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Hallowed Stewards
Solon and the Sacred Treasurers of Ancient Athens
William S. Bubelis
University of Michigan Press, 2016
Students of ancient Athenian politics, governance, and religion have long stumbled over the rich evidence of inscriptions and literary texts that document the Athenians’ stewardship of the wealth of the gods. Likewise, Athens was well known for devoting public energy and funds to all matters of ritual, ranging from the building of temples to major religious sacrifices. Yet, lacking any adequate account of how the Athenians organized that commitment, much less how it arose and developed, ancient historians and philologists alike have labored with only a paltry understanding of what was a central concern to the Athenians themselves. That deficit of knowledge, in turn, has constrained and diminished our grasp of other essential questions surrounding Athenian society and its history, such as the nature of political life in archaic Athens, and the forces underlying Athens’ imperial finances.

Hallowed Stewards closely examines those magistracies that were central to Athenian religious efforts, and which are best described as “sacred treasurers.” Given the extensive but fragmentary evidence available to us, which consists mainly of inscriptions but includes such texts as the ps.-Aristotelian Constitution of the Athenians, no catalog-like approach to these offices could properly encompass their details, much less their wider significance. By situating the sacred treasurers within a broader religious and historical framework, Hallowed Stewards not only provides an incisive portrait of the treasurers themselves but also elucidates how sacred property and public finance alike developed in ancient Athens.

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Hellenicity
Between Ethnicity and Culture
Jonathan M. Hall
University of Chicago Press, 2002
In today's cosmopolitan world, ethnic and national identity has assumed an ever-increasing importance. But how is this identity formed, and how does it change over time?

With Hellenicity, Jonathan M. Hall explores these questions in the context of ancient Greece, drawing on an exceptionally wide range of evidence to determine when, how, why, and to what extent the Greeks conceived themselves as a single people. Hall argues that a subjective sense of Hellenic identity emerged in Greece much later than is normally assumed. For instance, he shows that the four main ethnic subcategories of the ancient Greeks—Akhaians, Ionians, Aiolians, and Dorians—were not primordial survivals from a premigratory period, but emerged in precise historical circumstances during the eighth and seventh centuries B.C. Furthermore, Hall demonstrates that the terms of defining Hellenic identity shifted from ethnic to broader cultural criteria during the course of the fifth century B.C., chiefly due to the influence of Athens, whose citizens formulated a new Athenoconcentric conception of "Greekness."
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The Hellenistic, Roman, and Medieval Glass from Cosa
David Frederick Grose (R. T. Scott, editor)
University of Michigan Press, 2017
The Hellenistic, Roman, and Medieval Glass from Cosa continues the exemplary record of publication by the American Academy in Rome on important classes of materials recovered in excavation from one of the principal archaeological sites of Roman Italy. Over 15,000 fragments of glass tableware, ranging in date from the mid-second century BCE to the early fifth century CE, were found at Cosa, a small town in Etruria (modern Tuscany). Cosa’s products were chiefly exported to North Africa and Europe, but its influence was felt throughout the Mediterranean world.

The research and analysis presented here are the work of the late David Frederick Grose, who began this project when no other city site excavations in Italy focused on ancient glass. He confirmed that the Roman glass industry began to emerge in the Julio-Claudian era, beginning in the principate of Augustus. His study traces the evolution of manufacturing techniques from core-formed vessels to free blown glass, and it documents changes in taste and style that were characteristic of the western glass industry throughout its long history.

At the time of Grose’s unexpected passing, his study was complete but not yet published. Nevertheless, the reputation of his work in this area has done much to establish the value and importance of excavating and researching Cosa’s glass. This volume, arranged and edited by R. T. Scott, makes Grose’s essential scholarship on the subject available for the first time.


