Scholarly Publications - Program in Cultures, Civilization and Ideas

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/11693/115683

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Open Access
The argonautika by Orpheus. Madeła The Argonautika by Orpheus. Writing pre-Homeric poetry in late antiquity
(Cambridge University Press, 2025-07-25) Mcphee, Brian David
Open Access
Ethnography in the past tense: The amazons in Apollonius' Argonautica
(Oxford University Press, 2025) Mcphee, Brian David; Bloomfield-Gadêlha, Connie; Hall, Edith
Although Apollonius' Argonautica employs the present tense to describe the customs of several Pontic peoples, the poem's ethnographic excurses on the Amazons of Themiscyra are consistently cast in the imperfect instead. This chapter investigates the ramifications of this difference in tense usages both for Apollonius' portrayal of the Amazons themselves and for his construal of the relationship between epic and historical truth more generally. Among earlier scholars, Fränkel had interpreted this peculiarity as reflective of a generic distinction between true ethnography, cast in the omnitemporal present tense and applicable to the still extant peoples of the Black Sea littoral, and mythological epic, which naturally uses the preterite for the legendary Amazons. I complicate this analysis, however, by pointing to the range of attitudes towards the historicity of the Amazons that obtained in antiquity: historians and other intellectuals might equally hold that these warrior women never existed; that they existed in the Age of Heroes but have since become defunct; or that they still exist, but have now relocated from Pontus to Scythia. In fact, one of Apollonius' Amazonian ethnographies probably alludes to Herodotus' theory that the Amazons assimilated with a group of Scythians to become the Sauromatians, although other data in the poem preclude any straightforward endorsement of the historian's Amazonian logos on Apollonius' part. Ultimately, attempts to decode the significance of Apollonius' past-tense Amazonian ethnographies must wrestle with the ambiguous status of mythological truth in his Alexandrian epic-a problem that Apollonius' differential tenses highlight without resolving
Open Access
Commentary on Thucydides, book 3
(University of Michigan Press, 2025-07-14) Bruzzone, Rachel
Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War is one of the most significant historical and political texts of Ancient Greece, enjoying a broad appeal among the educated general public since at least 1628. The past decade has seen the historian garner significant attention even in the popular press, as scholars and politicians alike have sought to employ the History to analyze current international relations. Despite this popularity, the complexity of Thucydides' Greek has left the original language surprisingly challenging. Commentary on Thucydides, Book 3 remedies this situation by offering detailed linguistic explanations and grammatical clarifications designed to appeal both to seasoned Classicists and to a broader group of non-specialist readers who may still be developing their Greek language skills. Starting with 428 BCE, Book 3 covers a critical period of the Peloponnesian War in which the conflict began to manifest its extraordinary violence and scale. The book contains influential and controversial discussions, including Thucydides' own analysis of the nature of war and the ways that it teaches "lessons of violence" to individuals and states. Book 3 also features the famous Mytilenean Debate, an argument premised on the thesis that all international relations are, or should be, fundamentally amoral. Educated readers have always looked to Thucydides in turbulent times, and this commentary will open up his text to a wider audience.
Open Access
Spontaneous order and the history of nihilism
(Walter de Gruyter GmbH, 2025-10-09) Lea, Luke
While pre-modern intellectual cultures are recognized to have engaged with pessimism, nihilism is, by contrast, often understood to be a distinctly modern phenomenon. The sources of nihilism should then be traceable to or reflected in certain differences between modern and pre-modern thought. This paper identifies one such difference: a conceptual category for large-scale social and political phenomena understood as the product of human activity but not of human design. The paper briefly sketches the development of this concept in the Scottish Enlightenment and its development of a diachronic dimension in Hegel’s philosophy of history. It then points out the implications of this conceptual category both for our understanding of human beings as historical agents and for theories of normativity and the justification of social and political norms. These implications are identified by way of a contrast to the intellectual culture of Classical Greece. Finally, it is argued that this concept contributed to the development of trends in thought and culture commonly associated with nihilism by weakening notions of the historical agency of both individuals and groups.
