After Antiquity

After Antiquity PDF Author: Margaret Alexiou
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801433016
Category : Byzantine literature
Languages : en
Pages : 604

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Book Description
With the publication of Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition, widely considered a classic in Modern Greek studies and in collateral fields, Margaret Alexiou established herself as a major intellectual innovator on the interconnections among ancient, medieval, and modern Greek cultures. In her new, eagerly awaited book, Alexiou looks at how language defines the contours of myth and metaphor. Drawing on texts from the New Testament to the present day, Alexiou shows the diversity of the Greek language and its impact at crucial stages of its history on people who were not Greek. She then stipulates the relatedness of literary and "folk" genres, and assesses the importance of rituals and metaphors of the life cycle in shaping narrative forms and systems of imagery.Alexiou places special emphasis on Byzantine literary texts of the sixth and twelfth centuries, providing her own translations where necessary; modern poetry and prose of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and narrative songs and tales in the folk tradition, which she analyzes alongside songs of the life cycle. She devotes particular attention to two genres whose significance she thinks has been much underrated: the tales (paramythia) and the songs of love and marriage.In exploring the relationship between speech and ritual, Alexiou not only takes the Greek language into account but also invokes the neurological disorder of autism, drawing on clinical studies and her own experience as the mother of autistic identical twin sons.

After Antiquity

After Antiquity PDF Author: Margaret Alexiou
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801433016
Category : Byzantine literature
Languages : en
Pages : 604

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Book Description
With the publication of Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition, widely considered a classic in Modern Greek studies and in collateral fields, Margaret Alexiou established herself as a major intellectual innovator on the interconnections among ancient, medieval, and modern Greek cultures. In her new, eagerly awaited book, Alexiou looks at how language defines the contours of myth and metaphor. Drawing on texts from the New Testament to the present day, Alexiou shows the diversity of the Greek language and its impact at crucial stages of its history on people who were not Greek. She then stipulates the relatedness of literary and "folk" genres, and assesses the importance of rituals and metaphors of the life cycle in shaping narrative forms and systems of imagery.Alexiou places special emphasis on Byzantine literary texts of the sixth and twelfth centuries, providing her own translations where necessary; modern poetry and prose of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and narrative songs and tales in the folk tradition, which she analyzes alongside songs of the life cycle. She devotes particular attention to two genres whose significance she thinks has been much underrated: the tales (paramythia) and the songs of love and marriage.In exploring the relationship between speech and ritual, Alexiou not only takes the Greek language into account but also invokes the neurological disorder of autism, drawing on clinical studies and her own experience as the mother of autistic identical twin sons.

Ethnography After Antiquity

Ethnography After Antiquity PDF Author: Anthony Kaldellis
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812208404
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
Although Greek and Roman authors wrote ethnographic texts describing foreign cultures, ethnography seems to disappear from Byzantine literature after the seventh century C.E.—a perplexing exception for a culture so strongly self-identified with the Roman empire. Yet the Byzantines, geographically located at the heart of the upheavals that led from the ancient to the modern world, had abundant and sophisticated knowledge of the cultures with which they struggled and bargained. Ethnography After Antiquity examines both the instances and omissions of Byzantine ethnography, exploring the political and religious motivations for writing (or not writing) about other peoples. Through the ethnographies embedded in classical histories, military manuals, Constantine VII's De administrando imperio, and religious literature, Anthony Kaldellis shows Byzantine authors using accounts of foreign cultures as vehicles to critique their own state or to demonstrate Romano-Christian superiority over Islam. He comes to the startling conclusion that the Byzantines did not view cultural differences through a purely theological prism: their Roman identity, rather than their orthodoxy, was the vital distinction from cultures they considered heretic and barbarian. Filling in the previously unexplained gap between antiquity and the resurgence of ethnography in the late Byzantine period, Ethnography After Antiquity offers new perspective on how Byzantium positioned itself with and against the dramatically shifting world.

