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 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
Embargo
Major league baseball labour conflict and the popularization of fantasy baseball
(Routledge, 2024-03-10) Ploeg, Andrew Jonathan
Fantasy sport constitutes a major force in the international sport industry, attracting 62.5 million participants in North America and millions more throughout the world. Despite the significance of fantasy sport, however, much scholarly work remains to be done on its history, participants, and relationships with the sports that make it possible. To that end, this article endeavors to shed light on the development of fantasy baseball throughout the 1980s and 1990s. While I have argued elsewhere that the advent of free agency in Major League Baseball (MLB) facilitated the invention of Rotisserie League Baseball in 1980, in this article I contend that the most influential factor in the evolution of the game since that time was not primarily the increased prevalence of the internet, as most scholars maintain, but rather a series of labour conflicts in MLB during the first two full decades of the free agency era. I examine three of the most consequential of those conflicts in order to assert that they helped perpetuate a shift in fan attitudes and behaviors that began with free agency and that played a critical role in popularizing not only fantasy baseball but all of fantasy sport.
Open Access
Conscience after Darwin
(Cambridge University Press, 2022-12-01) Fessenbecker, Patrick; Nottelmann, N.; Griffiths, D.; Kreisel, D.
Open Access
Estranging Adorno: the dialectics of alienation in Leonard Michaels's "I would have saved them if I could"
(Penn State University Press, 2023-03-03) Coker, William Norman
Reflecting on his relatives’ deaths in the Shoah, Leonard Michaels lets their story unfold through a meditation on how not to tell it. He resists both the consolatory aestheticism he finds in Jorge Luis Borges and the teleological closure of Hegelian-Marxist history. Both modes press something positive out of Auschwitz’s absolute negativity. Yet Michaels finds he cannot do without Borges and Marx. As his standpoint emerges from theirs, light falls on what both tacitly teach: the necessity of alienation. Enabling a new reading of this key Marxian term, Michaels’s story complements and challenges the revisionary Marxism of Theodor W. Adorno. Adorno’s late works convey the awareness that a certain alienation inheres in subjectivity and that emancipation requires us to accept our own self-estrangement. In Michaels’s story, Borges and Marx appear as figures for the “nonidentity,” the internal contradiction, that every self must own in order to achieve an identity. By foregrounding the mismatch between narrative forms and their content, Michaels affirms narrative itself as “nonidentical.” Only through the alienation implicit to literature as self-conscious artifice, he finds, can one hope to grasp an experience in either its singularity or its universality.
Open Access
Book review: unite proletarian brothers! radicalism and revolution in the Spanish Second Republic by Matthew Kerry
(SAGE Publications, 2023-01) Chamberlin, Foster
Open Access
Governing the Byzantine Empire
(Routledge, 2023-09-06) Leidholm, Nathan; Raffensperger, Christian
This chapter seeks to move the conversation surrounding governance and administration in the medieval Roman Empire away from the emperor and his court, instead examining the administrative system at multiple levels, both in Constantinople and in the more remote provinces. It therefore offers an introduction to the mechanisms of medieval Byzantine government and administration through a series of four distinct case studies, each intended to illuminate different aspects of the system of governance that allowed Byzantium to function between the ninth and twelfth centuries. The medieval Byzantine Empire is notable for having produced an abundance of source material for the study of Byzantine governance, but few theoretical treatments of its own political system or ideologies, including even the position of the emperor. Case studies like those presented here can therefore be a useful way to approach Byzantine modes of governance and administration, thereby playing to the particular strengths of those sources that do survive.
Open Access
Eusebius’ knowledge of Thucydides
(Duke University * Department of Classical Studies, 2023-03-31) Devore, David J.; Kennedy, Scott
Eusebius’ two named citations of Thucydides imply extensive knowledge of other parts of the History, and his comments show awareness of the Thucydidean commentary tradition of the imperial era.
