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As a master of his discipline, the ancient Roman architect Vitruvius has been read widely for centuries. This collection of essays by an international team of experts investigates his influence and reception in ideas, artistic forms, and building practices from antiquity to modern day. The stories of influence told in these pages suggest that it is the unbridgeable gulf between the Vitruvian text and surviving monuments that makes reading the Ten Books so endlessly compelling. The contributors to this volume offer their own, original readings, which are organized into the five sections: transmission; translation; reception; practice; and Vitruvian topics.
Landscapes of the Islamic World presents new work by twelve authors on the archaeology, history, and ethnography of the Islamic world in the Middle East, the Arabian peninsula, and central Asia. The focus looks beyond the city to engage with the predominantly rural and pastoral character of premodern Islamic society.
In The Account Books of the Reimarus Family of Hamburg, 1728-1780, Almut Spalding and Paul S. Spalding offer a two-volume critical edition of domestic records that open windows onto early modern Europe and the Enlightenment.
Though the Roman Empire has been a hot topic within New Testament studies in the twenty-first century, its military aspect has--strangely--been almost entirely neglected. This volume will fill that lacuna by reprinting pivotal, but difficult to access, essays on the topic from the past forty years. The book will help bring scholars up to speed on what Roman military experts have been saying on the matter and give a sense for key developments within the field over the last forty years. The contents of this book include a variety of pivotal essays, though most are difficult to find without access to a major research library.
Urban Religion is an emerging research field cutting across various social science disciplines, all of them dealing with “lived religion” in contemporary and (mainly) global cities. It describes the reciprocal formation and mutual influence of religion and urbanity in both their material and ideational dimensions. However, this approach, if duly historicized, can be also fruitfully applied to antiquity. Aim of the volume is the analysis of the entanglement of religious communication and city life during an arc of time that is characterised by dramatic and even contradicting developments. Bringing together textual analyses and archaelogical case studies in a comparative perspective, the volume zooms in on the historical context of the advanced imperial and late antique Mediterranean space (2nd–8th centuries CE).
In this masterful new study of the ancient poetry of the Song of Songs, Elaine T. James explores the Song's underlying interest in the natural world. Engaging with the fields of geography, landscape architecture, and literature, James critiques the tendency of scholars to reify a perceived dichotomy between "nature" and "culture" and instead argues that the poetic attention to landscape indicates an awareness of a viewer. Nature is here a poetic device that informs James's close-readings of agrarianism, gardens, cities, social control, and feminism and the gaze in the Song. With this two-fold emphasis on landscape and lyric, Landscape of the Song of Songs shows how the Song persistently envisions a world in which human lovers are embedded in the natural world, complexly enfolded in relationships of fragility and care.
This volume views the study of disease as essential to understanding the key historical developments underpinning the foundation of contemporary Indian Ocean World (IOW) societies. The interplay between disease and climatic conditions, natural and manmade crises and disasters, human migration and trade in the IOW reveals a wide range of perceptions about disease etiologies and epidemiologies, and debates over the origin, dispersion and impact of disease form a central focus in these essays. Incorporating a wide scope of academic and scientific angles including history, social and medical anthropology, archaeology, epidemiology and paleopathology, this collection focuses on diseases that spread across time, space and cultures. It scrutinizes disease as an object, and engages with the subjectivities of afflicted inhabitants of, and travellers to, the IOW.