Ephesus After Antiquity

Ephesus After Antiquity PDF Author: Clive Foss
Publisher: CUP Archive
ISBN:
Category : Ephesus (Extinct city)
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description


RULING THE LATER ROMAN EMPIRE P

RULING THE LATER ROMAN EMPIRE P PDF Author: Christopher KELLY
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674039459
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
In this highly original work, Christopher Kelly paints a remarkable picture of running a superstate. He portrays a complex system of government openly regulated by networks of personal influence and the payment of money. Focusing on the Roman Empire after Constantine's conversion to Christianity, Kelly illuminates a period of increasingly centralized rule through an ever more extensive and intrusive bureaucracy. The book opens with a view of its times through the eyes of a high-ranking official in sixth-century Constantinople, John Lydus. His On the Magistracies of the Roman State, the only memoir of its kind to come down to us, gives an impassioned and revealing account of his career and the system in which he worked. Kelly draws a wealth of insight from this singular memoir and goes on to trace the operation of power and influence, exposing how these might be successfully deployed or skillfully diverted by those wishing either to avoid government regulation or to subvert it for their own ends. Ruling the Later Roman Empire presents a fascinating procession of officials, emperors, and local power brokers, winners and losers, mapping their experiences, their conflicting loyalties, their successes, and their failures. This important book elegantly recaptures the experience of both rulers and ruled under a sophisticated and highly successful system of government.

Hospitals and Healing from Antiquity to the Later Middle Ages

Hospitals and Healing from Antiquity to the Later Middle Ages PDF Author: Peregrine Horden
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 100094011X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 351

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Book Description
The first part of this collection brings together a selection of Peregrine Horden's papers on the history of hospitals and related institutions of welfare provision from their origins in Late Antiquity to their medieval flourishing in Byzantium and the Islamic lands as well as in western Europe. The hospital is seen in a variety of original contexts, from demography and family history to the history of music and the liturgy. The second part turns to the history of healing and medicine, outside the hospital as well as within it. These studies cover a period from Hippocratic times to the Renaissance, but with a particular focus on the Mediterranean region - Byzantine, Middle Eastern and Western - in the Middle Ages.

Life in an Egyptian Village in Late Antiquity

Life in an Egyptian Village in Late Antiquity PDF Author: Giovanni Ruffini
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107105609
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 245

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Book Description
The most detailed glimpse to date of daily life in a small town at the end of the Roman Empire.

Ephesus After Antiquity

Ephesus After Antiquity PDF Author: Clive Foss
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521220866
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
Professor Foss charts the fluctuations of Ephesus from the tenth to the nineteenth centuries.

The Perpetual Immigrant and the Limits of Athenian Democracy

The Perpetual Immigrant and the Limits of Athenian Democracy PDF Author: Demetra Kasimis
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107052432
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
Argues that immigration politics is a central - but overlooked - object of inquiry in the democratic thought of classical Athens. Thinkers criticized democracy's strategic investments in nativism, the shifting boundaries of citizenship, and the precarious membership that a blood-based order effects for those eligible and ineligible to claim it.

Readings in Late Antiquity

Readings in Late Antiquity PDF Author: Michael Maas
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0415473365
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 530

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Book Description
This volume seeks to make accessible to students a multiplicity of texts which illuminate the history, culture, medicine, philosophy, religion and peoples of late antiquity.

Race

Race PDF Author: Denise Eileen McCoskey
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0755697855
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 323

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Book Description
How do different cultures think about race? In the modern era, racial distinctiveness has been assessed primarily in terms of a person's physical appearance. But it was not always so. As Denise McCoskey shows, the ancient Greeks and Romans did not use skin colour as the basis for categorising ethnic disparity. The colour of one's skin lies at the foundation of racial variability today because it was used during the heyday of European exploration and colonialism to construct a hierarchy of civilizations and then justify slavery and other forms of economic exploitation. Assumptions about race thus have to take into account factors other than mere physiognomy. This is particularly true in relation to the classical world. In fifth century Athens, racial theory during the Persian Wars produced the categories 'Greek' and 'Barbarian', and set them in brutal opposition to one another: a process that could be as intense and destructive as 'black and 'white' in our own age. Ideas about race in antiquity were therefore completely distinct but as closely bound to political and historical contexts as those that came later. This provocative book boldly explores the complex matrices of race - and the differing interpretations of ancient and modern - across epic, tragedy and the novel. Ranging from Theocritus to Toni Morrison, and from Tacitus and Pliny to Bernal's seminal study Black Athena, this is a powerful and original new assessment.