BOB2024MIOT

Colonialism tends to arouse emotional debate, often based on incomplete knowledge of the facts and context. Colonial Congo fills this gap by introducing the general reader to the latest academic thinking and research. Answering concrete questions, pre-eminent historians offer a unique insight into the history of the Congo Free State and the Belgian Congo.

How did Leopold II’s autocratic government function and what do we know about the victims of his rule? How much profit was made in the Congo and who benefitted the most? What was life like for Congolese men and women during colonial rule and how did they feel about it? Did the Congolese offer resistance, and in what ways? What was colonialism’s impact on the Congo’s natural world? How did colonial policy affect infrastructure, education, healthcare and science? Did missionaries give colonialism a more human face? Colonial Congo’s explorations of these issues and more are revealed in this eye-opening, indispensable guide.

Several studies have been devoted to the flowering of the republic of Genoa during the so-called ‘siglo de los Genoveses’, when Genoa became the hub of European trade and an important center of artistic and literary production. Yet, little attention has been granted to the political and cultural crisis that followed, starting in 1559 and culminating in 1684, when the French bombed Genoa. Addressing this chronological gap, the volume explores how the image of the Genoese Republic was shaped, exploited, or contested in the long seventeenth century. How did Genoese politicians and men of letters represent their homeland? How was Genoa represented in Spain or in the Low Countries? How was its political system conceived by Italian and foreign political writers, and how did the prevailing absolutist model influence such ideas? In order to answer these questions, the volume gathers contributions from art historians, literary scholars, political and cultural historians, thus adopting a comparative, multidisciplinary approach.

Selon le mot de Pétrone, « notre pays est si plein de divinités que tu peux plus facilement y rencontrer un dieu qu’un homme. » La Rome antique est bien loin d’être la seule société à connaître pareille surpopulation divine. Par-delà la différence entre d’un côté ce que les sciences religieuses ont l’habitude de considérer comme des « religions traditionnelles » désignées par les termes de fétichisme, animisme, chamanisme et, de l’autre, des monothéismes et des polythéismes, la quasi-totalité des religions du monde réserve une place de choix à d’innombrables divinités mineures ou entités invisibles. Esprits, génies, êtres fantastiques, revenants, ancêtres ou saints font l’objet de relations intéressées, parfois aussi assez inquiétantes pour que l’on cherche à les éviter. La plupart de ces entités ambiguës ne donnent pas lieu à des cultes réguliers. Leur présence se manifeste le plus souvent dans des rencontres fortuites qui appellent un traitement rituel visant à normaliser les relations que les hommes ont avec elles. Créditées de pouvoirs qui se cantonnent à des champs d’intervention limités, elles sont liées à des lieux, des moments, des pratiques telles la chasse, l’agriculture, la guerre ou encore des épisodes biographiques saillants – naissance, maladies, conflits, etc. Cet ouvrage réunit les contributions d’anthropologues, historiens et philosophes qui, chacun à sa manière, se sont essayés à mieux comprendre le sens de cette prolifération d’entités mineures et à questionner sur cette base la notion même de religion comme impliquant – ou non – celle de dieux.

It is impossible to understand societies without looking at their technological underpinnings. Technology constitutes the very fabric of societies' political, economic, cultural, and everyday realities. Building on recent historiography, this book offers the first overview of the global history of contemporary technology.

Gathering more than fifty specialists of the history of technology, the collection of essays presents an overview of technological evolutions on a global scale. The book challenges both teleological approaches on progress and eurocentric perspectives. It explores the complex socio-economic implications of ‘techniques’ (and not simply technology) as well as the systems of representation and power structures that led to the emergence of today’s world.

The purpose of the collected essays is to offer a new history of technology. In this perspective, a central question concerns the very category of the history of technology, i.e. the term ‘technology’ itself. Refusing both the limitations of ‘technology’ and of ‘useful knowledge’, the book stresses the necessity to study technology as embodying human activity as a whole. In that sense, history of technology, envisioned as techniques rather than purely technologies, is intrinsically linked to anthropology and ethnology.

This book is divided into three sections. The first section opens with a world tour of techniques, restoring the complexity of regional historiographies and of the meanings given to technological activities in different societies. The second part focuses on sectors of activity, processes, and products with a strong emphasis on means of production and communication, the exploitation of natural resources, major technological systems, infrastructures and networks. The final section provides access to major cross-related issues. It pays particular attention to the role played by technology/techniques in the process of globalization, particularly through colonization, imperialism, and the development of large technological systems.

The Early Bronze Age site of Jebel al-Mutawwaq, located on a hill overlooking the Zarqa River in Jordan, was a thriving centre of population from the second half of the fourth millennium into the third millennium bce. During this time, the settlement developed both in population and social complexity, undergoing the beginnings of an urbanization process that fundamentally changed the relationship between this community of the Transjordanian Highlands with the surrounding landscape, until it was completely abandoned around 2900 bce. This volume offers a new assessment of the site by combining data from the first surveys of the site, under a Spanish team led by J. A. Fernandez-Tresguerres, with the new results from six seasons of excavations led by teams from Perugia in Italy, and San Esteban in Spain. In doing so, this work sheds new light on this walled settlement and its huge megalithic necropolises, and offers a fresh understanding of the site.

