Women's Ritual Competence in the Greco-Roman Mediterranean

Women's Ritual Competence in the Greco-Roman Mediterranean PDF Author: Matthew Dillon
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1134780524
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
Contributions in this volume demonstrate how, across the ancient Mediterranean and over hundreds of years, women’s rituals intersected with the political, economic, cultural, or religious spheres of their communities in a way that has only recently started to gain sustained academic attention. The volume aims to tease out a number of different approaches and contexts, and to expand existing studies of women in the ancient world as well as scholarship on religious and social history. The contributors face a famously difficult task: ancient authors rarely recorded aspects of women’s lives, including their songs, prophecies, and prayers. Many of the objects women made and used in ritual were perishable and have not survived; certain kinds of ritual objects (lowly undecorated pots, for example) tend not even to be recorded in archaeological reports. However, the broad range of contributions in this volume demonstrates the multiplicity of materials that can be used as evidence – including inscriptions, textiles, ceramics, figurative art, and written sources – and the range of methodologies that can be used, from analysis of texts, images, and material evidence to cognitive and comparative approaches.

Women's Ritual Competence in the Greco-Roman Mediterranean

Women's Ritual Competence in the Greco-Roman Mediterranean PDF Author: Matthew Dillon
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1134780524
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 262

Get Book Here

Book Description
Contributions in this volume demonstrate how, across the ancient Mediterranean and over hundreds of years, women’s rituals intersected with the political, economic, cultural, or religious spheres of their communities in a way that has only recently started to gain sustained academic attention. The volume aims to tease out a number of different approaches and contexts, and to expand existing studies of women in the ancient world as well as scholarship on religious and social history. The contributors face a famously difficult task: ancient authors rarely recorded aspects of women’s lives, including their songs, prophecies, and prayers. Many of the objects women made and used in ritual were perishable and have not survived; certain kinds of ritual objects (lowly undecorated pots, for example) tend not even to be recorded in archaeological reports. However, the broad range of contributions in this volume demonstrates the multiplicity of materials that can be used as evidence – including inscriptions, textiles, ceramics, figurative art, and written sources – and the range of methodologies that can be used, from analysis of texts, images, and material evidence to cognitive and comparative approaches.

Senses, Cognition, and Ritual Experience in the Roman World

Senses, Cognition, and Ritual Experience in the Roman World PDF Author: Blanka Misic
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009355554
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
How do the senses shape the way we perceive, understand, and remember ritual experiences? This book applies cognitive and sensory approaches to Roman rituals, reconnecting readers with religious experiences as members of an embodied audience. These approaches allow us to move beyond the literate elites to examine broader audiences of diverse individuals, who experienced rituals as participants and/or performers. Case studies of ritual experiences from a variety of places, spaces, and contexts across the Roman world, including polytheistic and Christian rituals, state rituals, private rituals, performances, and processions, demonstrate the dynamic and broad-scale application that cognitive approaches offer for ancient religion, paving the way for future interdisciplinary engagement. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

Lived Religion in the Ancient Mediterranean World

Lived Religion in the Ancient Mediterranean World PDF Author: Valentino Gasparini
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110557940
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 647

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Book Description
The Lived Ancient Religion project has radically changed perspectives on ancient religions and their supposedly personal or public character. This volume applies and further develops these methodological tools, new perspectives and new questions. The religious transformations of the Roman Imperial period appear in new light and more nuances by comparative confrontation and the integration of many disciplines. The contributions are written by specialists from a variety of disciplinary contexts (Jewish Studies, Theology, Classics, Early Christian Studies) dealing with the history of religion of the Mediterranean, West-Asian, and European area from the (late) Hellenistic period to the (early) Middle Ages and shaped by their intensive exchange. From the point of view of their respective fields of research, the contributors engage with discourses on agency, embodiment, appropriation and experience. They present innovative research in four fields also of theoretical debate, which are “Experiencing the Religious”, “Switching the Code”, „A Thing Called Body“ and “Commemorating the Moment”.

