Samuel P. Müller offers here the first book-length study of the image of Latins in Byzantine historiography of the long twelfth century, arguing that this image is more complex and ambivalent than ...often claimed.
Over the past few decades, there has been a significant amount of research on the Roman Lower Danube frontier by international teams focusing on individual forts or broader landscape survey work; ...collectively, this volume represents the best of this collaboration with the aim of elevating the Lower Danube within broader Roman frontier scholarship.
The Lower Danube, running between Singidunum (modern Belgrade) and Halmyris in the Danube Delta, was one of the most densely fortified regions of the Roman Empire. The region has long been a border zone, today forming part of the border between Serbia and Romania, and the majority of the border between Romania and Bulgaria. Despite its importance for understanding both Roman frontier policy and the relationship between ancient and modern borderscapes, the region has not yet made its full contribution to international Roman scholarship. Bridging the theoretical divide that exists between different regional research traditions, chapters in this volume focus on sites like Ratiaria, in modern north-western Bulgaria, while other contributors examine the complex landscape from a wider perspective oriented around roads, temporary camps, or early Christian sites. The Roman Lower Danube Frontier emphasises the importance of engaging with Roman frontier landscapes, particularly in regions such as East-Central Europe, where they remain part of a contemporary borderscape.
The present volume collects most of the contributions to the plenary sessions held at the 24th International Congress of Byzantine Studies, and incisively reflects the ever increasing broadening of ...the very concept of ‘Byzantine Studies’. Indeed, a particularly salient characteristic of the papers presented here is their strong focus on interdisciplinarity and their breadth of scope, both in terms of methodology and content. The cross-pollination between different fields of Byzantine Studies is also a major point of the volume. Archaeology and art history have pride of place; it is especially in archaeological papers that one can grasp the vital importance of the interaction with the so-called hard sciences and with new technologies for contemporary research. This relevance of science and technology for archaeology, however, also applies to, and have significant repercussions in, historical studies, where – for example – the study of climate change or the application of specific software to network studies are producing a major renewal of knowledge. In more traditional subject fields, like literary, political, and intellectual history, the contributions to the present volume offer some important reflections on the connection between Byzantium and other cultures and peoples through the intermediary of texts, stories, diplomacy, trade, and war.
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, German clockwork automata were collected, displayed, and given as gifts throughout the Holy Roman, Ottoman, and Mughal Empires. In Animating Empire , ...Jessica Keating recounts the lost history of six such objects and reveals the religious, social, and political meaning they held.
The intricate gilt, silver, enameled, and bejeweled clockwork automata, almost exclusively crafted in the city of Augsburg, represented a variety of subjects in motion, from religious figures to animals. Their movements were driven by gears, wheels, and springs painstakingly assembled by clockmakers. Typically wound up and activated by someone in a position of power, these objects and the theological and political arguments they made were highly valued by German-speaking nobility. They were often given as gifts and as tribute payment, and they played remarkable roles in the Holy Roman Empire, particularly with regard to courtly notions about the important early modern issues of universal Christian monarchy, the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, the encroachment of the Ottoman Empire, and global trade.
Demonstrating how automata produced in the Holy Roman Empire spoke to a convergence of historical, religious, and political circumstances, Animating Empire is a fascinating analysis of the animation of inanimate matter in the early modern period. It will appeal especially to art historians and historians of early modern Europe.
E-book editions have been made possible through support of the Art History Publication Initiative (AHPI), a collaborative grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Many early novels were cosmopolitan books, read from London to Leipzig and beyond, available in nearly simultaneous translations into French, English, German, and other European languages. InNovel ...Translations, Bethany Wiggins charts just one of the paths by which newness-in its avatars as fashion, novelties, and the novel-entered the European world in the decades around 1700. As readers across Europe snapped up novels, they domesticated the genre. Across borders, the novel lent readers everywhere a suggestion of sophistication, a familiarity with circumstances beyond their local ken.
Into the eighteenth century, the modern German novel was not German at all; rather, it was French, as suggested by Germans' usage of the French word Roman to describe a wide variety of genres: pastoral romances, war and travel chronicles, heroic narratives, and courtly fictions. Carried in large part on the coattails of the Huguenot diaspora, these romans, nouvelles, amours secrets, histoires galantes, and histories scandaleuses shaped German literary culture to a previously unrecognized extent. Wiggin contends that this French chapter in the German novel's history began to draw to a close only in the 1720s, more than sixty years after the word first migrated into German. Only gradually did the Roman go native; it remained laden with the baggage from its "French" origins even into the nineteenth century.
