Download or read book Shifting Cultural Frontiers in Late Antiquity written by David Brakke and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-05 with total page 407 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shifting Cultural Frontiers in Late Antiquity explores the transformation of classical culture in late antiquity by studying cultures at the borders - the borders of empires, of social classes, of public and private spaces, of literary genres, of linguistic communities, and of the modern disciplines that study antiquity. Although such canonical figures of late ancient studies as Augustine and Ammianus Marcellinus appear in its pages, this book shifts our perspective from the center to the side or the margins. The essays consider, for example, the ordinary Christians whom Augustine addressed, the border regions of Mesopotamia and Vandal Africa, 'popular' or 'legendary' literature, and athletes. Although traditional philology rightly underlies the work that these essays do, the authors, several among the most prominent in the field of late ancient studies, draw from and combine a range of disciplines and perspectives, including art history, religion, and social history. Despite their various subject matters and scholarly approaches, the essays in Shifting Cultural Frontiers coalesce around a small number of key themes in the study of late antiquity: the ambiguous effects of 'Christianization,' the creation of new literary and visual forms from earlier models, the interaction and spread of ideals between social classes, and the negotiation of ethnic and imperial identities in the contact between 'Romans' and 'barbarians.' By looking away from the core and toward the periphery, whether spatially or intellectually, the volume offers fresh insights into how ancient patterns of thinking and creating became reconfigured into the diverse cultures of the 'medieval.'

Download or read book Shifting Frontiers in Late Antiquity written by Ralph W. Mathisen and published by Variorum Publishing. This book was released on 1996 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume results from a conference held at the University of Kansas in 1995. The papers it encapsulates cover frontier studies from the third to the seventh century. It takes in the Roman world from Spain to Syria and from Britain to Dacia, clarifying the boundary role of Late Antiquity.

Download or read book Romans Barbarians and the Transformation of the Roman World written by Ralph W. Mathisen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-08 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the most significant transformations of the Roman world in Late Antiquity was the integration of barbarian peoples into the social, cultural, religious, and political milieu of the Mediterranean world. The nature of these transformations was considered at the sixth biennial Shifting Frontiers in Late Antiquity Conference, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in March of 2005, and this volume presents an updated selection of the papers given on that occasion, complemented with a few others,. These 25 studies do much to break down old stereotypes about the cultural and social segregation of Roman and barbarian populations, and demonstrate that, contrary to the past orthodoxy, Romans and barbarians interacted in a multitude of ways, and it was not just barbarians who experienced "ethnogenesis" or cultural assimilation. The same Romans who disparaged barbarian behavior also adopted aspects of it in their everyday lives, providing graphic examples of the ambiguity and negotiation that characterized the integration of Romans and barbarians, a process that altered the concepts of identity of both populations. The resultant late antique polyethnic cultural world, with cultural frontiers between Romans and barbarians that became increasingly permeable in both directions, does much to help explain how the barbarian settlement of the west was accomplished with much less disruption than there might have been, and how barbarian populations were integrated seamlessly into the old Roman world.

Download or read book Shifting Genres in Late Antiquity written by Professor Hugh Elton and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2015-01-28 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume examines the transformation that took place in a wide range of genres in Late Antiquity. Aspects of sacred and secular literature are discussed, alongside chapters on technical writing, monody, epigraphy, epistolography and visual representation. What emerges is the flexibility of genres in the period: late antique authors were not slavish followers of their classical predecessors, but were capable of engaging with existing models and adapting them to their own purposes.

Download or read book The End of Greek Athletics in Late Antiquity written by Sofie Remijsen and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-05-28 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive study of how and why athletic contests, a characteristic feature of ancient Greek culture, disappeared in late antiquity.

Download or read book Theodosius II written by Christopher Kelly and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-08-08 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fresh look at the vitality and integrity of the eastern Roman Empire under its longest reigning emperor.