 
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Herodotean Narrative and Discourse
Mabel Lang
Harvard University Press, 1984
Mabel Lang offers a new interpretation of Herodotus. Her reading of the “Father of History” pinpoints the aspects of his style that clearly derive from oral composition. Lang examines oral techniques in storytelling, known from folktales and other oral literature as well as from Homer. She shows how the dramatic use of speeches—so characteristic of folk literature—played an important part in Herodotus' development of history out of the chronologies and geographies that he knew. Story form and speeches attributed to historical persons, she demonstrates, follow traditional formulas. She also studies in detail Herodotus' distinctive use of proverbs and rhetorical questions. Throughout, Lang draws on a variety of materials and offers particularly revealing comparisons of Homeric and Herodotean styles. This analysis of the evidence for oral composition in Herodotus' Histories opens a new perspective for students and scholars of Greek history.
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The Hero's Place
Medieval Literary Traditions of Space and Belonging
Molly Robinson Kelly
Catholic University of America Press, 2009
The Hero's Place presents an innovative study of how the spaces described in a literary work contribute dynamically and profoundly to that work's meaning.
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The History of Byzantine and Eastern Canon Law to 1500
Wilfried Hartmann
Catholic University of America Press, 2012
This newest volume in the History of Medieval Canon Law series surveys the history of Byzantine and Eastern canon law. Beginning in the Patristic Age, Susan Wessel outlines the evolution of ecclesiastical law before the Council of Nicaea (325 A.D.).
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The History of Medieval Canon Law in the Classical Period, 1140-1234
From Gratian to the Decretals of Pope Gregory IX (History of Medieval Canon Law)
Wilfried Hartmann
Catholic University of America Press, 2008
This latest volume in the ongoing History of Medieval Canon Law series covers the period from Gratian's initial teaching of canon law during the 1120s to just before the promulgation of the Decretals of Pope Gregory IX in 1234.
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Honor Among Thieves
Craftsmen, Merchants, and Associations in Roman and Late Roman Egypt
Philip F. Venticinque
University of Michigan Press, 2016

Honor Among Thieves examines associations of craftsmen in the framework of ancient economics and transaction costs. Scholars have long viewed such associations primarily as social or religious groups that provided mutual support, proper burial, and sociability, and spaces where nonelite individuals could seek status supposedly denied them in their contemporary society. However, the analysis presented here concentrates on how craftsmen, merchants, and associations interacted with each other and with elite and nonelite constituencies; managed economic, political, social, and legal activities; represented their concerns to the authorities; and acquired and used social capital—a new and important view of these economic engines.

Philip F. Venticinque offers a study of associations from a social, economic, and legal point of view, and in the process examines how they helped their members overcome high transaction costs—the “costs of doing business”—through the development of social capital. He explores associations from the “bottom up,” in order to see how their members create status and reputation outside of an elite framework. He thus explores how occupations regarded as thieves in elite ideology create their own systems of honor.

Honor Among Thieves will be of interest to scholars of the ancient economy, of social groups, and Roman Egypt in all periods. 


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Household Economy at Wall Ridge
A Fourteenth-Century Central Plains Farmstead in the Missouri Valley
Edited by Stephen C. Lensink, Joseph A. Tiffany, and Shirley J. Schermer
University of Utah Press, 2020

Household Economy at Wall Ridge tells the story of a Native American household that occupied a lodge on the eastern Plains border during the early 1300s AD. Contributors use cutting-edge methods and the site’s unparalleled archaeological record to shed light on the daily technological, subsistence, and dietary aspects of the occupants’ lives. This work represents the first comprehensive study of a prehistoric Central Plains household in over half a century.

The research covers archaeobotany, zooarchaeology, dating, ceramics, lithics, bone and shell tools, diet, climate, ecology, and more. The study of plant and animal usage from the lodge stands as a tour de force of analytical methods, including stable isotope data that permit the discovery of dietary items missed by traditional studies. Many of these items have never been reported before from Central Plains sites. The book firmly sets the site’s occupancy at AD 1305, with a margin of error of only a few years. This result, based on high-precision dating methods, exceeds in accuracy all previously dated Plains lodges and provides a temporal backdrop for evaluating household activities.

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How Soon Is Now?
Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time
Carolyn Dinshaw
Duke University Press, 2012
How Soon Is Now? performs a powerful critique of modernist temporal regimes through its revelatory exploration of queer ways of being in time as well as of the potential queerness of time itself. Carolyn Dinshaw focuses on medieval tales of asynchrony and on engagements with these medieval temporal worlds by amateur readers centuries later. In doing so, she illuminates forms of desirous, embodied being that are out of sync with ordinarily linear measurements of everyday life, that involve multiple temporalities, that precipitate out of time altogether. Dinshaw claims the possibility of a fuller, denser, more crowded now that theorists tell us is extant but that often eludes our temporal grasp.

