The history of the Jews in Sicily covers a period of over a thousand years, from Antiquity to the Expulsion, based on some 40,000 archival records, most of them hitherto unpublished. It illustrates the political, legal, economic, social and religious vicissitudes of the Jewish minority and its relations with the surrounding majority of Romans, Moslems and Christians. While the antecedents of the Jewish presence on the island are shrouded in mystery, more and more historical records surface with the passage of time.
Scylla and Charybdis offers a collection of studies on epistolary and scholarly responses to religious and political controversy in Early Modern Europe. Careful examination of key intellectual letter-writers yields new biographical information as well as a more balanced judgement on the ways they responded to the challenges of their time.
This title provides managers, executives and other professionals with an innovative method for critical decision-making. The book explains the reasons for decision failures using the Law of Unintended Consequences. This account draws on the work of sociologist Robert K. Merton, psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, and economist Herbert Simon to identify two primary causes: cognitive biases and bounded rationality. It introduces an innovative method for “test driving” decisions that addresses both causes by combining scenario planning and “what-if” simulations. This method enables professionals to learn safely from virtual mistakes rather than real ones. It also provides four sample test drives of realistic critical decisions as well as two instructional videos to illustrate this new method. This book provides leaders and their support teams with important new tools for analyzing and refining complex decisions that are critical to organizational well-being and survival.
What's in a name? Using the example of a famous monster from Greek myth, this book challenges the dominant view that a mythical symbol denotes a single, clear-cut 'figure' and proposes instead to define the name 'Scylla' as a combination of three concepts - sea, dog and woman - whose articulation changes over time. While archaic and classical Greek versions usually emphasize the metaphorical coherence of Scylla's components, the name is increasingly treated as a well-defined but also paradoxical construct from the late fourth century BCE onward. Proceeding through detailed analyses of Greek and Roman texts and images, Professor Hopman shows how the same name can variously express anxieties about the sea, dogs, aggressive women and shy maidens, thus offering an empirical response to the semiotic puzzle raised by non-referential proper names.
This timely collection addresses key questions including: How did political parties from the left respond to the crisis? What does the crisis mean for the relationship between the left and European integration, and what does it mean for socialism as an economic, political and social project?
In an era of rising nationalism and geopolitical instability, Megan Fernandes’s Good Boys offers a complex portrait of messy feminist rage, negotiations with race and travel, and existential dread in the Anthropocene. The collection follows a restless, nervy, cosmically abandoned speaker failing at the aspirational markers of adulthood as she flips from city to city, from enchantment to disgust, always reemerging—just barely—on the trains and bridges and bar stools of New York City. A child of the Indian Ocean diaspora, Fernandes enacts the humor and devastation of what it means to exist as a body of contradictions. Her interpretations are muddied. Her feminism is accusatory, messy. Her homelands are theoretical and rootless. The poet converses with goats and throws a fit at a tarot reading; she loves the intimacy of strangers during turbulent plane rides and has dark fantasies about the “hydrogen fruit” of nuclear fallout. Ultimately, these poems possess an affection for the doomed: false beloveds, the hounded earth, civilizations intent on their own ruin. Fernandes skillfully interrogates where to put our fury and, more importantly, where to direct our mercy.
When NPR contributor Scott Huler made one more attempt to get through James Joyce’s Ulysses, he had no idea it would launch an obsession with the book’s inspiration: the ancient Greek epic The Odyssey and the lonely homebound journey of its Everyman hero, Odysseus. No-Man’s Lands is Huler’s funny and touching exploration of the life lessons embedded within The Odyssey, a legendary tale of wandering and longing that could be read as a veritable guidebook for middle-aged men everywhere. At age forty-four, with his first child on the way, Huler felt an instant bond with Odysseus, who fought for some twenty years against formidable difficulties to return home to his beloved wife and son. In reading The Odyssey, Huler saw the chance to experience a great vicarious adventure as well as the opportunity to assess the man he had become and embrace the imminent arrival of both middle age and parenthood. But Huler realized that it wasn’t enough to simply read the words on the page—he needed to live Odysseus’s odyssey, to visit the exotic destinations that make Homer’s story so timeless. And so an ambitious pilgrimage was born . . . traveling the entire length of Odysseus’s two-decade journey. In six months. Huler doggedly retraced Odysseus’s every step, from the ancient ruins of Troy to his ultimate destination in Ithaca. On the way, he discovers the Cyclops’s Sicilian cave, visits the land of the dead in Italy, ponders the lotus from a Tunisian resort, and paddles a rented kayak between Scylla and Charybdis and lives to tell the tale. He writes of how and why the lessons of The Odyssey—the perils of ambition, the emptiness of glory, the value of love and family—continue to resonate so deeply with readers thousands of years later. And as he finally closes in on Odysseus’s final destination, he learns to fully appreciate what Homer has been saying all along: the greatest adventures of all are the ones that bring us home to those we love. Part travelogue, part memoir, and part critical reading of the greatest adventure epic ever written, No-Man’s Lands is an extraordinary description of two journeys—one ancient, one contemporary—and reveals what The Odyssey can teach us about being better bosses, better teachers, better parents, and better people.
An essential visual handbook for anyone interested in Greek myth written by T. H. Carpenter, one of the world’s leading experts on myth in ancient art. The ancient Greeks recorded their mythology on vase paintings, engraved gems, and bronze and stone sculptures, offering depictions that often predate any references to the myths in literature or recount alternative, unfamiliar versions of these tales. In some cases, visual art provides our only evidence of these myths, as there are no surviving accounts in ancient Greek literature of stories such as the Fall of Troy or Theseus and the Minotaur. Art and Myth in Ancient Greece is a comprehensive survey of myth as it appears in Greek art. This classic volume has been updated with text and full-color images of more than three hundred scenes from Greek sculptures, vases, and gems. Aiding in the identification of mythological scenes and explaining chronological developments in style and subject matter, this book is an essential reference for anyone interested in the art, drama, poetry, or religion of ancient Greece.