Open Access
Teaching world epics
(Modern Humanities Research Association, 2025-04-01) Turner, Buffy
This volume serves as an exuberant testimony that epics — 'stories relating memorable deeds by heroic characters whose actions have significant consequences for themselves and their larger communities' (p. 1) — remain as 'relevant, thought provoking, and potentially life changing' (p. 13) as ever. Offering twenty-eight essays from thirty scholars who consider epic narratives across Asia, Europe, Africa, and the Americas from antiquity to the present, the collection emphasizes the global nature of the genre alongside the rich cultural specificity such narratives contribute individually. This abundantly inclusive approach invites comparison across a range of contexts and concerns, providing instructors in any number of courses — from epic and literary studies to 'peace and conflict studies, transnational studies, women's studies, and religious studies' (p. 13) — with insights, resources, and strategies for teaching these stories in a way that might retain a vitality and pertinence worthy of the stories themselves. The first five parts proceed 'roughly' (p. 7) chronologically and focus mostly on the teaching of individual epics. But that focus is not isolation, nor is it Eurocentric. Part i treats epics from the ancient world, including two from the Indian tradition — the Mahabharata and the Ramayana — before two from ancient Rome, allowing 'differences not only across epic traditions but also within them' to emerge 'as a reminder that cultures are not monolithic' (p. 13). When an essay centres on the Iliad, it contextualizes it within the larger Greek world and Near East, bringing it into dialogue with the Epic of Gilgamesh and biblical narratives. Part ii turns to epics from the tenth to the fifteenth century, covering epics from the French, German, Spanish, Japanese, and Chinese traditions as well as one from the Oghuz Turks, before Part iii shifts to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to address epics 'composed as original creations by single authors' (p. 6); here New World epics are considered alongside their Italian and English counterparts. Part iv moves to oral-derived epics between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, including Finland's Kalevala, Central Asia's Manas, and Armenia's David of Sassoun, while Part v examines 'living oral epics' (p. 6) from Africa, such as Mwindo and Sun-Jata, as well as one from the South Indian folk tradition. A sixth part takes up the teaching of multiple epics in various contexts, where the Persian Shahnameh, the Ethiopian Kebra Nagast, and the Arabic Sirat Bani Hilal receive attention, among others. A concise seventh part outlines resources for further study. This exceedingly limited overview should convey the astonishing scope of time, geography, content, and form that this volume's polycentric perspective takes in. By treating epic as a 'signpost to signal core characteristics' (p. 1) rather than using it for 'border control' (p. 2) — features of epic often coinciding with those of other genres — the collection works against 'the exclusion of entire cultures' (p. 2), [End Page 265] urges comparison 'within and beyond national literary traditions' (p. 12), and insists on making connections with issues in the world today. This vast diversity inevitably limits coverage of individual epics, but in creating dialogue across 'linguistic, religious, cultural, and national boundaries' (p. 14) these essays, not unlike Angelica Duran's 'miniassignments', intend 'to be provocative since they cannot be comprehensive' (p. 192). Most contributors teach at college level, and all write for English-speaking classrooms. But the tools and contextualizing knowledge they share may be used or adapted for other student bodies, just as Zachary Hamby's 'creative questioning' (p. 301) and activities with high school students would enliven college classrooms. His sensitivity to play as 'a surprisingly analytical activity' and 'such an important part of learning' (p. 302) appears across essays — in the form of adaptations and rewritings to YouTube videos, graphic novels, and role-playing — reminding us that expertise, critical thinking, and meaningful engagement grow vigorous with delight (the mere title of Charles Ross's essay, 'Bad Boys to the Rescue in Statius's Thebaid', makes one smile). Jo Ann Cavallo suggests a 'mix and match' (p. 7) approach, which her Introduction greatly assists by identifying topics related to gender, power, violence, geography, authorial practice, the reception of epic, issues of translation, and more, as they occur across essays...
Open Access
Cupid, Minerva, and lyric consciousness. Two readings of Horace odes 3.12
(Fabrizio Serra Editore, 2025) McPhee, Brian David
Scholars have nigh universally read Horace Odes 3.12 with sympathy for its addressee Neobule, but this paper argues that the poem may equally be interpreted as passing moral judgment on her. The poem’s amenability to either reading is paradigmatic of the Odes’ projection of a complex and ambivalent lyric consciousness.
Open Access
'Princely performed to the honor of our nation': Leicester's men in the Netherlands as agents of English soft power
(2025-06-10) Glider, Emily
When Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester, travelled to the Netherlands leading Elizabeth I’s 1585 military intervention in the Dutch revolt, he brought along his acting troupe, which delivered entertainment during the welcome festivities, performing for several of Dudley’s major diplomatic interlocutors. While scholars have long recognized the significance of this tour for English theatre history, the international relations context that brought the actors to Europe has received little attention. Drawing on recent historical research exploring ‘cultural diplomacy’ in the early modern world, I reevaluate Leicester’s Men as agents of English ‘soft power’ who built international influence through pageantry, drama, and ritual gift-giving at a strategically significant diplomatic occasion.
Open Access
Cosmic delegitimation: toward a political theology of scale
(Duke University Press, 2025-07) Chepurin, Krill; Dubilet, Alex; Lloyd, V. W.
