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Rituals in Ink
In order to reconstruct ancient rituals we must rely on ancient texts. That is the premise of these eight papers which are taken from a conference held at Stanford University in 2002 which brought together scholars of Roman religion and scholars of Roman literature to debate the `textuality of ritual'. The papers are followed by six brief essays which discuss the themes of the and consider the problems of retrieving ritual from texts written by such complex authors as Virgil, Ovid and Livy. The essays themselves focus on: the theme of sacrificial ritual in Roman poetry; religious communication in Rome; professional poets and the 2nd-century BC temple of Hercules of the muses; Livy; the Aeneid ; Ovid's use of hymns in the Metamorphoses ; Ovid's depiction of a triumph in Tristia ; the secret name of Rome. The numerous extracts are presented in Latin verse and English prose translation.
Pliny the Elder's Natural History
The most important surviving encyclopedia from the ancient world, Pliny the Elder's Natural History is unparalleled as a guide to the cultural meanings of everyday things in first-century Rome. As part of a new direction in classical scholarship, Trevor Murphy reads the work not just for the information it contains, but to understand how and why Pliny collects and presents information as he does. Concentrating on the geographic and ethnographic information in Pliny, Murphy demonstrates the work's political importance. The selection and arrangement of the encyclopedia's material show that it is more than an instrument of reference: it is a monument to the power of Roman imperial society.
Demons in the Details
The Babylonian Talmud is full of stories of demonic encounters, and it also includes many laws that attempt to regulate such encounters. In this book, Sara Ronis takes the reader on a journey across the rabbinic canon, exploring how late antique rabbis imagined, feared, and controlled demons. Ronis contextualizes the Talmud's thought within the rich cultural matrix of Sasanian Babylonia, placing rabbinic thinking in conversation with Sumerian, Akkadian, Ugaritic, Syriac Christian, Zoroastrian, and Second Temple Jewish texts about demons to delve into the interactive communal context in which the rabbis created boundaries between the human and the supernatural, and between themselves and other religious communities. Demons in the Details explores the wide range of ways that the rabbis participated in broader discussions about beliefs and practices with their neighbors, out of which they created a profoundly Jewish demonology.
The Essenes, the Scrolls, and the Dead Sea
The mystery surrounding the Dead Sea Scrolls remains, over 60 years after their rediscovery. Who hid them and why? This groundbreaking book reinvigorates the contested hypothesis that the Essenes were responsible. Rather than being a marginal esoteric sect, Taylor shows that this group acted as one of the leading legal schools of Judaism.
Finding Augusta
Finding Augusta breaks new ground, revising how media studies interpret the relationship between our bodies and technology. This is a challenging exploration of how, for both good and ill, the sudden ubiquity of mobile devices, GPS systems, haptic technologies, and other forms of media alter individuals' experience of their bodies and shape the social collective. The author succeeds in problematizing the most salient fact of contemporary mobile media technologies, namely, that they have become, like highways and plumbing, an infrastructure that regulates habit. Audacious in its originality, Finding Augusta will be of great interest to art and media scholars alike.
The Babylonian Talmud and Late Antique Book Culture
In this book, Monika Amsler explores the historical contexts in which the Babylonian Talmud was formed in an effort to determine whether it was the result of oral transmission. Scholars have posited that the rulings and stories we find in the Talmud were passed on from one generation to the next, each generation adding their opinions and interpretations of a given subject. Yet, such an oral formation process is unheard of in late antiquity. Moreover, the model exoticizes the Talmud and disregards the intellectual world of Sassanid Persia. Rather than taking the Talmud's discursive structure as a sign for orality, Amsler interrogates the intellectual and material prerequisites of composers of such complex works, and their education and methods of large-scale data management. She also traces and highlights the marks that their working methods inevitably left in the text. Detailing how intellectual innovation was generated, Amsler's book also sheds new light on the content of the Talmud. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Pliny's Roman Economy
"Recent works by economic historians of early modern Europe have argued for a link between encyclopedias of the 18th century and the developments culminating in the Industrial Revolution. Diderot and D'Alembert's great Encyclopedie aimed to disseminate useful knowledge for productive growth and was one of the most visible contributions to what economic historian Joel Mokyr has labelled a "culture of growth." While the Ancient Romans didn't have anything like these encyclopedias, they did have its very popular and acknowledged ancestor, the thirty-seven books of Pliny's Natural History. Much has been written about Pliny's view of nature, his scientific thought, his ideology of empire, and so ...
The Cosmic Viewpoint
The Cosmic Viewpoint examines the literary and philosophical qualities essential to Seneca's art of science in his Natural Questions. Seneca's meteorological theme raises our gaze from a terrestrial level to a higher, more intuitive plane - a conceptual climb by which Seneca promotes a change of perspective in his readership towards the cosmic viewpoint.
The Mineral and the Visual
Opulent jeweled objects ranked among the most highly valued works of art in the European Middle Ages. At the same time, precious stones prompted sophisticated reflections on the power of nature and the experience of mineralized beings. Beyond a visual regime that put a premium on brilliant materiality, how can we account for the ubiquity of gems in medieval thought? In The Mineral and the Visual, art historian Brigitte Buettner examines the social roles, cultural meanings, and active agency of precious stones in secular medieval art. Exploring the layered roles played by gems in aesthetic, ideological, intellectual, and economic practices, Buettner focuses on three significant categories of ...
