late antiquity, as historian Michael L. Satlow argues in *An Enchanted World*, the boundary between heaven and earth was porous, and divine beings were as real and present as family or furniture. People didn’t just 'believe' in gods—they interacted with them daily, through prayer, amulets, dreams, and rituals. Satlow challenges the dominant scholarly focus on religious identity, showing that labels like 'Christian,' 'Jew,' or 'pagan' were often fuzzy and context-dependent. Instead, he reveals a shared spiritual landscape where people navigated a complex, bureaucratic heaven through 'technicians'—dream interpreters, priests, elders—just as they managed earthly hierarchies. The real magic wasn’t in doctrine, but in the tangible, contagious holiness of objects, places, and time. From Torah scrolls to temple ruins repurposed as churches, sacred space and sacred time were co-created through ritual, not decree. This isn’t nostalgia for a lost faith—it’s a radical invitation to rethink our own world: what if we stopped dividing people by identity and instead focused on the relationships we maintain—with each other, with the unseen, and with the sacred in the everyday? The book’s core insight is that enchantment wasn’t primitive—it was deeply relational.