The chapter sketches a post-Copernican political theology of scale by focusing especially on the interplay of the global, planetary, and cosmic in modernity. It also rethinks modernity itself as a geophysical process of cross-scalar remediation and upscaling. To that end, the chapter draws, among others, on Hans Blumenberg, Quentin Meillassoux, Sylvia Wynter, and Russian Cosmism. Turning to the Copernican revolution in astronomy as what discloses a more-than-human cosmic immanence, the chapter takes this immanence to delegitimate not only the modern project of self-assertion and the racialized world of “Man,” but also the very dichotomy between human self-assertion and post-Copernican decenteredness. The chapter’s conclusion calls for an embrace of universal contingency and an immanent inhabitation of the alien body of the Earth.
Open Access
“Two stories tangled together”: the double brain, Pudd’nhead Wilson, and Those Extraordinary Twins
(University of California Press * Journals Division, 2025-12-01) Howard, Thomas Wayne
In this article, I examine Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins (1894) alongside nineteenth-century psychological theories, especially ideas about the double brain. While scholars have long acknowledged Twain’s fascination with twinship, I argue that the twinned and conjoined characters of these texts reflect deeper concerns about mental duality and the divided self. I begin by demonstrating Twain’s longstanding interest in psychological and psychical research, including his own investigation into “mental telegraphy,” his membership in the Society for Psychical Research, and his acquaintance with famed psychologists including William James. Next, I show how the conjoined characters Angelo and Luigi demonstrate character istics that commonly appear in theories of the dual-hemispheric structure of the brain. I then turn to the two tales themselves as evidence of a further conjoinment, where Twain performs hypnotic whispers and subconscious suggestion through his careful revision of the texts. Instead of a straightforward narrative, Twain creates a twinned narrative that disrupts linear storytelling, requiring readers to navigate layered and shifting interpretations. Ultimately, Twain’s entangled stories serve as a literary experiment that engages multiple forms of attention, paralleling contemporary con ceptions of the double brain and challenging readers to experience the reading of fictional narrative as a more psychological, nuanced process.
Open Access
Fictions of consent: slavery, servitude, and free service in early modern England
(Oxford University Press, 2025-03-11) Lenthe, Victor; Chakravarty, Urvashi
Open Access
The idol and the iconoclasts: popular anti-capitalist critique in fin-de-siècle print culture
(Routledge, 2025-12-17) Menevşe, Aslı
What type of icons can give face to a system that carries the mark of transience and rules with abstraction? Using this question as its point of departure, this article attends to popular representations of capitalism in the works of fin-de-siècle French graphic artists, especially those with radical political affiliations. The rise of speculative capitalism rendered the swollen body of ‘the laissez-faire industrialist’ an insufficient icon to capture the hegemonic financial system by the close of the nineteenth century. The print artists of this study found icons from the historical and mythical pasts as well as extracted modern icons from their daily lives to give recognizable faces to capitalism. Beyond being mere cogs in a mechanics of representation, these icons had to generate affective economies to unite, instruct and agitate their audiences. The biblical golden calf is among the most ubiquitous of these faces. This article brings the visual representations of Capitalism-as-the-modern-golden-calf in dialogue with a selection of nineteenth-century anti-capitalist texts in order to illustrate how the images of popular print culture present a comparable, yet largely overlooked capacity for theoretical interventions. Finally, I constellate these observations with artworks that animated, tamed, or destroyed ‘the Bull of Wall Street’ during the Occupy Movement (2011). The iconographic similarity between the calf and the bull not only bridges centuries and cultures together, but also opens up new pathways to explore historical moments marking the creation, dissolution, and resurfacing of popular icons that constitute a universally recognizable anti-capitalist visual vernacular.
Open Access
English theatrical anecdotes, 1660–1800
(University of Toronto Press, 2024-03-20) Del Balzo, Angelina; Ladd, Heather; Ritchie, Leslie
Open Access
Making whiteness visible: Slavery and oriental she-tragedy in Thomas Southerne's Oroonoko (1696)
(Duke University Press, 2024-09-01) Del Balzo, Angelina
This article offers a genre‐based argument for the white Imoinda in Thomas Southerne's stage adaptation of Aphra Behn's Oroonoko. Southerne's adaptation was one of the earliest depictions of plantation slavery on the English stage, and it drew on tropes from the Oriental she‐tragedy's depiction of enslaved European women in the Ottoman Empire. Evoking Desdemona in the then‐popular Othello, Imoinda offers a rare moment when the actress's whiteness is named as such diegetically. The stage Oroonoko shines a spotlight on the way that gendered performance worked through naturalizing white women as the default sympathetic subject for Enlightenment audiences. The dramatic conventions of the Oriental she‐tragedy make this representation of the white Imoinda imaginatively viable, while the dissonance of her character reveals the contradictory nature of race thought in the long eighteenth century.