Download or read book Moment of Reckoning written by Ellen Muehlberger and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-03-01 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Late antiquity saw a proliferation of Christian texts dwelling on the emotions and physical sensations of dying, not as a heroic martyr in a public square or a judge's court, but as an individual, at home in a bed or in a private room. In sermons, letters, and ascetic traditions, late ancient Christians imagined the last minutes of life and the events that followed death in elaborate detail. The majority of these imagined scenarios linked the quality of the experience to the moral state of the person who died. Death was no longer the "happy ending," in Judith Perkins's words, it had been to Christians of the first three centuries, an escape from the difficult and painful world. Instead, death was most often imagined as a terrifying, desperate experience. This book is the first to trace how, in late ancient Christianity, death came to be thought of as a moment of reckoning: a physical ordeal whose pain is followed by an immediate judgment of one's actions by angels and demons and, after that, fitting punishment. Because late ancient Christian culture valued the use of the imagination as a religious tool and because Christian teachers encouraged Christians to revisit the prospect of their deaths often, this novel description of death was more than an abstract idea. Rather, its appearance ushered in a new ethical sensibility among Christians, in which one's death was to be imagined frequently and anticipated in detail. This was, at first glance, meant as a tool for individuals: preachers counted on the fact that becoming aware of a judgment arriving at the end of one's life tends to sharpen one's scruples. But, as this book argues, the change in Christian sensibility toward death did not just affect individuals. Once established, it shifted the ethics of Christianity as a tradition. This is because death repeatedly and frequently imagined as the moment of reckoning created a fund of images and ideas about what constituted a human being and how variances in human morality should be treated. This had significant effects on the Christian assumption of power in late antiquity, especially in the case of the capacity to authorize violence against others. The thinking about death traced here thus contributed to the seemingly paradoxical situation in which Christians proclaimed their identity with a crucified person, yet were willing to use force against their ideological opponents.

Download or read book Monica written by Gillian Clark and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015-08-03 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rarely did ancient authors write about the lives of women; even more rarely did they write about the lives of ordinary women: not queens or heroines who influenced war or politics, not sensational examples of virtue or vice, not Christian martyrs or ascetics, but women of moderate status, who experienced everyday joys and sorrows and had everyday merits and failings. Such a woman was Monica--now Saint Monica because of her relationship with her son Augustine, who wrote about her in the Confessions and elsewhere. Despite her rather unremarkable life, Saint Monica has inspired a robust controversy in academia, the Church, and the Augustine-reading public alike: some agree with Ambrose, bishop of Milan, who knew Monica, that Augustine was exceptionally blessed in having such a mother, while others think that Monica is a classic example of the manipulative mother who lives through her son, using religion to repress his sexual life and to control him even when he seems to escape. In Monica: An Ordinary Saint, Gillian Clark reconciles these competing images of Monica's life and legacy, arriving at a woman who was shrewd and enterprising, but also meek and gentle. Weighing Augustine's discussion of his mother against other evidence of women's lives in late antiquity, Clark achieves portraits both of Monica individually, and of the many women like her. Augustine did not claim that his mother was a saint, but he did think that the challenges of everyday life required courage and commitment to Christian principle. Monica's ordinary life, as both he and Clark tell it, showed both. Monica: An Ordinary Saint illuminates Monica, wife and mother, in the context of the societal expectations and burdens that shaped her and all ordinary women.

Download or read book Philological and Historical Commentary on Ammianus Marcellinus XXIX written by Jan den Boeft and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2013-11-25 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Book 29 opens with the judicial terror in Antioch following the discovery of a plot against the emperor in the East, Valens, who played an active role in hunting down and executing the culprits. The account of these internal troubles is balanced by two long chapters at the end of the book dealing with warfare in Africa and Central Europe. The general Theodosius mercilessly crushed the revolt of the Moorish prince Firmus, while the emperor in the West, Valentinian, had to deal with violent invasions of the Quadi and the Sarmatians. The two central chapters are devoted to different aspects of Valentinian’s character, his cruelty on the one hand, his diligence in reinforcing the border defenses on the other.

Download or read book The Politics of Heresy in Ambrose of Milan written by Michael Stuart Williams and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-10-19 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ambrose of Milan is famous above all for his struggle with, and triumph over, 'Arian' heresy. Yet, almost all of the evidence comes from Ambrose's own writings, and from pious historians of the next generation who represented him as a champion of orthodoxy. This detailed study argues instead that an 'Arian' opposition in Milan was largely conjured up by Ambrose himself, lumping together critics and outsiders in order to secure and justify his own authority. Along with new interpretations of Ambrose's election as bishop, his controversies over the faith, and his clashes with the imperial court, this book provides a new understanding of the nature and significance of heretical communities in Late Antiquity. In place of rival congregations inflexibly committed to doctrinal beliefs, it envisages a world of more fluid allegiances in which heresy - but also consensus - could be a matter of deploying the right rhetorical frame.

Download or read book The Lamps of Late Antiquity from Rhodes written by Angeliki Katsioti and published by Archaeopress Publishing Ltd. This book was released on 2017-12-31 with total page 678 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study focuses on the recording, study and publication of the corpus of the Late Antique lamps dating from the 3rd to the 7th centuries as found in rescue excavations in the town of Rhodes. The aim here is to present the diachronic changes in the artistic sensibility and preferences of this particular market.

