One route to understanding the nature of specifically religious violence is the study of past conflicts. Distinguished ancient historian Brent D. Shaw provides a new analysis of the intense sectarian ...battles between the Catholic and Donatist churches of North Africa in late antiquity, in which Augustine played a central role as Bishop of Hippo. The development and deployment of images of hatred, including that of the heretic, the pagan, and the Jew, and the modes by which these were most effectively employed, including the oral world of the sermon, were critical to promoting acts of violence. Shaw explores how the emerging ecclesiastical structures of the Christian church, on one side, and those of the Roman imperial state, on the other, interacted to repress or excite violent action. Finally, the meaning and construction of the acts themselves, including the Western idea of suicide, are shown to emerge from the conflict itself.
In analysing matters as diverse as state financing, strategic planning, public benefactions and long-term credit in private business transactions, the historian is faced with an underlying problem ...about the perceptions of time. One aspect of this problem is the manner in which pictures of a complex future are reflected in the behaviour of agents engaged in these activities. The manner in which actions were (or were not) taken by them suggests a peculiar configuration of future time in the Roman world. It is speculatively argued that perspectives on the future had analogies with the different ways in which a sense of depth was created by artists working on a two-dimensional space and with the contextual ways in which spatial perspective was employed.
A conventional certainty is that the first state-driven persecution of Christians happened in the reign of Nero and that it involved the deaths of Peter and Paul, and the mass execution of Christians ...in the aftermath of the great fire of July 64 c.e. The argument here contests all of these facts, especially the general execution personally ordered by Nero. The only source for this event is a brief passage in the historian Tacitus. Although the passage is probably genuine Tacitus, it reflects ideas and connections prevalent at the time the historian was writing and not the realities of the 60s.
Bringing in the sheaves Shaw, Brent
Bringing in the sheaves,
c2013, 20121030, 2013, 2012-01-01, 2013-02-27
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The work features an edition of the reaper inscription, and a commentary on it. It is also lavishly illustrated to demonstrate the important iconic and pictorial dimensions of the story.
In this cursory response, the author reflect on the hard work done by the three colleagues on whose articles he is commenting. Their investigations have contributed to a better understanding of the ...complex academic and professional background of a man who was surely one of the more influential historians of Greek and Roman antiquity writing in the latter half of the twentieth century. So it is to these colleagues that the reader should pay most attention. His first observation made in reflecting on the detailed recountings of one individual's past -- ordered details that produce an apparently sensible and logical narrative -- is to see less conscious and perhaps seemingly trivial factors in the making of the professional historian. These are easily ignored, but their long-term and situational impact was sometimes great. Finley seems to have come out of his wartime experience as a different public person, deliberately set on a new trajectory. By autumn 1946, along with other members of his family, he changed his name.
If Frankfurter usefully draws attention to Van Gennep's categories, then I would like to draw attention to the significant studies of María Victoria Uribe on the Colombian Violencia-especially ...because these episodes of violence were frequently denounced as crazed and irrational or just plain insane.15 But the modes of enforcement, in which various parts of the body were cut, sliced, dissected, disemboweled, scalped, egorged, restuffed, and violently reshaped in other ways, were meant to signal things to the living witnesses and to the deceased. In the communication of violence, say in the narratives of the martyrs, what kinds of transformations took place in its picturing and representation? Since we find the bishops constantly re-interpreting their meanings for their parishioners, it cannot be that their significance was somehow manifest. Mia Bloom, Dying to Kill: The Allure of Suicide Terror (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005); Robert A. Pape, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (New York: Random House, 2005); Robert A. Pape and James K. Feldman, Cutting the Fuse: The Explosion of Global Suicide Terrorism and How to Stop It (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); Cristoph Reuter, My Life is a Weapon: A Modern History of Suicide Bombing (Princeton, NJ: R. Glenchill, "Churches Raided in Zimbabwe for Opposing Disgraced Bishop," Times Online, January 14, 2008; BBC Radio News, evening broadcast, December 17, 2012; C. W. Dugger, "Zimbabwe's Rulers Unleash Police on Anglicans," The New York Times, May 16, 2008; T. Presler, "Woman Age 89 Murdered for Loyalty to Harare Diocese," TitusOnMission, February 20, 2011; S. Nyaira, "Conflict in Zimbabwe Anglican Church Hits Low as Parishioner Denied Burial," VOANews, April 11, 2011; "Zimbabwe Anglican Church Appeals Property Ruling to Constitutional Court," VOANews, August 26, 2011; B. Hungwe, "Archbishop Will Find Zimbabwe Church in Chaos," BBC News Online, September 8, 2011; T. Karimakwenda, "Zimbabwe: Kunonga Faction Resists Eviction in Some Parishes," All Africa, November 28, 2012); E. Tree, "Problems Facing the Church in Zimbabwe," The London Evening Post, December 1 and 2, 2012), among many such reports, all online. 10.
Revolutionary new concepts of bryophyte relationships have emerged from molecular phylogenetic analyses conducted since the onset of the 21st century. For example, sequence data contradict the ...historical notion that isophylly in leafy liverworts is plesiomorphic and that simple thalloid liverworts are monophyletic. Also contrary to traditional views are the concepts that Leiosporoceros is genetically distinct from other hornworts and that Oedipodium is sister to the peristomate mosses. Substantial increases in ultrastructural and anatomical data likewise have provided new insights on interrelationships. Because of this recent deluge in evolutionary studies on bryophytes, it is an opportune time to co-examine contemporary morphological knowledge and novel molecular hypotheses. An understanding of bryophyte evolution and biology is essential to identify structural innovations that accompanied early land colonization and to illuminate the evolution of more complicated body plans in tracheophytes. In this review, we examine the progress that has been made since the 1999 International Botanical Congress in clarifying the evolutionary history of the three groups of bryophytes. The state of our knowledge on interrelationships is discussed, with poorly-known, genetically divergent taxa illustrated for each group. Our review of bryophyte evolution includes a reëvaluation of the evolution of sperm cells, sporogenesis, stomata, symbioses, conducting cells and chloroplast ultrastructure in hornworts. We explore the prospects for future discoveries and advances with an emphasis on fundamental evolutionary problems that remain and the challenges that must be met to resolve them.
The following investigation considers three different historical cases that involved the siege of a dissident Christian community by the armed forces of the state. It is an exercise in comparative ...history. The incidents concerned are the siege of the Donatist basilica at Timgad in the year 419 by the forces of the late Roman state, the siege of dissident monasteries in seventeenth-century Muscovy in the year 1687–88 by forces of Romanov Muscovy, and the modern-day siege of the Branch Davidian site at Mount Carmel near Waco, TX, in 1993. These cases are investigated in order to delineate some of the common and diverging elements in the armed involvement of premodern and modern states in religious conflicts. The description and analysis is focused on the nature of the difference between premodern and modern states in their response to demands that they undertake coercive action against targeted religious groups. A particular concern of the paper is with the different ways in which structural salience—the jumping of violence from one level of the state to the next—happens, and how.
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