Open Access
Surrounding and surrounded: toward a conceptual history of environment
(The University of Chicago Press, 2023) Sprenger, Florian; Born, Erik; Stoltz, Matthew Thomas
At this historical moment, few terms are as charged and powerful as the omnipresent term environment. It has become a strategic tool for politics and theories alike, crossed the borders of the disciplines of biology and ecology, and left the manifold field of environmentalism. This article explores the first steps on this path of expansion, in which the term becomes an argumentative resource and achieves a plausibility that transforms it into a universal tool. It is not self-evident to describe ubiquitous media, cinematic spaces, or augmented realities as environments. To understand how the term gained this plausibility, it is necessary to distinguish it from two other terms: the French milieu and the German Umwelt. When these three terms substitute one another and are used as translations, they lose their historical specificity and depth, and three different theoretical and philosophical traditions merge into indifference. Consequently, a conceptual history of the term environment and its relation to milieu and Umwelt—as well as terms such as medium, atmosphere, ambiance, and climate—can help us to understand the potentials and dangers of the term’s plausibility. In this sense, the article argues for a new perspective on epistemologies of surrounding that relate that which surrounds to that which is surrounded.
Embargo
In flagrante delicto: on the legal implications of sight
(Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023-12-01) de Boer, Luuk
Open Access
Thucydides in Byzantium
(Cambridge University Press, 2023-07-06) Kennedy, Scott; Kaldellis, A.
Open Access
The famine and Plague of Maximinus (311 to 312): Between Ekphrasis, Polemic, and Historical Reality in Eusebius’s Ecclesiastical History
(Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023) Kennedy, Scott; Devore, D. J.
In Book 9.8 of his Ecclesiastical History, Eusebius of Caesarea describes a horrific famine and plague that ravaged the eastern Roman empire. Hith-erto, scholars have generally treated this as an exaggerated but truthful account of these catastrophes. In this paper, we question the veracity of this account. We first demonstrate how Eusebius masterfully models his account on Thucydides’s plague and Josephus’s account of famine during the siege of Jerusalem in order to dismantle Maximinus Daia’s regime and affirm the superiority of Christian philanthropy. While Eusebius’s knowledge of Thucydides has often been disputed, this paper shows that he used not only Thucydides but also the Thucydidean commentary from the rhetorical tradition for his polemicizing against pagans. Having shown how Eusebius used his models, this paper then questions the veracity of Eusebius’s famine and plague, suggesting that it was probably a fairly unimportant localized event, which Eusebius catastrophized to serve the Ecclesiastical History’s polemical aims against Christian persecutors.
Open Access
Remote theater Review
(The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022) Del Balzo, Angelina
Open Access
Parents and children, servants and masters: Slaves, freedmen, and the family in Byzantium
(Routledge, 2022-03-31) Leidholm, Nathan
Open Access
Women and the history of ideas in the global eighteenth century: Intelligent souls?: Feminist orientalism in eighteenth-century English literature by Samara Anne Cahill; Novel Cleopatras: Romance historiography and the Dido tradition in English fiction, 1688–1785 by Nicole Horejsi
(University of Toronto Press Journals Division, 2022) Del Balzo, Angelina
Embargo
Antonio’s sad flesh
(British Shakespeare Association, 2022-08-18) Lenthe, Victor
This article examines different meanings attached to the adjective ‘sad’ in the 1590s in order to reinterpret the sexual politics of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. The play’s title character Antonio famously proclaims that he performs ‘a sad [part]’ on the world’s ‘stage’. Critics have related this apparent declaration of melancholy to Antonio’s love for Bassanio and the heartbreak he may experience when the latter marries Portia. However, by examining the word's largely forgotten physiological meanings, I show that ‘sad’ was also a non-judgmental term for a man who lacks interest in procreation. Antonio’s embrace of this label has implications both for the play’s sexual politics and for its representation of putatively non-generative market economics.