The First Pagan Historian

The First Pagan Historian PDF Author: Frederic Clark
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197540724
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 367

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Book Description
In The History of the Destruction of Troy, Dares the Phrygian boldly claimed to be an eyewitness to the Trojan War, while challenging the accounts of two of the ancient world's most canonical poets, Homer and Virgil. For over a millennium, Dares' work was circulated as the first pagan history. It promised facts and only facts about what really happened at Troy — precise casualty figures, no mention of mythical phenomena, and a claim that Troy fell when Aeneas and other Trojans betrayed their city and opened its gates to the Greeks. But for all its intrigue, the work was as fake as it was sensational. From the late antique encyclopedist Isidore of Seville to Thomas Jefferson, The First Pagan Historian offers the first comprehensive account of Dares' rise and fall as a reliable and canonical guide to the distant past. Along the way, it reconstructs the central role of forgery in longstanding debates over the nature of history, fiction, criticism, philology, and myth, from ancient Rome to the Enlightenment.

The First Pagan Historian

The First Pagan Historian PDF Author: Frederic Clark
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197540724
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 367

Get Book Here

Book Description
In The History of the Destruction of Troy, Dares the Phrygian boldly claimed to be an eyewitness to the Trojan War, while challenging the accounts of two of the ancient world's most canonical poets, Homer and Virgil. For over a millennium, Dares' work was circulated as the first pagan history. It promised facts and only facts about what really happened at Troy — precise casualty figures, no mention of mythical phenomena, and a claim that Troy fell when Aeneas and other Trojans betrayed their city and opened its gates to the Greeks. But for all its intrigue, the work was as fake as it was sensational. From the late antique encyclopedist Isidore of Seville to Thomas Jefferson, The First Pagan Historian offers the first comprehensive account of Dares' rise and fall as a reliable and canonical guide to the distant past. Along the way, it reconstructs the central role of forgery in longstanding debates over the nature of history, fiction, criticism, philology, and myth, from ancient Rome to the Enlightenment.

The First Pagan Historian

The First Pagan Historian PDF Author: Frederic Clark
Publisher:
ISBN: 0190492309
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 367

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Book Description
The First Pagan Historian offers the first comprehensive account of Dares the Phyrgian, the infamous author of The History of the Destruction of Troy, tracing his afterlife from the late antique encyclopedist Isidore of Seville to Thomas Jefferson. Along the way, it reconstructs Dares' central place in longstanding debates over the nature of history, fiction, criticism, philology, and myth, from ancient Rome to the Enlightenment.

The Final Pagan Generation

The Final Pagan Generation PDF Author: Edward J. Watts
Publisher: University of California Press
ISBN: 0520379225
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
A compelling history of radical transformation in the fourth-century--when Christianity decimated the practices of traditional pagan religion in the Roman Empire. The Final Pagan Generation recounts the fascinating story of the lives and fortunes of the last Romans born before the Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity. Edward J. Watts traces their experiences of living through the fourth century’s dramatic religious and political changes, when heated confrontations saw the Christian establishment legislate against pagan practices as mobs attacked pagan holy sites and temples. The emperors who issued these laws, the imperial officials charged with implementing them, and the Christian perpetrators of religious violence were almost exclusively young men whose attitudes and actions contrasted markedly with those of the earlier generation, who shared neither their juniors’ interest in creating sharply defined religious identities nor their propensity for violent conflict. Watts examines why the "final pagan generation"—born to the old ways and the old world in which it seemed to everyone that religious practices would continue as they had for the past two thousand years—proved both unable to anticipate the changes that imperially sponsored Christianity produced and unwilling to resist them. A compelling and provocative read, suitable for the general reader as well as students and scholars of the ancient world.

The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity

The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity PDF Author: Aby Warburg
Publisher: Getty Publications
ISBN: 9780892365371
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 872

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Book Description
A collection of essays by the art historian Aby Warburg, these essays look beyond iconography to more psychological aspects of artistic creation: the conditions under which art was practised; its social and cultural contexts; and its conceivable historical meaning.

