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One of the most pressing issues for scholars of religion concerns the role of persuasion in early Christianities and other religions in Greco-Roman antiquity. The essays in Rhetoric and Reality in Early Christianities explore questions about persuasion and its relationship to early Christianities. The contributors theorize about persuasion as the effect of verbal performances, such as argumentation in accordance with rules of rhetoric, or as a result of other types of performance: ritual, behavioural, or imagistic. They discuss the relationship between the verbal performance of rhetoric and other performative modes in generating, sustaining, and transmitting a persuasive form of religiosity....
This wide-ranging collection of essays reflects the manifold scholarly interests of legal historian Charles Donahue, whose former students engage here with questions related to foundational Roman law concepts, the impact of the law on women and families in medieval and early modern Europe, the intersection of law and religion, and the echoes of legal ideas on later developments in American law and in world literature and philosophy. From the monks of Metz to the book sellers of colonial Boston, from fourteenth-century English charters to the writings of Faust, these essays invite you to experience law at once learned and lived. Contributors are: Charles Bartlett, Anton Chaevitch, Wim Decock, Rowan Dorin, Sally E. Hadden, Elizabeth Haluska-Rausch, Nikitas E. Hatzimihail, Samantha Kahn Herrick, Daniel Jacobs, Elizabeth Papp Kamali, Amalia D. Kessler, Saskia Lettmaier, Sara McDougall, Stuart M. McManus, Elizabeth W. Mellyn, Bharath Palle, Ryan Rowberry, Carol Symes, James R. Townshend, and John Witte, Jr.
Explores the vital links between social order and cosmology by examining the concept of foedus in Roman religion and literature.
This study investigates why "faith" (pistis/fides) was so important to early Christians that the concept and praxis dominated the writings of the New Testament. It argues that such a study must be interdisciplinary, locating emerging Christianities in the social practices and mentalites of contemporary Judaism and the early Roman empire. This can, therefore, equally be read as a study of the operation of pistis/fides in the world of the early Roman principate, taking one small but relatively well-attested cult as a case study in how micro-societies within that world could treat it distinctively. Drawing on recent work in sociology and economics, the book traces the varying shapes taken by pi...
Chastity as a topic is an ideal interdisciplinary consideration since it accesses iconographical representation, the philosophical issues of purity, morality, and of innocence; the legal issues of loss and punishment, the historical issues of celibacy, and the legislation that topic evoked; as well as the role of chastity as a literary topos in Late Antiquity as well as the Middle Ages, for example, in medieval commentary traditions and within medieval vernacular literatures. The topic of Chastity, as well as its opposing characteristics, thus provides an arena for a discussion of the transmission of Ovid and the commentaries this author provoked in the Middle Ages, the interpretation of images illustrating legal texts, cross-cultural enquiries, such as the reciprocity between Christian, Muslim, and Judaic interpretations of temperance, continence, and abstinence, and the theological-legal issue of “God’s rights” (in excising Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden). Contributors: Nancy van Deusen; Frank T. Coulson; Marcia L. Colish; Uta-Renate Blumenthal; Thérèse-Anne Druart; Claudia Bornholdt; Susan L’Engle; Cristian Gaspar; and Rafael Chodos.
Through a range of case studies, this book traces how death shaped cities, and vice versa. It argues that by focusing on death and the city, we can open up new avenues of research into religious, political and cultural change. Dying in a city was significantly different from dying in a village or the countryside. Cities and towns were centres of commerce and learning, shaping discourses on death. The importance of urban centres meant that events had a large audience there, for example when people were executed. Urban diversity led to a wide variety of deathways, which also had to be regulated by urban magistrates. The placement of dead bodies and the urban arrangement of cemeteries were rela...
The story of Maecenas and his role in the evolution and continuing legacy of ancient Roman poetry and culture An unelected statesman with exceptional powers, a patron of the arts and a luxury-loving friend of the emperor Augustus: Maecenas was one of the most prominent and distinctive personalities of ancient Rome. Yet the traces he left behind are unreliable and tantalizingly scarce. Rather than attempting a conventional biography, Emily Gowers shows in Rome’s Patron that it is possible to tell a different story, one about Maecenas’s influence, his changing identities and the many narratives attached to him across two millennia. Rome’s Patron explores Maecenas’s appearances in the c...
The papers in this second selection of articles by Professor Colish focus on thinkers of the patristic age, and relate to her three monographic studies in this area published over the last two decades. At the same time these papers look beyond the patristic period, both backward to these authors' appropriation of the classical and Christian traditions, and forward to their function as authorities in later medieval intellectual history, from the Carolingian Renaissance to Anselm of Canterbury, the scholastics, and Dante. Themes which these papers address include the transmission and use of Platonism and Stoicism, logic and linguistic theory, and the ethics of lying, moral indifference, and the salvation of the virtuous pagan.
Religious scholars take up various questions relating to the relationship between orality and literacy in the context of colonized people in antiquity, and explore the role of orality in relation to this hegemony. Among the topics are theoretical and methodological foundations, Mithra's cult as an example of religious colonialism in Roman times, th
"EURO". The name of the single currency for the European Union has not been chosen casually by the Heads of State and Government during the Madrid Council of December 1995. After tough discus sions, it has been unanimously accepted. The intention was to recall to every single citizen that this new money would be his money, that it would be the expression of the new European environment carefully built since the "fifties" to avoid any return to war and barbarism in Europe. Confidence and positive expectations for a better future put in the European construction have thus been clearly linked to the confidence in the new European currency and vice-versa. Euro notes and coins will be the first expression, clear, material and universal (for any European citizen being young or old, rich or poor, but also for the rest of the world) of a European identity alongside the national one. Obviously, it is of the outmost importance that the change over to the euro, be as smooth and as citizen-friendly as possible.