Whether discussing Victorian men of letters who parodied the Book of John Mandeville, a fictionalized fourteenth-century travel narrative, or Hope Emily Allen, modern coeditor of the early-fifteenth-century Book of Margery Kempe, Dinshaw argues that these and other medievalists outside the academy inhabit different temporalities than modern professionals operating according to the clock. How Soon Is Now? clears space for amateurs, hobbyists, and dabblers who approach medieval worlds from positions of affect and attachment, from desires to build other kinds of worlds. Unruly, untimely, they urge us toward a disorderly and asynchronous collective.

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Human Adaptation in Ancient Mesoamerica
Empirical Approaches to Mesoamerican Archaeology
Nancy Gonlin
University Press of Colorado, 2016

This volume explores the dynamics of human adaptation to social, political, ideological, economic, and environmental factors in Mesoamerica and includes a wide array of topics, such as the hydrological engineering behind Teotihuacan’s layout, the complexities of agriculture and sustainability in the Maya lowlands, and the nuanced history of abandonment among different lineages and households in Maya centers.

The authors aptly demonstrate how culture is the mechanism that allows people to adapt to a changing world, and they address how ecological factors, particularly land and water, intersect with nonmaterial and material manifestations of cultural complexity. Contributors further illustrate the continuing utility of the cultural ecological perspective in framing research on adaptations of ancient civilizations.

This book celebrates the work of Dr. David Webster, an influential Penn State archaeologist and anthropologist of the Maya region, and highlights human adaptation in Mesoamerica through the scientific lenses of anthropological archaeology and cultural ecology.

Contributors include Elliot M. Abrams, Christopher J. Duffy, Susan Toby Evans, Kirk D. French, AnnCorinne Freter, Nancy Gonlin, George R. Milner, Zachary Nelson, Deborah L. Nichols, David M. Reed, Don S. Rice, Prudence M. Rice, Rebecca Storey, Kirk Damon Straight, David Webster, Stephen L. Whittington, Randolph J. Widmer, John D. Wingard, and W. Scott Zeleznik.

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Humanist Educational Treatises
Translated by Craig W. Kallendorf
Harvard University Press, 2008

The disciplines now known as the humanities emerged in their modern form during the Italian Renaissance as the result of an educational movement begun by humanist teachers, writers, and scholars in the early fourteenth century. These educators argued for the usefulness of classical literature as an instrument for training young men and women, not only in the arts of language and eloquence, but also in civic virtue and practical wisdom.

This volume provides new translations, commissioned for the I Tatti Renaissance Library, of four of the most important theoretical statements that emerged from the early humanists’ efforts to reform medieval education: Pier Paolo Vergerio, “The Character and Studies Befitting a Free-Born Youth”; Leonardo Bruni, “The Study of Literature”; Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini (Pope Pius II), “The Education of Boys”; and Battista Guarino, “A Program of Teaching and Learning.”

The original text of these four documents with Craig W. Kallendorf’s translation is also available in a facing-page edition.

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Humanist Educational Treatises
Edited and translated by Craig W. Kallendorf
Harvard University Press, 2002

The cycle of disciplines now known as the humanities emerged in their modern form during the Italian Renaissance as the result of an educational movement begun by humanist teachers, writers, and scholars of the early Quattrocento. The movement argued for the usefulness of classical literature as an instrument for training young men and women, not only in the arts of language and eloquence, but also in civic virtue and practical wisdom. This volume contains four of the most important theoretical statements that emerged from the early humanists’ efforts to reform medieval education.

The four texts are Pier Paolo Vergerio, “The Character and Studies Befitting a Free-Born Youth”; Leonardo Bruni, “The Study of Literature”; Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini (Pope Pius II), “The Education of Boys”; and Battista Guarino, “A Program of Teaching and Learning.” The Vergerio and Guarino texts appear in English for the first time.

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