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This book is the first major study of the themes which were used in the decoration of sarcophagi made for children in Rome and Ostia from the late first to early fourth century AD. It provides a selective catalogue of examples of each type, followed by discussion of how these fit into the general pattern. This allows certain themes to be identified which are virtually exclusive to childre's sarcophagi. The second part of the book discusses the choice of subjects and how these reflect the standing of children in Roman society: to what extent, for instance, was childhood shown as a differentiated stage of life, or was it dominated by aspirations of the adult world? How is the death of a child treated in art? There are separate sections on the role of workshops and customers in the development of child-specific imagery, and on material from the early Christian era, providing some interesting differences resulting from differing attitudes towards children and beliefs about life and death.
Unique in their broad-based coverage the twelve essays in this book provide a fresh look at some central aspects of Roman culture and society.
This volumepresents acollection of essays on different aspects of Roman sarcophagi. These varied approaches will produce fresh insights into a subject which is receiving increased interest in English-language scholarship, with a new awareness of the important contribution that sarcophagi can make to the study of the social use and production of Roman art. The book will therefore be a timely addition to existing literature. Metropolitan sarcophagi are the main focus of the volume, which will cover a wide time range from the first century AD to post classical periods (including early Christian sarcophagi and post-classical reception). Other papers will look at aspects of viewing and representation, iconography, and marble analysis. There will be an Introduction written by the co-editors.
This is the first full study of Roman strigillated sarcophagi, which are the largest group of decorated marble sarcophagi to survive in the city of Rome. Characterized by panels of carved fluting - hence the description 'strigillated', after the curved strigil used by Roman bathers to scrape off oil - and limited figure scenes, they were produced from the mid-second to the early fifth century AD, and thus cover a critical period in Rome, from empire to early Christianity. Roman Strigillated Sarcophagi focuses on their rich potential as an historical source for exploring the social and cultural life of the city in the later empire. The first part of the volume examines aspects of their manufa...
Who was Tertullian, and what can we know about him? This work explores his social identities, focusing on his North African milieu. Theories from the discipline of social/cultural anthropology, including kinship, class and ethnicity, are accommodated and applied to selections of Tertullian’s writings. In light of postcolonial concerns, this study utilizes the categories of Roman colonizers, indigenous Africans and new elites. The third category, new elites, is actually intended to destabilize the other two, denying any “essential” Roman or African identity. Thereafter, samples from Tertullian’s writings serve to illustrate comparisons of his own identities and the identities of his rhetorical opponents. The overall study finds Tertullian’s identities to be manifold, complex and discursive. Additionally, his writings are understood to reflect antagonism toward Romans, including Christian Romans (which is significant for his so-called Montanism), and Romanized Africans. While Tertullian accommodates much from Graeco-Roman literature, laws and customs, he nevertheless retains a strongly stated non-Roman-ness and an African-ity, which is highlighted in the present monograph.
This interdisciplinary anthology takes as its starting point the belief that, as the material grounds of lived experience, material culture provides an avenue of historical access to women's lives, extending beyond the reaches of textual evidence. Studies here range from utilitarian tools used in Late Roman abortion to sacred, magical or ritual objects associated with sex, procreation, and marriage in the Renaissance. Together the essays demonstrate the complex relationship between language and object, and explore the ways in which objects become forms of communication in their own right, transmitting both rather specific messages and more generalized social and cultural values.
The pursuit and love of death has characterized Western culture since Homeric times. Foundations of Violence enters the ancient world of Homer, Plato and Aristotle to explore the genealogy of violence in Western thought. It covers the origins of ideas of death--the "beautiful death" of Homeric heroes-through to the gendered misery of war. Jantzen examines the tensions between those who tried to eliminate fear of death by denying its significance, and those like Plotinus who looked to another world for life and beauty.
This study examines third- and fourth-century portraits of married Christians and associated images, reading them as visual rhetoric in early Christian conversations about marriage and celibacy, and recovering lay perspectives underrepresented or missing in literary sources. Historians of early Christianity have grown increasingly aware that written sources display an enthusiasm for asceticism and sexual renunciation that was far from representative of the lives of most early Christians. Often called a “silent majority,” the married laity in fact left behind a significant body of work in the material record. Particularly in and around Rome, they commissioned and used such objects as sarc...
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...
In this volume, experts from around the world investigate childhood in the past, showing why it is important to understand childhood, why different cultures construct different ideas of how to rear children, what part children play in the community, and when and why childhood ends.