Slave-Wives, Single Women and “Bastards” in the Ancient Greek World

Slave-Wives, Single Women and “Bastards” in the Ancient Greek World PDF Author: Morris Silver
Publisher: Oxbow Books
ISBN: 178570866X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
Greek scholars have produced a vast body of evidence bearing on nuptial practices that has yet to be mined by a professional economist. By standing on their shoulders, the author proposes and tests radically new interpretations of three important status groups in Greek history: the pallakē, the nothos, and the hetaira. It is argued that legitimate marriage – marriage by loan of the bride to the groom – was not the only form of legal marriage in classical Athens and the ancient Greek world generally. Pallakia – marriage by sale of the bride to the groom – was also legally recognized. The pallakē-wifeship transaction is a sale into slavery with a restrictive covenant mandating the employment of the sold woman as a wife. In this highly original and challenging new book, economist Morris Silver proposes and tests the hypothesis that the likelihood of bride sale rises with increases in the distance between the ancestral residence of the groom and the father’s household. Nothoi, the bastard children of pallakai, lacked the legal right to inherit from their fathers but were routinely eligible for Athenian citizenship. It is argued that the basic social meaning of hetaira (companion) is not ‘prostitute’ or ’courtesan,’ but ‘single woman’ – a woman legally recognized as being under her own authority (kuria). The defensive adaptation of single women is reflected in Greek myth and social practice by their grouping into packs, most famously the Daniads and Amazons.

The Roman Republic

The Roman Republic PDF Author: Matthew Dillon
Publisher: Pen and Sword Military
ISBN: 1473889693
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
Essays exploring the role religion played in ancient Roman warfare, including destroying enemies’ gods, wartime ceremonies, and live burials. Religion was integral to the conduct of war in the ancient world and the Romans were certainly no exception. No campaign was undertaken, no battle risked, without first making sacrifice to propitiate the appropriate gods (such as Mars, god of War) or consulting oracles and omens to divine their plans. Yet the link between war and religion is an area that has been regularly overlooked by modern scholars examining the conflicts of these times. This volume addresses that omission by drawing together the work of experts from across the globe. The chapters have been carefully structured by the editors so that this wide array of scholarship combines to give a coherent, comprehensive study of the role of religion in the wars of the Roman Republic. Aspects considered in depth will include: declarations of war; evocation and taking gods away from enemies; dedications and ceremonies; the cult of the legionary eagle; the role of women in Republican warfare; omens and divination; live burials of people in times of military crisis; and the rituals of the Roman triumph. PraiseReligion & Classical Warfare: The Roman Republic “The authors take a novel approach in looking at military history of the Roman Republic in terms of the relationship between warriors and religion. The ancient world was driven to a high degree by religious belief, even to the point of commanders relying on seers to advise them on the eve of battle.—Very Highly Recommended.” —Firetrench “A work of meticulous and detailed scholarship.” —Midwest Book Review

Greek and Roman Small Size Sculpture

Greek and Roman Small Size Sculpture PDF Author: Giovanni Colzani
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110741741
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
Considerations about size and scale have always played a central role within Greek and Roman visual culture, deeply affecting sculptural production. Both Greeks and Romans, in particular, had a clear notion of “colossality” and were able to fully exploit its implications with sculpture in many different areas of social, cultural and religious life. Instead, despite their ubiquitous presence, an equal and contrary categorization for small size statues does not seem to have existed in Greek and Roman culture, leading one to wonder what were the ancient ways of conceptualizing sculptural representations in a format markedly smaller than “life-size.” Even in the context of modern scholarship on Classical Art, few notions appear to be as elusive as that of “small sculpture”, often treated with a certain degree of diffidence well summarized in the formula Klein, aber Kunst? In fact, a large and heterogeneous variety of objects corresponds to this definition: all kinds of small sculpture, from statuettes to miniatures, in a variety of materials including stone, bronze, and terracotta, associated with a great array of functions and contexts, and with extremely different levels of manufacture and patronage. It would be a major misunderstanding to think of these small sculptures in general as nothing more than a cheap and simplified alternative to larger scale statues. Compared with those, their peculiar format allowed for a wider range of choices, in terms, for example, of use of either cheap or extremely valuable materials (not only marble and bronze, but also gold and silver, ivory, hard stones, among others), methods of production (combining seriality and variation), modes of fruition (such as involving a degree of intimacy with the beholder, rather than staging an illusion of “presence”). Furthermore, their pervasive presence in both private and public spaces at many levels of Greek and Roman society presents us with a privileged point of view on the visual literacy of a large and varied public. Although very different in many respects, small-sized sculptures entertained often a rather ambivalent relationship with their larger counterparts, drawing from them at the same time schemes, forms and iconographies. By offering a fresh, new analysis of archaeological evidence and literary sources, through a variety of disciplinary approaches, this volume helps to illuminate this rather complex dynamic and aims to contribute to a better understanding of the status of Greek and Roman small size sculpture within the general development of ancient art.

