This book offers a thorough analysis of demons in the Hebrew Bible and Septuagint in the wider context of the ancient Near East and the Greek world. Taking a fresh and innovative angle of enquiry, ...Anna Angelini investigates continuities and changes in the representation of divine powers in Hellenistic Judaism, thereby revealing the role of the Greek translation of the Bible in shaping ancient demonology, angelology, and pneumatology. Combining philological and semantic analyses with a historical approach and anthropological insights, the author both develops a new method for analyzing religious categories within biblical traditions and sheds new light on the importance of the Septuagint for the history of ancient Judaism.; Readership:
Monsters, grotesque creatures, and giants were frequently depicted in Italian Renaissance landscape design, yet they have rarely been studied. Their ubiquity indicates that gardens of the period ...conveyed darker, more disturbing themes than has been acknowledged.
InThe Monster in the Garden, Luke Morgan argues that the monster is a key figure in Renaissance culture. Monsters were ciphers for contemporary anxieties about normative social life and identity. Drawing on sixteenth-century medical, legal, and scientific texts, as well as recent scholarship on monstrosity, abnormality, and difference in early modern Europe, he considers the garden within a broader framework of inquiry. Developing a new conceptual model of Renaissance landscape design, Morgan argues that the presence of monsters was not incidental but an essential feature of the experience of gardens.
Tolkien scholars have long studied the many connections between Beowulf and J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit. This essay explores the novel's representation of heroism and monstrousness and the ideal of ...kingship in relation to the Old English poem. Parallel descriptions between heroes and monsters illustrate that neither Beowulf nor Thorin is immune to monstrousness, but analyzing their actions in light of Hrothgar's advice to Beowulf illustrates that both characters distinguish themselves as great kings and heroes. Moreover, how these characters resist evil varies greatly and reveals a core distinction between the Beowulfian and Tolkienian hero, and even highlights the importance of hope in Tolkien's works and his emphasis on what he termed eucatastrophe, rather than the elegiac tone of Beowulf.
The aim of this book is to explore the realm of the imaginary world of Greek mythology and present the reader with a categorization of monstrosity, referring to some of the most noted examples in ...each category.
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