This book provides the most complete and definitive study of Roman comedy. Originally published in 1952. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
A study of Pliny's "Natural History", highlighting its overall theme, Nature, especially in her relationship with humans. Author and work are also placed in a literary and historical context. Pliny is seen as a figure with a valuable contribution to make to our understanding of ancient thought.
A look at the history of censorship, science, and magic from the Middle Ages to the post-Reformation era. Neil Tarrant challenges conventional thinking by looking at the longer history of censorship, considering a five-hundred-year continuity of goals and methods stretching from the late eleventh century to well into the sixteenth. Unlike earlier studies, Defining Nature’s Limits engages the history of both learned and popular magic. Tarrant explains how the church developed a program that sought to codify what was proper belief through confession, inquisition, and punishment and prosecuted what they considered superstition or heresy that stretched beyond the boundaries of religion. These efforts were continued by the Roman Inquisition, established in 1542. Although it was designed primarily to combat Protestantism, from the outset the new institution investigated both practitioners of “illicit” magic and inquiries into natural philosophy, delegitimizing certain practices and thus shaping the development of early modern science. Describing the dynamics of censorship that continued well into the post-Reformation era, Defining Nature's Limits is revisionist history that will interest scholars of the history science, the history of magic, and the history of the church alike.
Roman Law in the State of Nature offers a new interpretation of the foundations of Hugo Grotius' natural law theory. Surveying the significance of texts from classical antiquity, Benjamin Straumann argues that certain classical texts, namely Roman law and a specifically Ciceronian brand of Stoicism, were particularly influential for Grotius in the construction of his theory of natural law. The book asserts that Grotius, a humanist steeped in Roman law, had many reasons to employ Roman tradition and explains how Cicero's ethics and Roman law - secular and offering a doctrine of the freedom of the high seas - were ideally suited to provide the rules for Grotius' state of nature. This fascinating new study offers historians, classicists and political theorists a fresh account of the historical background of the development of natural rights, natural law and of international legal norms as they emerged in seventeenth-century early modern Europe.
A selection of forty-one pages of the manuscript Mira calligraphiae monumenta, comprising Joris Hoefnagel's illumination of Georg Bocskay's model book of calligraphy, now in the manuscript collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum.
The doctrinal teaching of the Roman Catholic Church extends over two millennia and seeks to inform and direct lives at many levels: personal, familial, civic, and institutional. The reach of this teaching extends to law, moral and ethical issues, politics, education, science, and art. No single volume can serve even as a sketch of this teaching, but in the present volume ten internationally renowned scholars address the various dimensions of the Roman Catholic understanding of the human person, especially St. Thomas Aquinas's affirmation of the rational and social nature of man. The authors present a truly multidisciplinary approach to the topic--the contributors include philosophers, psychologists, political scientists, a theologian, and an architect. Special attention is given to the theology and anthropology of Pope John Paul II whose writings vividly condense the searching examination and robust conception of human nature developed over the centuries. Readers are reminded of just how central the Church's teaching has been to Western Civilization in all of its projections and are thus alerted to the conditions likely to preserve or threaten it. The contributors are Hadley Arkes, Jude P. Dougherty, Kevin Flannery, S.J., Robert P. George, Richard Gill, L.C., F. Russell Hittinger, Daniel N. Robinson, Robert Royal, Peter Ryan, S.J., and Carroll William Westfall. ABOUT THE EDITORS: Daniel N. Robinson is professor of philosophy at Oxford University and visiting professor at the Institute for the Psychological Sciences. He is professor emeritus of Georgetown University. Gladys M. Sweeney is dean of the Institute for the Psychological Sciences. Richard Gill, L.C., is director of the women's section of the Legionaries of Christ. PRAISE FOR THE BOOK: "This volume offers the possibility of a fruitful dialogue on the question of Catholic identity in higher education." -- Lucien Richard, Catholic Library World
Bodily gesture. A Roman worshipper spins in a circle in front of a temple. Faced with death, a Roman woman tears her hair and beats her breasts. Enthusiastic spectators at a gladiatorial event gesticulate with thumbs. Examining the tantalizing glimpses of ancient bodies offered by surviving Roman sculptures, paintings, and literary texts, Anthony Corbeill analyzes the role of gesture in medical and religious ritual, in the gladiatorial arena, in mourning practice, in aristocratic competition of the late Republic, and in the court of the emperor Tiberius. Adopting approaches from anthropology, gender studies, and ecological theory, Nature Embodied offers both a series of case studies and an overarching narrative of the role and meanings of gesture in ancient Rome. Arguing that bodily movement grew out of the relationship between Romans and their natural, social, and spiritual environment, the book explores the ways in which an originally harmonious relationship between nature and the body was manipulated as Rome became socially and politically complex. By the time that Tacitus was writing about the reign of Tiberius, the emergence of a new political order had prompted an increasingly inscrutable equation between truth and the body--and something vital in the once harmonizing relationship between bodies and the world beyond them had been lost. Nature Embodied makes an important contribution to an expanding field of research by offering a new theoretical model for the study of gesture in classical times.
This volume uses the art of Rome to help us understand the radical historical break between the fundamental ancient pre-supposition that there is a natural world or cosmos situating human life, and the equally fundamental modern emphasis on human imagination and its creative power. Rome’s unique art history reveals a different side of the battle between ancients and moderns than that usually raised as an issue in the history of science and philosophy. The book traces the idea of a cosmos in pre-modern art in Rome, from the reception of Greek art in the Roman republic to the construction of the Pantheon, to early Christian art and architecture. It then sketches the disappearance of the presupposition of a cosmos in the High Renaissance and Baroque periods, as creativity became a new ideal. Through discussions of the art and architecture that defines proto-modern Rome— from Michelangelo’s terribilita’ in the Sistine Chapel, Caravaggio’s realism, Baroque illusionism, the infinities of Borromini’s architecture, to the Grand Tour’s representations of ruins— through an interpretation of such major issues and works, this book shows how modern art liberates us while leaving us feeling estranged from our grounding in the natural world. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, architectural history, classics, philosophy, and early modern history and culture.