Richard Hingley here asks the questions: What is Romanization? Was Rome the first global culture? Romanization has been represented as a simple progression from barbarism to civilization. Roman forms ...in architecture, coinage, language and literature came to dominate the world from Britain to Syria. Hingley argues for a more complex and nuanced view in which Roman models provided the means for provincial elites to articulate their own concerns. Inhabitants of the Roman provinces were able to develop identities they never knew they had until Rome gave them the language to express them. Hingley draws together the threads of diverse and separate study, in one sophisticated theoretical framework that spans the whole Roman Empire. Students of Rome and those with an interest in classical cultural studies will find this an invaluable mine of information.
'A valuable addition to the scholarly literature.' - BMCR
'The explicit recognition of the complex relationship between past and present is one of the book's many strengths... a sophisticated and nuanced picture of 'Roman' identities... this book will do much to set the tone for a new generation of studies of the Roman World.' - Britannia
Specialist in Roman studies, with a particular focus upon Roman imperialism and the context of Roman research. Lecturer in Roman archaeology at the University of Durham. Author of Roman Officers and English Gentleman (Routledge 2000) and Images of Rome (Journal of Roman Archaeology, 2001).
Drawing on vital new evidence, a top historian dramatically reinterprets the ruler of the world's first transatlantic empireThe life of Emperor Charles V (1500-1558), ruler of Spain, Germany, the ...Netherlands, and much of Italy and Central and South America, has long intrigued biographers. But the elusive nature of the man (despite an abundance of documentation), his relentless travel and the control of his own image, together with the complexity of governing the world's first transatlantic empire, complicate the task. Geoffrey Parker, one of the world's leading historians of early modern Europe, has examined the surviving written sources in Dutch, French, German, Italian, Latin, and Spanish, as well as visual and material evidence. He explores the crucial decisions that created and preserved this vast empire, analyzes Charles's achievements within the context of both personal and structural factors, and scrutinizes the intimate details of the ruler's life for clues to his character and inclinations. The result is a unique biography that interrogates every dimension of Charles's reign and views the world through the emperor's own eyes.
The ancient Romans changed more than the map of the world when they conquered so much of it; they altered the way historical time itself is marked and understood. In this brilliant, erudite, and ...exhilarating book Denis Feeney investigates time and its contours as described by the ancient Romans, first as Rome positioned itself in relation to Greece and then as it exerted its influence as a major world power. Feeney welcomes the reader into a world where time was movable and changeable and where simply ascertaining a date required a complex and often contentious cultural narrative. In a style that is lucid, fluent, and graceful, he investigates the pertinent systems, including the Roman calendar (which is still our calendar) and its near perfect method of capturing the progress of natural time; the annual rhythm of consular government; the plotting of sacred time onto sacred space; the forging of chronological links to the past; and, above all, the experience of empire, by which the Romans meshed the city state’s concept of time with those of the foreigners they encountered to establish a new worldwide web of time. Because this web of time was Greek before the Romans transformed it, the book is also a remarkable study in the cross-cultural interaction between the Greek and Roman worlds.
The fourteen chapters of this e-book examine Roman dance by looking at its role in Roman religion, by following it into the theatre and the banquet hall, and by tracing its (metaphorical) presence in ...a variety of literary contexts, including rhetorical treatises, biography, and lyric poetry. These different approaches, which draw on literary texts, inscriptions, documentary papyri, the visual record, and modern reperformances, converge in illustrating a rich and vibrant dance culture which prided itself on indigenous dances no less than on its capacity to absorb, transform, or revive the dance traditions of their Etruscan or Greek neighbours. Dance was a cultural practice which was able to affirm Romanness, for instance in the case of the Salian priests, but also to raise the question of what was Roman in the first place, for instance when the originally Greek pantomime was embraced by Augustus and came to be known as "Italian style of dancing". Together the fourteen case studies offer fresh perspectives on an underexplored topic, shedding light on the manifold contexts, functions, practitioners, and appreciations of Roman dance.
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