Late Antiquity in Contemporary Debate
Late Antiquity in Contemporary Debate

Author: Rita Lizzi Testa

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2017-03-07

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13: 1443876569

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Late Antiquity, once known only as the period of protracted decline in the ancient world (Bas-Empire), has now become a major research area. In recent years, a wide-ranging historiographic debate on Late Antiquity has also begun. Replacing Gibbon’s categories of decline and decadence with those of continuity and transformation has not only brought to the fore the concept of the Late Roman period, but has made the alleged hiatus between the Roman, Byzantine and Mediaeval ages less important, while also driving to the margins the question of the end of the Roman Empire. This has broadened the scope of research on Late Antiquity enormously and made the issue of periodization of crucial significance. The resulting debate has escaped the confines of Europe and now embraces almost all historiographic cultures around the world. This book sheds new light on this debate, collecting papers given at the 22nd International Congress of Historical Sciences (CISH/ICHS) in Jinan, China. They recall key moments of the discovery of the world of Late Antiquity, and show how it is possible to reach a definition of an age, analysing different sectors of history, using disparate sources, and with the guidance of very varied interpretative models.

Cities and the Meanings of Late Antiquity
Cities and the Meanings of Late Antiquity

Author: Mark Humphries

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2019-11-04

Total Pages: 118

ISBN-13: 9004422617

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The last half century has seen an explosion in the study of late antiquity, which has characterised the period between the third and seventh centuries not as one of catastrophic collapse and ‘decline and fall’, but rather as one of dynamic and positive transformation. Yet research on cities in this period has provoked challenges to this positive picture of late antiquity. This study surveys the nature of this debate, examining problems associated with the sources historians use to examine late antique urbanism, and the discourses and methodological approaches they have constructed from them. It aims to set out the difficulties and opportunities presented by the study of cities in late antiquity in terms of transformations of politics, the economy, and religion, and to show that this period witnessed very real upheaval and dislocation alongside continuity and innovation in cities around the Mediterranean.

Christianity, Empire, and the Making of Religion in Late Antiquity
Christianity, Empire, and the Making of Religion in Late Antiquity

Author: Jeremy M. Schott

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2013-04-23

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 0812203461

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In Christianity, Empire, and the Making of Religion in Late Antiquity, Jeremy M. Schott examines the ways in which conflicts between Christian and pagan intellectuals over religious, ethnic, and cultural identity contributed to the transformation of Roman imperial rhetoric and ideology in the early fourth century C.E. During this turbulent period, which began with Diocletian's persecution of the Christians and ended with Constantine's assumption of sole rule and the consolidation of a new Christian empire, Christian apologists and anti-Christian polemicists launched a number of literary salvos in a battle for the minds and souls of the empire. Schott focuses on the works of the Platonist philosopher and anti- Christian polemicist Porphyry of Tyre and his Christian respondents: the Latin rhetorician Lactantius, Eusebius, bishop of Caesarea, and the emperor Constantine. Previous scholarship has tended to narrate the Christianization of the empire in terms of a new religion's penetration and conquest of classical culture and society. The present work, in contrast, seeks to suspend the static, essentializing conceptualizations of religious identity that lie behind many studies of social and political change in late antiquity in order to investigate the processes through which Christian and pagan identities were constructed. Drawing on the insights of postcolonial discourse analysis, Schott argues that the production of Christian identity and, in turn, the construction of a Christian imperial discourse were intimately and inseparably linked to the broader politics of Roman imperialism.

Classics in Progress
Classics in Progress

Author: T. P. Wiseman

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2006-01-26

Total Pages: 476

ISBN-13: 9780197263235

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The study of Greco-Roman civilisation is as exciting and innovative today as it has ever been. This intriguing collection of essays by contemporary classicists reveals new discoveries, new interpretations and new ways of exploring the experiences of the ancient world. Through one and a half millennia of literature, politics, philosophy, law, religion and art, the classical world formed the origin of western culture and thought. This book emphasises the many ways in which it continues to engage with contemporary life. Offering a wide variety of authorial style, the chapters range in subject matter from contemporary poets' exploitation of Greek and Latin authors, via newly discovered literary texts and art works, to modern arguments about ancient democracy and slavery, and close readings of the great poets and philosophers of antiquity. This engaging book reflects the current rejuvenation of classical studies and will fascinate anyone with an interest in western history.

