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.
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).
This is the first English translation of the main contemporary accounts of the Crusade and death of the German Frederick I Barbarossa (ruled 1152-90). The most important of these, the 'History of the ...Expedition of the Emperor Frederick' was written soon after the events described, and is a crucial, and under-used source for the Third Crusade (at least in the Anglophone world). The account begins with two letters describing the disaster of Hattin and Saladin's subsequent conquest of most of the Holy Land (the second of these is addressed to the duke of Austria). It goes on to describe how the emperor took the Cross, the preparations and recruitment for the Crusade, the diplomatic contacts of Barbarossa with the Byzantine Emperor and the Sultan of Iconium in an attempt to secure a peaceful passage for the expedition, and the Crusade itself: the journey through the Balkans and the gruelling march through Asia Minor, beset by Turkish attack, until its arrival at Antioch on 21st July 1190, eleven days after the emperor had drowned while crossing a river in Cilician Armenia. The 'History' gives a vivid account of the sufferings of the German army as it traversed Asia Minor. The account of the expedition itself appears to be, or to be based upon an eyewitness record, cast in the form of (often) a daily memoir. However, it concludes with an account of the captivity and release of Richard I in Germany, Henry VI's conquest of the kingdom of Sicily, and of the preparations for a new Crusade under his leadership. In addition, a number of further accounts related to, and expanding, the 'History of the Expedition' have also been translated, including a contemporary newsletter about the death of the emperor, as well as the narrative of Otto of St Blasien, placing the Crusade into context twenty years later, and a contemporary account of the capture of Silves in Portugal by German crusaders on their way to the Holy Land in 1189. This collection is a valuable companion volume t
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.
In this study intended for general readers, eminent critic Patricia Meyer Spacks provides a fresh, engaging account of the early history of the English novel.Novel Beginningsdeparts from the ...traditional, narrow focus on the development of the realistic novel to emphasize the many kinds of experimentation that marked the genre in the eighteenth century before its conventions were firmly established in the nineteenth. Treating well-known works likeTom JonesandTristram Shandyin conjunction with less familiar texts such as Sarah Fielding'sThe Cry(a kind of hybrid novel and play) and Jane Barker'sA Patch-Work Screen for the Ladies(a novel of adventure replete with sentimental verse and numerous subnarratives), the book evokes the excitement of a multifaceted and unpredictable process of growth and change.Investigating fiction throughout the 1700s, Spacks delineates the individuality of specific texts while suggesting connections among novels. She sketches a wide range of forms and themes, including Providential narratives, psychological thrillers, romans à clef, sentimental parables, political allegories, Gothic romances, and many others. These multiple narrative experiments show the impossibility of thinking of eighteenth-century fiction simply as a precursor to the nineteenth-century novel, Spacks shows. Instead, the vast variety of engagements with the problems of creating fiction demonstrates that literary history-by no means inexorable-might have taken quite a different course.
This is a ground-breaking philosophical-historical study of the work of Galen of Pergamum. It contains four case-studies on (1) Galen’s remarkable and original thoughts on the relation between body ...and soul, (2) his notion of human nature, (3) his engagement with Plato’s Timaeus, (4) and black bile and melancholy. It shows that Galen develops an innovative view of human nature that problematizes the distinction between body and soul.
The present volume contains papers on Origen and the history of his reception which were presented at a series of workshops at the Eighteenth International Conference on Patristic Studies held at ...Oxford in August 2019. They provide multifarious insights into various aspects of Origen’s thought and his impact on different topics of theology, exegesis and philosophy from Late Antiquity to Early Modern Times. By connecting the Alexandrian’s legacy with recent developments in Patristics and Classics, they open up new perspectives for Origen scholarship in the new millenium. Research on Origen can be connected with studies, e.g., on rhetoric and power, on individuality and diversity, on gender and equality issues, on determinism and freedom and on questions of cultural transfer and transformation. The contributions to this volume can thus be taken as starting points for future studies on Origen within the broader context of contemporary research in science and the humanities.
Ruth Perry describes the transformation of the English family as a function of several major social changes taking place in the eighteenth century including the development of a market economy and ...waged labor, enclosure and the redistribution of land, urbanization, the 'rise' of the middle class, and the development of print culture. In particular, Perry traces the shift from a kinship orientation based on blood relations to a kinship axis constituted by conjugal ties as it is revealed in popular literature of the second half of the eighteenth century. Perry focuses particularly on the effect these changes had on women's position in families. She uses social history, literary analysis and anthropological kinship theory to examine texts by Samuel Richardson, Charlotte Lennox, Henry MacKenzie, Frances Burney, Jane Austen, and many others. This important study by a leading eighteenth-century scholar will be of interest to social and literary historians.
