The Temporality of Festivals: Approaches to Festive Time in Ancient Babylon, Greece, Rome, and Medieval China

How can time become festive? How do festivals manage to make time ‘special’, to mark out a certain day or days, to distinguish them from ‘normal’, everyday time, and to fill them with meaning? And how can we reconstruct what festive time looked like in the past and what people thought about it?

While a lot of research has been done on festivals from the point of view of several scholarly disciplines, the specific temporality of festivals has not yet attracted sufficient attention. In this ...