Egypt in Late Antiquity
Egypt in Late Antiquity

Author: Roger S. Bagnall

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 1996

Total Pages: 396

ISBN-13: 9780691010960

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Focusing on Egypt from the accession of Diocletian in 284 to the middle of the fifth century, this book brings together information pertaining to the society, economy and culture of a province important to understanding the entire eastern part of the later

Reading Late Antiquity
Reading Late Antiquity

Author: Sigrid Schottenius Cullhed

Publisher: Universitatsverlag Winter

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9783825367879

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The field of Late Antique studies has involved self-reflexion and criticism since its emergence in the late nineteenth century, but in recent years there has been a widespread desire to retrace our steps more systematically and to inquire into the millennial history of previous interpretations, historicization and uses of the end of the Greco-Roman world. This volume contributes to that enterprise. It emphasizes an aspect of Late Antiquity reception that ensues from its subordination to the Classical tradition, namely its tendency to slip in and out of western consciousness. Narratives and artifacts associated with this period have gained attention, often in times of crisis and change, and exercised influence only to disappear again. When later readers have turned to the same period and identified with what they perceive, they have tended to ascribe the feeling of relatedness to similar values and circumstances rather than to the formation of an unbroken tradition of appropriation.

The Bishop of Rome in Late Antiquity
The Bishop of Rome in Late Antiquity

Author: Revd Dr Geoffrey D. Dunn

Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published: 2015-05-28

Total Pages: 287

ISBN-13: 1472455517

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The essays in this volume examine the bishop of Rome in late antiquity from the time of Constantine in the fourth century to the death of Gregory the Great in the seventh. The volume canvasses a wide range of opinions about the nature of papal power by concentrating on how the holders of the office exercised their episcopal responsibilities and prerogatives within the city or in relation to both civic administration and churches in other areas.

(Re)using Ruins: Public Building in the Cities of the Late Antique West, A.D. 300-600
(Re)using Ruins: Public Building in the Cities of the Late Antique West, A.D. 300-600

Author: Douglas R. Underwood

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2019-04-09

Total Pages: 285

ISBN-13: 9004390537

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In (Re)using Ruins, Douglas Underwood presents a new account of the use and reuse of Roman urban public monuments in a crucial period of transition, A.D. 300-600. Commonly seen as a period of uniform decline for public building, especially in the western half of the Mediterranean, (Re)using Ruins shows a vibrant, yet variable, history for these structures. Douglas Underwood establishes a broad catalogue of archaeological evidence (supplemented with epigraphic and literary testimony) for the construction, maintenance, abandonment and reuses of baths, aqueducts, theatres, amphitheatres and circuses in Italy, southern Gaul, Spain, and North Africa, demonstrating that the driving force behind the changes to public buildings was largely a combined shift in urban ideologies and euergetistic practices in Late Antique cities.

Ostia in Late Antiquity
Ostia in Late Antiquity

Author: Douglas Boin

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2013-07-22

Total Pages: 309

ISBN-13: 1107024013

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'Ostia in Late Antiquity' narrates the life of Ostia Antica, Rome's ancient harbor, during the later empire.

Public Disputation, Power, and Social Order in Late Antiquity
Public Disputation, Power, and Social Order in Late Antiquity

Author: Richard Lim

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2024-06-21

Total Pages: 303

ISBN-13: 0520378385

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Richard Lim explores the importance of verbal disputation in Late Antiquity, offering a rich socio-historical and cultural examination of the philosophical and theological controversies. He shows how public disputation changed with the advent of Christianity from a means of discovering truth and self-identification to a form of social competition and "winning over" an opponent. He demonstrates how the reception and practice of public debate, like other forms of competition in Late Antiquity, were closely tied to underlying notions of authority, community and social order. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1995.