Charlemagne is often claimed as the greatest ruler in Europe before Napoleon. This magisterial study re-examines Charlemagne the ruler and his reputation. It analyses the narrative representations of ...Charlemagne produced after his death, and thereafter focuses on the evidence from Charlemagne's lifetime concerning the creation of the Carolingian dynasty and the growth of the kingdom, the court and the royal household, communications and identities in the Frankish realm in the context of government, and Charlemagne's religious and cultural strategies. The book offers a critical examination of the contemporary sources and in so doing transforms our understanding of the development of the Carolingian empire, the formation of Carolingian political identity, and the astonishing changes effected throughout Charlemagne's forty-six year period of rule. This is a major contribution to Carolingian history which will be essential reading for anyone interested in the medieval past. Rosamond McKitterick has also received the 2010 Dr A. H. Heineken Prize for History for her research into the Carolingians.
How encounters with the Roman Empire compelled the Jews
of antiquity to rethink their conceptions of Israel and the
Torah Throughout their history, Jews have lived under a
succession of imperial ...powers, from Assyria and Babylonia to Persia
and the Hellenistic kingdoms. Jews and Their Roman Rivals
shows how the Roman Empire posed a unique challenge to Jewish
thinkers such as Philo, Josephus, and the Palestinian rabbis, who
both resisted and internalized Roman standards and imperial
ideology. Katell Berthelot traces how, long before the empire
became Christian, Jews came to perceive Israel and Rome as rivals
competing for supremacy. Both considered their laws to be the most
perfect ever written, and both believed they were a most pious
people who had been entrusted with a divine mission to bring order
and peace to the world. Berthelot argues that the rabbinic
identification of Rome with Esau, Israel's twin brother, reflected
this sense of rivalry. She discusses how this challenge transformed
ancient Jewish ideas about military power and the use of force, law
and jurisdiction, and membership in the people of Israel. Berthelot
argues that Jewish thinkers imitated the Romans in some cases and
proposed competing models in others. Shedding new light on Jewish
thought in antiquity, Jews and Their Roman Rivals reveals
how Jewish encounters with pagan Rome gave rise to crucial
evolutions in the ways Jews conceptualized the Torah and conversion
to Judaism.
For a graph G=(V,E) with V=V(G) and E=E(G), a Roman {3}-dominating function is a function f:V→{0,1,2,3} having the property that ∑u∈NG(v)f(u)≥3, if f(v)=0, and ∑u∈NG(v)f(u)≥2, if f(v)=1 for any ...vertex v∈G. The weight of a Roman {3}-dominating function f is the sum f(V)=∑v∈V(G)f(v) and the minimum weight of a Roman {3}-dominating function on G is the Roman {3}-domination number of G, denoted by γ{R3}(G). We initiate the study of Roman {3}-domination and show its relationship to domination, Roman domination, Roman {2}-domination (Italian domination) and double Roman domination. Finally, we present an upper bound on the Roman {3}-domination number of a connected graph G in terms of the order of G and characterize the graphs attaining this bound. Finally, we show that associated decision problem for Roman {3}-domination is NP-complete, even for bipartite graphs.
This book examines how Romans used their pottery and the implications of these practices on the archaeological record. It is organized around a flow model for the life cycle of Roman pottery that ...includes a set of eight distinct practices: manufacture, distribution, prime use, reuse, maintenance, recycling, discard, reclamation. J. Theodore Peña evaluates how these practices operated, how they have shaped the archaeological record, and the implications of these processes on archaeological research through the examination of a wide array of archaeological, textual, representational and comparative ethnographic evidence. The result is a rich portrayal of the dynamic that shaped the archaeological record of the ancient Romans that will be of interest to archaeologists, ceramicists, and students of material culture.
Why do spies have such cachet in the twentieth century? Why do they keep reinventing themselves? What do they mean in a political process? This book examines the tradition of the spy narrative from ...its inception in the late nineteenth century through the present day. Ranging from John le Carré's bestsellers to Elizabeth Bowen's novels, from James Bond to John Banville's contemporary narratives, Allan Hepburn sets the historical contexts of these fictions: the Cambridge spy ring; the Profumo Affair; the witch-hunts against gay men in the civil service and diplomatic corps in the 1950s.
Instead of focusing on the formulaic nature of the genre,Intrigueemphasizes the responsiveness of spy stories to particular historical contingencies. Hepburn begins by offering a systematic theory of the conventions and attractions of espionage fiction and then examines the British and Irish tradition of spy novels. A final section considers the particular form that American spy narratives have taken as they have cross-fertilized with the tradition of American romance in works such as Joan Didion'sDemocracyand John Barth'sSabbatical.
This exciting new study draws on objects excavated or discovered in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century at three Mediterranean sites. Through the three case studies,Materia ...Magicaidentifies specific forms of magic that may be otherwise unknown. It isolates the practitioners of magic and examines whether magic could be used as a form of countercultural resistance. Andrew T. Wilburn discovers magic in the objects of ancient daily life, suggesting that individuals frequently turned to magic, particularly in crises. Local forms of magic may have differed, and Wilburn proposes that the only way we can find small-town sorcerers is through careful examination of the archaeological evidence.
Studying the remains of spells enacted by practitioners, Wilburn's work unites the analysis of the words written on artifacts and the physical form of these objects. He situates these items within their contexts, to study how and why they were used.Materia Magicaapproaches magic as a material endeavor, in which spoken spells, ritual actions, and physical objects all played vital roles in the performance of a rite.
Materia Magicadevelops a new method for identifying and interpreting the material remains of magical practice by assessing artifacts within their archaeological contexts. Wilburn suggests that excavations undertaken in recent centuries can yield important lessons about the past, and he articulates the ways in which we can approach problematic data.
In this first book-length study of imperial villages, Beat Kümin provides unprecedented insights into the micro-political cultures of rural communities and popular desires for local autonomy in the ...pre-modern German lands.
The Holy Roman Empire was one of the oldest and largest states in early modern Europe. This book breaks new ground in its collective exploration of the Empire's political and diplomatic, social and ...cultural relations and of transnational interactions.
The slave experience was a defining one in American history, and not surprisingly, has been a significant and powerful trope in African American literature. In Re-Forming the Past, A. Timothy ...Spaulding examines contemporary revisions of slave narratives that use elements of the fantastic to redefine the historical and literary constructions of American slavery. In their rejection of mimetic representation and traditional historiography, postmodern slave narratives such as Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada, Octavia Butler’s Kindred, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Charles Johnson’s Ox Herding Tale and Middle Passage, Jewelle Gomez’s The Gilda Stories, and Samuel Delaney’s Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand set out to counter the usual slave narrative’s reliance on realism and objectivity by creating alternative histories based on subjective, fantastic, and non-realistic representations of slavery. As these texts critique traditional conceptions of history, identity, and aesthetic form, they simultaneously re-invest these concepts with a political agency that harkens back to the original project of the 19th-century slave narratives. In their rejection of mimetic representation and traditional historiography, Spaulding contextualizes postmodern slave narrative. By addressing both literary and popular African American texts, Re-Forming the Past expands discussions of both the African American literary tradition and postmodern culture.
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