Pagan Britain

Pagan Britain PDF Author: Ronald Hutton
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300198582
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 496

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Book Description
Britain's pagan past, with its mysterious monuments, atmospheric sites, enigmatic artifacts, bloodthirsty legends, and cryptic inscriptions, is both enthralling and perplexing to a resident of the twenty-first century. In this ambitious and thoroughly up-to-date book, Ronald Hutton reveals the long development, rapid suppression, and enduring cultural significance of paganism, from the Paleolithic Era to the coming of Christianity. He draws on an array of recently discovered evidence and shows how new findings have radically transformed understandings of belief and ritual in Britain before the arrival of organized religion. Setting forth a chronological narrative, Hutton along the way makes side visits to explore specific locations of ancient pagan activity. He includes the well-known sacred sites—Stonehenge, Avebury, Seahenge, Maiden Castle, Anglesey—as well as more obscure locations across the mainland and coastal islands. In tireless pursuit of the elusive “why” of pagan behavior, Hutton astonishes with the breadth of his understanding of Britain’s deep past and inspires with the originality of his insights.

A History of Pagan Europe

A History of Pagan Europe PDF Author: Prudence Jones
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136141723
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
The first comprehensive study of its kind, this fully illustrated book establishes Paganism as a persistent force in European history with a profound influence on modern thinking. From the serpent goddesses of ancient Crete to modern nature-worship and the restoration of the indigenous religions of eastern Europe, this wide-ranging book offers a rewarding new perspective of European history. In this definitive study, Prudence Jones and Nigel Pennick draw together the fragmented sources of Europe's native religions and establish the coherence and continuity of the Pagan world vision. Exploring Paganism as it developed from the ancient world through the Celtic and Germanic periods, the authors finally appraise modern Paganism and its apparent causes as well as addressing feminist spirituality, the heritage movement, nature-worship and `deep' ecology This innovative and comprehensive history of European Paganism will provide a stimulating, reliable guide to this popular dimension of religious culture for the academic and the general reader alike.

The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles

The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles PDF Author: Ronald Hutton
Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
ISBN: 9780631172888
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 397

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Book Description
This is the first survey of religious beliefs in the British Isles from the Stone Age to the coming of Christianity. Hutton draws upon a wealth of new data to reveal some important rethinking about Christianization and the decline of paganism.

Pagans in the Early Modern Baltic

Pagans in the Early Modern Baltic PDF Author: Francis Young
Publisher: ARC Humanities Press
ISBN: 9781641894371
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
Sixteenth-century ethnographic accounts of Baltic paganism in English translation for the first time. With a critical introduction placing these texts in the contexts of early modern ethnography, Baltic history, and Reformation religious polemic.

The Triumph of the Moon

The Triumph of the Moon PDF Author: Ronald Hutton
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191622419
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 512

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Book Description
Ronald Hutton is known for his colourful and provocative writings on original subjects. This work is no exception: for the first full-scale scholarly study of the only religion England has ever given the world; that of modern pagan witchcraft, which has now spread from English shores across four continents. Hutton examines the nature of that religion and its development, and offers a microhistory of attitudes to paganism, witchcraft, and magic in British society since 1800. Its pages reveal village cunning folk, Victorian ritual magicians, classicists and archaeologists, leaders of woodcraft and scouting movements, Freemasons, and members of rural secret societies. We also find some of the leading of figures of English literature, from the Romantic poets to W.B. Yeats, D.H. Lawrence, and Robert Graves, as well as the main personalities who have represented pagan witchcraft to the world since 1950. Densely researched, Triumph of the Moon presents an authoritative insight into a hitherto little-known aspect of modern social history.

Pagans and Christians

Pagans and Christians PDF Author: Robin Lane Fox
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 808

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Book Description
The author recreates the world from the second to the fourth century A.D., when the gods of Olympus lost their dominion, and Christianity, with the conversion of Constantine, triumphed in the Mediterranean world.