front cover of A Family of Gods
A Family of Gods
The Worship of the Imperial Family in the Latin West
Gwynaeth McIntyre
University of Michigan Press, 2016

Roman politics and religion were inherently linked as the Romans attempted to explain the world and their place within it. As Roman territory expanded and power became consolidated into the hands of one man, people throughout the empire sought to define their relationship with the emperor by granting honors to him. This collection of practices has been labeled “emperor worship” or “ruler cult,” but this tells only half the story: imperial family members also became an important part of this construction of power and almost half of the individuals deified in Rome were wives, sisters, children, and other family members of the emperor.

In A Family of Gods, Gwynaeth McIntyre expands current “ruler cult” discussions by including other deified individuals, and by looking at how communities in the period 44 BCE to 337 CE sought to connect themselves with the imperial power structure through establishing priesthoods and cult practices. This work focuses on the priests dedicated to the worship of the imperial family in order to contextualize their role in how imperial power was perceived in the provincial communities and the ways in which communities chose to employ religious practices. Special emphasis is given to the provinces in Gaul, Spain, and North Africa.

This book draws on epigraphic evidence but incorporates literary, numismatic, and archaeological evidence where applicable. It will be of interest to scholars of Roman imperial cult as well as Roman imperialism, and religious and political history. 
 


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A Forest of History
The Maya after the Emergence of Divine Kingship
Travis W. Stanton
University Press of Colorado, 2020
David Freidel and Linda Schele’s monumental work A Forest of Kings: The Untold Story of the Ancient Maya (1990) offered an innovative, rigorous, and controversial approach to studying the ancient Maya, unifying archaeological, iconographic, and epigraphic data in a form accessible to both scholars and laypeople. Travis Stanton and Kathryn Brown’s A Forest of History: The Maya after the Emergence of Divine Kingship presents a collection of essays that critically engage with and build upon the lasting contributions A Forest of Kings made to Maya epigraphy, iconography, material culture, and history.
 
These original papers present new, cutting-edge research focusing on the social changes leading up to the spread of divine kingship across the lowlands in the first part of the Early Classic. The contributors continue avenues of inquiry such as the timing of the Classic Maya collapse across the southern lowlands, the nature of Maya warfare, the notion of usurpation and “stranger-kings” in the Classic period, the social relationships between the ruler and elite of the Classic period Yaxchilán polity, and struggles for sociopolitical dominance among the later Classic period polities of Chichén Itzá, Cobá, and the Puuc kingdoms.
 
Many of the interpretations and approaches in A Forest of Kings have withstood the test of time, while others have not; a complete understanding of the Classic Maya world is still developing. In A Forest of History recent discoveries are considered in the context of prior scholarship, illustrating both the progress the field has made in the past quarter century and the myriad questions that remain. The volume will be a significant contribution to the literature for students, scholars, and general readers interested in Mesoamerican and Maya archaeology.
 
Contributors:
Wendy Ashmore, Arlen F. Chase, Diane Z. Chase, Wilberth Cruz Alvarado, Arthur A. Demarest, Keith Eppich, David A. Freidel, Charles W. Golden, Stanley P. Guenter, Annabeth Headrick, Aline Magnoni, Joyce Marcus, Marilyn A. Masson, Damaris Menéndez, Susan Milbrath, Olivia C. Navarro-Farr, José Osorio León, Carlos Peraza Lope, Juan Carlos Pérez Calderón, Griselda Pérez Robles, Francisco Pérez Ruíz, Michelle Rich, Jeremy A. Sabloff, Andrew K. Scherer, Karl A. Taube
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The Four Deaths of Acorn Whistler
Telling Stories in Colonial America
Joshua Piker
Harvard University Press, 2013

Who was Acorn Whistler, and why did he have to die? A deeply researched analysis of a bloody eighteenth-century conflict and its tangled aftermath, The Four Deaths of Acorn Whistler unearths competing accounts of the events surrounding the death of this Creek Indian. Told from the perspectives of a colonial governor, a Creek Nation military leader, local Native Americans, and British colonists, each story speaks to issues that transcend the condemned man’s fate: the collision of European and Native American cultures, the struggle of Indians to preserve traditional ways of life, and tensions within the British Empire as the American Revolution approached.

At the hand of his own nephew, Acorn Whistler was executed in the summer of 1752 for the crime of murdering five Cherokee men. War had just broken out between the Creeks and the Cherokees to the north. To the east, colonists in South Carolina and Georgia watched the growing conflict with alarm, while British imperial officials kept an eye on both the Indians’ war and the volatile politics of the colonists themselves. They all interpreted the single calamitous event of Acorn Whistler’s death through their own uncertainty about the future. Joshua Piker uses their diverging accounts to uncover the larger truth of an early America rife with violence and insecurity but also transformative possibility.

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Frederick II
The Wonder of the World
Richard Bressler
Westholme Publishing, 2010
A Medieval King Who Embraced the Arts and Sciences
One of the most remarkable personalities of the Middle Ages, Frederick II of Hohenstaufen was born in 1194. His parents—the reigning Holy Roman Emperor and the heiress to the Kingdom of Sicily—belonged to two of the leading ruling families in medieval Europe. The lands controlled by these two families extended from southern Denmark to Sicily, from modern Belgium to Bohemia. Frederick II eventually ruled the joint kingdom, and the story of how he gained and maintained this status is the primary thread running through his life. As a child in Sicily, Frederick was a ward of Pope Innocent III. When he came of age, he sought to be crowned Holy Roman Emperor but only succeeded in 1220 after many years of negotiations with the Vatican, which was reluctant to give up or share power. Resenting the influence and pressure from the papacy, Frederick became its leading opponent. As a result, the new pope, Gregory IX, condemned Frederick as the Antichrist. However, Frederick believed he was a sincere Christian, and led the Sixth Crusade to the Holy Land while under excommunication.
 
As a ruler, Frederick was unusually modern in his sensibilities. Sicily was a cultural melting pot in the thirteenth century and Frederick ended up speaking several languages. He protected Jews and Muslims in his realms and prosecuted Christian heretics throughout his thirty-year reign. Frederick was married three times, and had four legitimate and eleven illegitimate children. He was a polymath with interests ranging from sculpture, architecture, and poetry to mathematics and science in many forms, earning him admiration from his contemporaries who called him Stupor mundi, “Wonder of the World.” His lifelong interest in hunting with birds of prey led to the writing of the classic work De Arte Venandi cum Avibus (The Art of Falconry), which is still in print. Based on the latest scholarship and written for the general reader, Frederick II: The Wonder of the World by Richard Bressler provides the complete story of this complex and fascinating man.
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