Open Access
The Cambridge companion to Thucydides
(Cambridge University Press, 2024-05-03) Bruzzone, Rachel
Open Access
The conditionality of Helenus' Oracle and tragic choice in Sophocles' Philoctetes
(Brill, 2024-10-02) McPhee, Brian David
Helenus' oracle in Sophocles' Philoctetes is commonly misunderstood as an unqualified revelation of an immutable future: the gods have fated Philoctetes to rejoin the Greek army at Troy. This has occasioned further misinterpretations of the play, especially as regards the "false ending", in which Neoptolemus and Philoctetes would appear to disregard the divine will in an act of conscious impiety by choosing to sail for Malis instead. This paper argues that the oracle should rather be understood as conditional, allowing Philoctetes either to assent or refuse to rejoin the Greek army in good conscience. In the absence of compulsion from the gods, Neoptolemus and Philoctetes feel free to make tragic choices of real gravity about their futures, and these choices reveal the duo's characters before Heracles appears and reverses their course.
Open Access
Paradigms of frontier interaction: a new use for Digenes Akrites
(History Studies, 2024-02-10) Leidholm, Nathan
This article argues that the Byzantine romance known as Digenes Akrites has more to offer historians than is often recognized. Regardless of the fictional nature of the story or of the exact date of its composition, the Digenes tale can serve as an exemplar of the kinds of interactions which regularly took place in the frontier regions between the Byzantine and Muslim worlds and the social values and cultural mores that guided such interactions. If taken as a paradigm of otherwise invisible conditions along the frontier regions of southeastern Anatolia, Digenes can shed new light on an otherwise dark and incomplete picture. It is, in fact, a frontier world in and of itself, in which outside powers, both Muslim and Byzantine, are distant images and only occasional players.
Open Access
Transforming the religious landscape: Emperor Leo VI and his struggle for supremacy over the church
(İstanbul University Press, 2024-03-15) Leidholm, Nathan
From the very outset of his reign, Byzantine Emperor Leo VI (r. 886-912) recognized the need for serious efforts to reassert imperial hegemony over the church. This article offers an analysis of Leo VI’s multi-faceted program that aimed at reasserting the emperor’s dominance over the ecclesiastical organization. In particular, the article stresses the incorporation of Leo’s homilies into his program, which not been widely recognized by modern scholars. The various efforts Leo made, including his homilies, display a marked cohesiveness, interconnectivity, and consistency that affirm their inclusion in a singular, organized effort both imagined and executed as a composite whole.
Open Access
Ben Jonson on father Thomas Wright
(Edinburgh University Press, 2024-05) Lenthe, Victor
This article reassesses Ben Jonson's relationship to the Roman-Catholic priest and missionary Thomas Wright (c. 1561–1623). Wright plays two roles in critical accounts of Jonson's life and works: first as the spiritual mentor who probably worked Jonson's conversion in 1598, second as the dedicatee of one of Jonson's only six extant sonnets. My article applies literary analysis to the sonnet Jonson wrote for Wright in order to show that it signals negative feelings for the priest. This recognition is important to Jonson studies for two reasons. It contributes the first extended literary analysis of an artful poem by Jonson. In addition, it raises questions about the tendency of much recent scholarship to explain various aspects of Jonson's life and works by reference to his religion. In contrast to this recent religious turn stands an older narrative about Jonson as a secular individualist largely indifferent to the supernatural. By revealing Jonson to be struggling against a figure central to his spiritual biography, I suggest a middle ground between these two narratives in which the secularizing aspects of Jonson's thought are enmeshed with, rather than opposed to, the religious aspects emphasized by recent scholarship.
Open Access
The monument of the present: the Fossati restoration of Hagia Sophia (1847-9)
(Edinburgh University Press, 2024-09-19) Menevşe, Aslı; Neumeier, Emily; Anderson, Benjamin
In 1847, architect Gaspare Fossati embarked on an ambitious restoration project for Hagia Sophia on the orders of Sultan Abdülmecid I. The Sultan, his bureaucrats, and the myriad agents of the restoration chose the restored monument to act as the face of a modern Ottoman state and society when Tanzimat was searching for forms that communicated social and political cohesion. This article builds its arguments on the exchange between the French-language Ottoman press and European newspapers regarding the restoration of Hagia Sophia, which culminate in the analysis of a crucial—but neglected—visual document: the commemorative lithographic album (1852) published by Gaspare Fossati with the support of Sultan Abdülmecid I. The Album and the Francophone press embraced the diverse identities of the building – Byzantine cathedral, imperial mosque, and world heritage monument— to present the political and social vision behind this co-existence of differences as distinctively Ottoman. Through their efforts, the restored Hagia Sophia was presented as a privileged historical-aesthetic site and a living monument, where the conciliation between tradition and reform seemed possible.
Open Access
Redating Bessarion's against the Slanderer of Plato: his defense of Plato and Platonic politics
(Duke University * Department of Classical Studies, 2024-08-13) Kennedy, Scott