BOB2024MIOT

Les notions d’urbanité, de politesse et de savoir-vivre connaissent depuis une dizaine d’années un intérêt renouvelé à la fois dans leurs dimensions politique, sociale et culturelle.

Cet ouvrage souhaite envisager le milieu urbain en tant qu’espace de civilité en croisant les regards des historiens et des spécialistes de la littérature de l’âge classique. Il s’agit aussi d’examiner les cérémonies et rituels du XVIIe siècle comme un ensemble de réseaux de pratiques codifiées, dans lequel interagissent notamment des usages collectifs et des préséances individuelles. Ces usages organisent l’espace urbain comme l’espace curial en se déployant en leur sein. La confrontation des archives et des documents littéraires, mais aussi des outils et des méthodologies utilisés par ces différents champs disciplinaires, permet d’étudier à nouveaux frais les relations entre des concepts trop rapidement perçus comme antonymiques : l’incivilité n’est jamais le contraire de la civilité, et il n’existe pas de civilisation, ni de société civilisée, qui puisse se revendiquer comme statique ou achevée. En revenant, dans le sillage des travaux de Norbert Elias, aux origines de la civilité moderne, envisagée à l’échelle européenne, cet ouvrage entreprend d’examiner ce processus, non pas de manière linéaire et téléologique, mais dans la complexité de ses évolutions et mutations, afin de mieux contextualiser les débats contemporains autour de l’incivilité.

This bookaddresses the issue of political celebration in early modern Venice. Dealing with processional orders and iconographic programs, historiographical narratives and urbanistic canons, stylistic features and diplomatic accounts, the interdisciplinary contributions gathered in these pages aim to question the performative effectiveness and the social consistency of the so called ‘myth’ of Venice: a system of symbols, beliefs and meanings offering a self-portrait of the ruling elite, the Venetian patriciate. In order to do so, the volume calls for a spatial turn in Venetian studies, blurring the boundaries between institutionalized and unofficial ceremonial spaces and considering their ongoing interaction in representing the rule of the Serenissima. The twelve chapters move from Ducal Palace to the Venetian streets and from the city of Venice to its dominions, thus widening considerably the range of social and political actors and audiences involved in the analysis. Such multifocal perspective allows us to challenge the very idea of a single ‘myth’ of Venice.

The Hellenistic world, with its many new cultural trends and traditions, has often proved a challenging period for scholars. In the wake of changing political, religious, cultural, economic, and social conceptions and practices, gender roles and notions also underwent significant change, leading to the emergence of strong female figures. Up to now, however, no major encompassing research work on elite Hellenistic women has been published. This volume aims to fill this historiographical gap by gathering together contributions covering a wide range of geographical, chronological, and cultural backgrounds. While mostly focused on royal women, the chapters included here also seek to provide readers with an accurate and diverse description of the female experience in the Hellenistic period. The contributors to this book, both renowned scholars and new voices in the discipline, together advocate for a fresh approach that goes beyond the often problematic approaches of earlier historiography and provides a new understanding of elite women in the period.

The Greeks had a rich and varied relationship with foreign lands and people, which made possible a real circulation of knowledge throughout the Archaic, Classical, and Hellenistic times. The essays collected in this volume aim at exploring the hypothesis that the most adventurous intellectuals saw foreign lands and foreigners as repositories of knowledge that the Greeks σοφοί had to engage with, in the hope of bringing back home valuables in the form of new ideas. Each of the articles included in this collective work explores one aspect of the “stranger” as a potential source, with contributions mostly focused on Plato, Xenophon, Democritus, Aristotle, Diogenes, Cicero, and Galen.

Architecture, and the layout of settlements, are key elements of archaeological research that enable an understanding of past societies. In studying the built environment and the articulation of social spaces, it is possible to shed light on the social relations of communities, and on the ideology, economy, and cultural and social practices that underpinned how people lived. Taking a study of the built environment as its starting point, this volume draws together contributions focusing on the Neolithic transition in south-western Asia. Covering a period that extends from the Early Pre-Pottery Neolithic through to the Late Neolithic (c. 10,000–5500 BCE), the chapters gathered here explore the built environment from different regions, perspectives, and methodologies, and draw on new theoretical and analytical approaches in order to expand our knowledge of the emergence of the Neolithic through the lens of architectural and settlement analysis.