LUX: Studies in Greek and Latin Literature

LUX: Studies in Greek and Latin Literature PDF Author: Myrto Aloumpi
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3111448843
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 954

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Book Description
This volume of essays in honor of Lucia Athanassaki offers a great variety of chapters on a number of topics in Greek and Latin literature and genres, from Greek epic and lyric poetry to Greek drama and late antiquity, Greek historiography, and Latin lyric poetry.

Wedding, Gender, and Performance in Ancient Greece

Wedding, Gender, and Performance in Ancient Greece PDF Author: Andromache Karanika
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198884591
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Wedding, Gender, and Performance in Ancient Greece traces the wedding song tradition, its imagery, and its tropes as a genre that became crystallized throughout the ages. It explores how wedding poetics permeates ancient Greek literature. It first analyzes how explicit or implicit matrimonial references shape archaic epic diction and become an integral part of epic discourse; orally circulating texts, such as wedding songs, could have a life of their own but, beyond their original context, could also become an integral part of a different genre, especially epic and drama. This author discusses the multiple platforms that enrich the wedding song tradition, including children's songs, hymns, paeans, and ululations, arguing for a combination of ritualized discourse with ludic childhood poetics. With an approach from cognitive and trauma studies, such references can be more revealing of the female experience than previously acknowledged. This book resists the idea that a wedding constitutes an initiation ritual, arguing that what on the surface may seem like a transition to a new phase reveals other underlying trends that work against the concept of a passage. It further considers how emotion is staged and revisits the poetics of return by looking at patterns such as the eloping, returning, failed, and dead bride. Finally, the theme of separation and return as an exemplification of a distinct female nostos is revisited in female-authored poetry, which helps us decode the complex interweaving of wedding performances and lamentation, among other types of performance.

Iconotropy and Cult Images from the Ancient to Modern World

Iconotropy and Cult Images from the Ancient to Modern World PDF Author: Jorge Tomás García
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000574180
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 213

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Book Description
The book examines the process of symbolic and material alteration of religious images in antiquity, the middle ages and the modern period. The process by which the form and meaning of images are modified and adapted for a new context is defined by a large number of spiritual, religious, artistic, geographical or historical circumstances. This book provides a defined theoretical framework for these symbolic and material alterations based on the concept of iconotropy; that is, the way in which images change and/or alter their meaning. Iconotropy is a key concept in religious history, particularly for periods in which religious changes, often turbulent, took place. In addition, the iconotropic process of appropriating cult images brought with it changes in the materiality of those images. Numerous accounts from antiquity, the middle ages and the modern period detail how cult images were involved in such processes of misinterpretation, both symbolically and materially. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual culture and religious history.

Emotional Trauma in Greece and Rome

Emotional Trauma in Greece and Rome PDF Author: Andromache Karanika
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 135124339X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 191

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Book Description
This volume examines emotional trauma in the ancient world, focusing on literary texts from different genres (epic, theatre, lyric poetry, philosophy, historiography) and archaeological evidence. The material covered spans geographically from Greece and Rome to Judaea, with a chronological range from about 8th c. bce to 1st c. ce. The collection is organized according to broad themes to showcase the wide range of possibilities that trauma theory offers as a theoretical framework for a new analysis of ancient sources. It also demonstrates the various ways in which ancient texts illuminate contemporary problems and debates in trauma studies.