Welcome to our book review site go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
From Roman to Early Christian Thessalonikē
This volume brings together international scholars of religion, archaeologists, and scholars of art and architectural history to investigate social, political, and religious life in Roman and early Christian Thessalonikē, an important metropolis in the Hellenistic, Roman, and early Christian periods and beyond. This volume is the first broadly interdisciplinary investigation of Roman and early Christian Thessalonikē in English and offers new data and new interpretations by scholars of ancient religion and archaeology. The book covers materials usually treated by a broad range of disciplines: New Testament and early Christian literature, art historical materials, urban planning in antiquity, material culture and daily life, and archaeological artifacts from the Roman to the late antique period.
The Middle East Under Rome
The ancient Middle East was the theater of passionate interaction between Phoenicians, Aramaeans, Arabs, Jews, Greeks, and Romans. At the crossroads of the Mediterranean, Mesopotamia, and the Arabian peninsula, the area dominated by what the Romans called Syria was at times a scene of violent confrontation, but more often one of peaceful interaction, of prosperous cultivation, energetic production, and commerce--a crucible of cultural, religious, and artistic innovations that profoundly determined the course of world history. Maurice Sartre has written a long overdue and comprehensive history of the Semitic Near East (modern Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Israel) from the eve of the Roman conqu...
The Making of the Slavs
This book offers an alternative approach to the problem of Slavic ethnicity in south-eastern Europe between c. 500 and c. 700, from the perspective of current anthropological theories. The conceptual emphasis here is on the relation between material culture and ethnicity. The author demonstrates that the history of the Sclavenes and the Antes begins only at around 500 AD. He also points to the significance of the archaeological evidence, which suggests that specific artefacts may have been used as identity markers. This evidence also indicates the role of local leaders in building group boundaries and in leading successful raids across the Danube. Because of these military and political developments, Byzantine authors began employing names such as Sclavines and Antes in order to make sense of the process of group identification that was taking place north of the Danube frontier. Slavic ethnicity is therefore shown to be a Byzantine invention.
The Bone Gatherers
The bone gatherers found in the annals and legends of the early Roman Catholic Church were women who collected the bodies of martyred saints to give them a proper burial. They have come down to us as deeply resonant symbols of grief: from the women who anointed Jesus's crucified body in the gospels to the Pietà, we are accustomed to thinking of women as natural mourners, caring for the body in all its fragility and expressing our deepest sorrow. But to think of women bone gatherers merely as mourners of the dead is to limit their capacity to stand for something more significant. In fact, Denzey argues that the bone gatherers are the mythic counterparts of historical women of substance and m...
Calvinism and the Arts
It is often thought that the French Reformer John Calvin (1509-1564) had a negative attitude towards the arts, particularly visual art. However, in Calvinism and the Arts: A Re-assessment, Dr. Joby argues that in Calvin's writings and in the development of the Reformed tradition more generally, it is possible to discern a more positive attitude than has hitherto been recognized. He makes a start by examining exactly what type of visual art Calvin rejected and what type he affirmed. He goes on to consider how Calvin's epistemology and eschatology can be used to argue for the placing of certain types of art, notably histories and landscape paintings, within Reformed churches and then devotes s...
Authority and Control in the Countryside
Authority and Control in the Countryside looks at the economic, religious, political and cultural instruments that local and regional powers in the late antique to early medieval Mediterranean and Near East used to manage their rural hinterlands.
The Color of Life
There has been a persistent tradition of enlivening sculptures with color. This book presents five essays on polychromy in classical Greek through contemporary sculpture, along with discussions of over 40 extraordinary polychrome sculptures.
Beyond Priesthood
The last decade has seen a surge of scholarly interest in these religious professionals and a good number of high quality publications. Our volume, however, with its unique intercultural character and its explicit focus on appropriation and contestation of religious expertise in the Imperial Era is substantially different. Unlike the rather narrow focus of earlier studies of civic priests, the papers presented here examine a wider range of religious professionals, their dynamic interaction with established religious authorities and institutions, and their contributions to religious innovation in the ancient Mediterranean world, from the late Hellenistic period through to Late Antiquity, from...
The Cross in the Visual Culture of Late Antique Egypt
In The Cross in the Visual Culture of Late Antique Egypt Gillian Spalding-Stracey brings the design of crosses in monastic and ecclesiastical settings to the fore. Visual representations of the Holy Cross are often so ubiquitous in Christian art that they are often overlooked as artistic devices themselves. This volume offers an exploration of the variety of designs and associated imagery by which the Cross was expressed across the Egyptian landscape in late antiquity. A survey of locations and images leads to an analysis of artistic influences, possible symbolism, variance across time and place and the contextual use of the motif. Gillian Spalding-Stracey provides the reader with an art-historical perspective of the socio-cultural situation in Egypt at the time.
Byzantine Images and their Afterlives
The twelve papers written for this volume reflect the wide scope of Annemarie Weyl Carr's interests and the equally wide impact of her work. The concepts linking the essays include the examination of form and meaning, the relationship between original and copy, and reception and cultural identity in medieval art and architecture. Carr’s work focuses on the object but considers the audience, looks at the copy for retention or rejection of the original form and meaning, and always seeks to understand the relationship between intent and perception. She examines the elusive nature of ’center’ and ’periphery’, expanding and enriching the discourse of manuscript production, icons and the...