This fifth volume of a collection devoted to the interdisciplinary meetings held one every two years at Kültepe, ancient Kaneš, brings together eighteen contributions dedicated to the archaeology and history of this Central Anatolian site and its surroundings. Each chapter within the volume presents the results of current research into Kültepe, thus continuing the holistic approach first demonstrated in earlier volumes of the Kültepe International Meetings sub-seriesof revitalizing one of the most important cultural centres of early Anatolia and of emphasising its importance as a pilot site for interdisciplinary studies. Drawing on Kültepe’s unique textual and archaeological data, the studies gathered here are organized into four key thematic sections devoted respectively to politics, law and religion; women, family and correspondence; human and animal skeletons; and to the most recent archaeological excavations in Kültepe covering a period from the Chalcolithic to Hellenistic times.

The Decapolis city of Jerash has long attracted attention from travellers and scholars, due both to the longevity of the site and the remarkable finds uncovered during successive phases of excavation that have taken place from 1902 onwards. Between 2011 and 2016, a Danish-German team, led by the universities of Aarhus and Münster, focused their attention on the Northwest Quarter of Jerash — the highest point within the walled city — and this volume is the sixth in a series of books presenting the team’s final results.

In this volume, a wide range of miscellaneous items discovered in the Northwest Quarter are presented, ranging from prehistoric lithics to Ottoman pipes. Material finds covered include stone sculpture, utensils, and inscriptions, as well as bone objects, spindle whorls, and bread stamps, while some scientific analyses of jewellery and terracotta figurines complement the studies. These chapters ensure that all finds from the Northwest Quarter — no matter how small — are made available to researchers, with the contributions gathered here offering unique new insights into the material groups from Gerasa, later Jerash, and into the lives of the population of the city from a longue durée perspective.

The famous oasis city of Palmyra, located in the Syrian Desert, has long been the subject of scholarly research; and over the last decade, it has been the focus of three key projects based at Aarhus University in Denmark. Together, these projects have yielded results that have shed new light on Palmyra and have profoundly changed what we know about both the city itself, and its place in the wider Roman Empire, through a focus on sculptural production and the sustainability and economy that underpinned this, urban development, excavation history, and legacy data. This volume, based on a conference organized under the auspices of the Palmyra research projects in Aarhus, draws together papers that reflect on our understanding of Palmyra up to now, and pave the way for new lines of enquiry. Experts in the field engage with discussions of best practice, offer new perspectives on the city, its society, and its environs, and outline approaches that will allow research to continue to break new ground in our understanding of Palmyra.

‘Rewriting’ as the reworking of narrative material based on conscious strategies of composition plays a significant role in much of the Latin poetry of Late Antiquity. This book, resulting from the conference Riscritture poetiche nell’Occidente latino tra tarda antichità e medioevo, which was held on 9-11 May 2022 at the Department of Human Sciences (DSU) of the University of L’Aquila, looks at the range of practices and purposes that inform this procedure, with particular regard to the processes of transcodification enacted – in different historical and cultural contexts – by the recasting of authoritative prose texts into a classicising poetic idiom. The contributions present a multifaceted approach to rewriting, cover a variety of authors, genres, and texts, and cast a glance also at medieval Latin literature. In short, the essays in this collection, by reflecting on the interpretative contribution of the critical category of ‘rewriting’, not only add further tesserae to the mosaic of literary studies on Late Latinity, they also invite to grasp the difference between secular and Christian rewritings.

The rich literary production of Gaza in the fifth and sixth centuries AD has received quite some attention in recent scholarship. Yet, the figure and work of Procopius the Sophist, as author of catenae, compiler, and epitomist of patristic exegesis, have remained relatively unknown and under-explored. This collection of essays delves deeply into Procopius’ exegetical work. At the outset, a strong case is made that one should distinguish between the famous orator of Gaza and "the Christian sophist" Procopius. A first large section of the book deals with the Genesis Epitome that is studied from three different angles: the limited and as a rule critical use of Origen and his tradition; the importance given to Theodore of Mopsuestia’s exegesis of Gen 1–3; and the relations between Procopius’ Epitome and John Philoponus’ De opificio mundi. The section on the Exodus Epitome studies the specificity of Procopius’ work in comparison to the Catena on Exodus, the way the material is organised, and the literary genre of the work. The volume further contains contributions on the connections between the Scholia on Kings attributed to Procopius, the type B catena, and the so-called "Catena Lipsiensis"; the relations between Procopius’ Catena on Proverbs and other catenae on this book; the sources of the Isaiah Epitome that show a diligent and able compiler at work; and the comparison between the characteristic features of Procopius’ Epitomes and those of the Catena III on Obadiah. As a whole, it offers a wide perspective and significantly advances research on, and our knowledge of, Procopius the Christian sophist, a still somewhat mysterious early Byzantine author and scholar.