The Moon in the Greek and Roman Imagination

The Moon in the Greek and Roman Imagination
Author: Karen ní Mheallaigh
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2020-10-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 1108483038

This is a book for readers who are fascinated by the Moon and the earliest speculations about life on other worlds. It takes the reader on a journey from the earliest Greek poetry, philosophy and science, through Plutarch's mystical doctrines to the thrilling lunar adventures of Lucian of Samosata.

The Moon in the Greek and Roman Imagination

The Moon in the Greek and Roman Imagination
Author: Karen ní Mheallaigh
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2020-10-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 1108603181

The Moon exerted a powerful influence on ancient intellectual history, as a playground for the scientific imagination. This book explores the history of the Moon in the Greco-Roman imaginary from Homer to Lucian, with special focus on those accounts of the Moon, its attributes, and its 'inhabitants' given by ancient philosophers, natural scientists and imaginative writers including Pythagoreans, Plato and the Old Academy, Varro, Plutarch and Lucian. ní Mheallaigh shows how the Moon's enigmatic presence made it a key site for thinking about the gaze (erotic, philosophical and scientific) and the relation between appearance and reality. It was also a site for hoax in antiquity as well as today. Central issues explored include the view from elsewhere (selēnoskopia), the relation of science and fiction, the interaction between the beginnings of science in the classical polis and the imperial period, and the limits of knowledge itself.

The Babylonian Talmud and Late Antique Book Culture

The Babylonian Talmud and Late Antique Book Culture
Author: Monika Amsler
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 567
Release: 2023-04-06
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1009297309

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.

Simon of Samaria and the Simonians

Simon of Samaria and the Simonians
Author: M. David Litwa
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 177
Release: 2024-03-07
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0567712982

Who were the Simonians? Beginning in the mid-second century CE, heresiologists depicted them as licentious followers of the first “gnostic,” a supposedly Samarian self-deifier called Simon, who was thought to practice “magic” and became known as the father of all heresies. Litwa examines the Simonians in their own literature and in the literature used to refute and describe them. He begins with Simonian primary sources, namely The Declaration of Great Power (embedded in the anonymous Refutation of All Heresies) and The Concept of Our Great Power (Nag Hammadi codex VI,4). Litwa argues that both are early second-century products of Simonian authors writing in Alexandria or Egypt. Litwa then moves on to examine the heresiological sources related to the Simonians (Justin, the book of Acts, Irenaeus, the author of the Refutation of All Heresies, Pseudo-Tertullian, Epiphanius, and Filaster). He shows how closely connected Justin's report is to the portrait of Simon in Acts, and offers an extensive exegesis and analysis of Simonian theology and practice based on the reports of Irenaeus and the Refutator. Finally, Litwa examines Simonianism in novelistic sources, namely the Acts of Peter and the Pseudo-Clementines. By the time these sources were written, Simon had become the father of all heresies. Accordingly, virtually any heresy could be attributed to Simon. As a result-despite their alluring portraits of Simon-these sources are mostly unusable for the historical study of the Simonian Christian movement. Litwa concludes with a historical profile of the Simonian movement in the second and third centuries. The book features appendices which contain Litwa's own translations of primary Simonian texts.

Eschatology in Antiquity

Eschatology in Antiquity
Author: Hilary Marlow
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 654
Release: 2021-09-29
Genre: History
ISBN: 1315459493

This collection of essays explores the rhetoric and practices surrounding views on life after death and the end of the world, including the fate of the individual, apocalyptic speculation and hope for cosmological renewal, in a wide range of societies from Ancient Mesopotamia to the Byzantine era. The 42 essays by leading scholars in each field explore the rich spectrum of ways in which eschatological understanding can be expressed, and for which purposes it can be used. Readers will gain new insight into the historical contexts, details, functions and impact of eschatological ideas and imagery in ancient texts and material culture from the twenty-fifth century BCE to the ninth century CE. Traditionally, the study of “eschatology” (and related concepts) has been pursued mainly by scholars of Jewish and Christian scripture. By broadening the disciplinary scope but remaining within the clearly defined geographical milieu of the Mediterranean, this volume enables its readers to note comparisons and contrasts, as well as exchanges of thought and transmission of eschatological ideas across Antiquity. Cross-referencing, high quality illustrations and extensive indexing contribute to a rich resource on a topic of contemporary interest and relevance. Eschatology in Antiquity is aimed at readers from a wide range of academic disciplines, as well as non-specialists including seminary students and religious leaders. The primary audience will comprise researchers in relevant fields including Biblical Studies, Classics and Ancient History, Ancient Philosophy, Ancient Near Eastern Studies, Art History, Late Antiquity, Byzantine Studies and Cultural Studies. Care has been taken to ensure that the essays are accessible to undergraduates and those without specialist knowledge of particular subject areas.

Byzantine Media Subjects

Byzantine Media Subjects
Author: Glenn A. Peers
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 325
Release: 2024-06-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1501775049

Byzantine Media Subjects invites readers into a world replete with images—icons, frescoes, and mosaics filling places of worship, politics, and community. Glenn Peers asks readers to think themselves into a world where representation reigned and humans followed, and indeed were formed. Interrogating the fundamental role of representation in the making of the Byzantine human, Peers argues that Byzantine culture was (already) posthuman. The Byzantine experience reveals the extent to which media like icons, manuscripts, music, animals, and mirrors fundamentally determine humans. In the Byzantine world, representation as such was deeply persuasive, even coercive; it had the power to affect human relationships, produce conflict, and form self-perception. Media studies has made its subject the modern world, but this book argues for media having made historical subjects. Here, it is shown that media long ago also made Byzantine humans, defining them, molding them, mediating their relationship to time, to nature, to God, and to themselves.

Classical Enrichment

Classical Enrichment
Author: Antony Augoustakis
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 566
Release: 2024-11-04
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3111577759

This collection brings together twenty eight chapters written by Stephen Harrison’s colleagues and former students from around the globe to celebrate both his distinguished teaching and research career as a classicist and his outstanding and admirable service to the international classical community. The wide variety of original contributions on topics ranging from Greek to Latin and ancient literature’s reception in opera and contemporary writing is divided into five parts. Each corresponds to the staggering publication record of the honorand, encompassing, as it does, a broad literary spectrum, starting from the literature of the end of the Roman Republic and coming down to Neo-Latin and the reception of Classics in Irish, in English poetry and in European literature and culture in general. This corpus of compelling chapters is hoped to match Stephen Harrison’s rich research output in an illuminating dialogue with it.

Knowledge Shaping

Knowledge Shaping
Author: Valentina Lepri
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 264
Release: 2023-11-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 311107272X

How can we portray the history of Renaissance knowledge production through the eyes of the students? Their university notebooks contained a variety of works, fragments of them, sentences, or simple words. To date, studies on these materials have only concentrated on a few individual works within the collections, neglecting the strategy by which texts and textual fragments were selected and the logic through which the notebooks were organized. The eight chapters that make up this volume explore students' note-taking practices behind the creation of their notebooks from three different angles. The first considers annotation activities in relation to their study area to answer the question of how university disciplines were able to influence both the content and structure of their notebooks. The volume's second area of research focuses on the student's curiosity and choices by considering them expressions of a self-learning practice not necessarily linked to a discipline of study or instructions from teaching. The last part of the volume moves away from the student's desk to consider instructions on note-taking methods that students could receive from manuals of various kinds.