Download or read book Nonnus of Panopolis in Context written by Konstantinos Spanoudakis and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2014-07-16 with total page 584 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nonnus of Panopolis (fifth century CE) composed two poems once thought to be incompatible: the Dionysiaca, a mythological long epic with a marked interest in astrology, the occult, the paradox and not least the beauty of the female body, and a pious and sublime Paraphrase of the Gospel of St John. Little is known about the man, to whom sundry identities have been attached. The longer work has been misrepresented as a degenerate poem or as a mythological handbook. The Christian poem has been neglected or undervalued. Yet, Nonnus accomplished an ambitious plan, in two parts, aiming at representing world-history. This volume consists mainly of the Proceedings of the First International Conference on Nonnus held in Rethymno, Crete in May 2011. With twentyfour essays, an international team of specialists place Nonnus firmly in his time's context. After an authoritative Introduction by Pierre Chuvin, chapters on Nonnus and the literary past, the visual arts, Late Antique paideia, Christianity and his immediate and long-range afterlife (to modern times) offer a wide-ranging and innovative insight into the man and his world. The volume moves on beyond stereotypes to inaugurate a new era of research for Nonnus and Late Antique poetics on the whole.

Download or read book Political Memory and the Constantinian Dynasty written by Rebecca Usherwood and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-03-21 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is an exploration of political memory and disgrace in the reigns of Constantine and his sons. It uses the conditions of the early to mid-fourth century to argue that the deconstruction of political legitimacy should be viewed, first and foremost, as a collective phenomenon, the result of the actions of a diverse range of people responding to political change. It also challenges many positivist and teleological narratives of the ‘Age of Constantine’. Shifting the focus from the emperor and his sons onto their rivals and opponents, the Constantinian dynasty is placed back into the messy and ambiguous political environment from which it emerged.

Download or read book God Sexuality and the Self written by Sarah Coakley and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-08-29 with total page 389 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: God, Sexuality and the Self is a new venture in systematic theology. Sarah Coakley invites the reader to re-conceive the relation of sexual desire and the desire for God and - through the lens of prayer practice - to chart the intrinsic connection of this relation to a theology of the Trinity. The goal is to integrate the demanding ascetical undertaking of prayer with the recovery of lost and neglected materials from the tradition and thus to reanimate doctrinal reflection both imaginatively and spiritually. What emerges is a vision of human longing for the triune God which is both edgy and compelling: Coakley's théologie totale questions standard shibboleths on 'sexuality' and 'gender' and thereby suggests a way beyond current destructive impasses in the churches. The book is clearly and accessibly written and will be of great interest to all scholars and students of theology.

Download or read book Representing Rome s Emperors written by Caillan Davenport and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-01-09 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Roman emperors have long functioned—and continue to function—in the western imagination as paradigms of imperial leadership to be emulated or avoided. This innovative volume brings together an international team of experts to examine the literary and artistic representations of Roman emperors across more than two thousand years of history. In doing so, it breaks down traditional disciplinary boundaries that have separated the study of emperors in antiquity from their representation in later periods. The individual chapters offer close readings of different texts, media, and contexts, ranging from the Annals of Tacitus, Roman lamps, and triumphal statues to medieval legends, early modern philosophical tracts, twentieth-century novels, and museum exhibitions. Collectively they explore the creative impulses and political agendas that have shaped how we understand Roman emperors today.

Download or read book Ancient African Christianity written by David E. Wilhite and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-07-14 with total page 437 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Christianity spread across North Africa early, and it remained there as a powerful force much longer than anticipated. While this African form of Christianity largely shared the Latin language and Roman culture of the wider empire, it also represented a unique tradition that was shaped by its context. Ancient African Christianity attempts to tell the story of Christianity in Africa from its inception to its eventual disappearance. Well-known writers such as Tertullian, Cyprian, and Augustine are studied in light of their African identity, and this tradition is explored in all its various expressions. This book is ideal for all students of African Christianity and also a key introduction for anyone wanting to know more about the history, religion, and philosophy of these early influential Christians whose impact has extended far beyond the African landscape.

Download or read book Imagining Emperors in the Later Roman Empire written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2018-07-10 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Imagining Emperors in the Later Roman Empire offers new analysis of the textual depictions of a series of emperors in the fourth century within overlapping historical, religious, and literary contexts. Drawing on the recent Representational Turn in the study of imperial power, these essays examine how literary authors working in various genres, both Latin and Greek, and of differing religious affiliations construct and manipulate the depiction of a series of emperors from the late third to the late fourth centuries CE. In a move away from traditional source criticism, this volume opens up new methodological approaches to chart intellectual and literary history during a critical century for the ancient Mediterranean world.