En 1994, François-Joseph Leroy publiait vingt-deux sermons inédits, qu’il attribua à un contemporain d’Augustin et dans lesquels il vit une collection, non apologétique et non polémique, de textes donatistes. C’était là une découverte exceptionnelle. Pourtant, depuis l’édition provisoire de Leroy, la recherche ne s’est guère penchée sur ce corpus. C’est la raison pour laquelle le Groupe de Recherches sur l’Afrique Antique (GRAA) a entrepris une nouvelle édition critique de ces 22 sermons, accompagnée de la première traduction annotée, et rassemblé autour de ce corpus les contributions de différents spécialistes, historiens et littéraires, pour en analyser tant la langue, le style et les procédés homilétiques que la portée supposée donatiste, la spiritualité et la théologie.

The thirty chapters in this book are based on the work of an international, multidisciplinary team of researchers and archivists brought together for the PerformArt project, funded by the European Research Council from 2016 to 2022. This project investigated the artistic patronage of the great Roman aristocratic families of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries through research in the extant archives.After the accession to the papal throne of Innocent X in 1644, and more so after the Peace of the Pyrenees in 1659 – which led to a greater loss of power for the pope in his relations with other European states – the Roman families stepped up their efforts to assert their social preeminence not only through architecture and the fine arts, but also through the ephemeral performing arts: music, theatre, and dance, which were omnipresent throughout the year and especially during the intense period of artistic production that was the Roman Carnival. The search for traces of these spectacles in the archives of these families reveals that their desire to display their magnificence – an ideal well documented in the literature of the period – gave rise to lavish expenditure on a scale that could only be justified by the benefits (if not tangible, then at least symbolic) they hoped to gain.The essays in this book, which draw on social economic history, the history of ideas, and the evolving artistic practices of the time, make a major contribution to our knowledge of courtly societies in Ancien Régime Europe by integrating the performing arts into their analyses in innovative ways.

La formule « petites divinités », qui désigne dans ce volume toutes les puissances revêtant des pouvoirs limités ou une position inférieure dans une configuration divine donnée, est utilisée ici comme un concept exploratoire dont le caractère opérationnel est testé collectivement, en l’appliquant au monde romain et en le comparant aux cultures voisines, grecques et italiques. Si l’étiquette « petites divinités » peut étonner, elle repose cependant sur des catégories antiques. Dans quelques textes latins, en effet, les dieux se définissent eux-mêmes – ou sont définis – comme inférieurs aux autres. Le concept de petites divinités est donc éminemment relationnel mais également contextuel. Les articles réunis dans ce volume abordent ainsi la question des classifications et des hiérarchies divines à partir de sources et de contextes spécifiques, plus ou moins larges, mettant en jeu des panthéons, configurations ou réseaux divins, plus ou moins structurels ou conjoncturels. Si dans le contexte romain, la hiérarchie est une clé pour organiser les groupes des dieux, en se déplaçant vers d’autres contextes culturels, au contraire, les rapports entre divinités semblent plutôt fondés sur des liens de complémentarités entre les dieux.

This volume brings together studies about books as artefacts within transitional zones. The history of the book from the handwritten to the printed medium is understood as a process marked by innovation and social change, but also by disorientation and bewilderment. The journey of a book from production to use was determined by a complex set of factors: communication among authors, makers of books, patrons, and readership; the emergence of publishers; and decisions to be made concerning production and publication. These factors underwent tremendous changes during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries owing to the spread of printing and the rise of Humanism in Europe. Particular focus is put on the physical evidence of books, both handwritten and printed, and what it can tell us about a book’s production and its reception.

Qu’il s’agisse d’écrire sous le nom de Pythagore, d’Orphée, de la Pythie, ou encore de Paul de Tarse ou d’Énoch, les Anciens usaient de noms d’emprunt célèbres pour s’exprimer. Phénomène fondamental de l’Antiquité, la pseudépigraphie n’a cependant fait l’objet d’aucune monographie avant les années 1970, avec le livre de Wolfgang Speyer, Die literarische Fälschung im heidnischen und christlichen Altertum (1971), et les Entretiens de la Fondation Hardt, Pseudepigrapha I. Pseudopythagorica – Lettres de Platon – Littérature pseudépigraphique juive (1972). Le sujet a alors suscité les critiques de plusieurs savants. Plus récemment, la somme que Bart Ehrman a consacrée à la question, Forgery and Counterforgery (2013), par les vives réactions qu’elle a provoquées – parfois critiques, parfois élogieuses – a contribué à relancer le débat. Le présent volume se propose de revenir sur ces importantes synthèses, en les abordant sous l’angle de figures précises, ainsi que d’époques, de langues et de régions diverses. Il vise aussi à élargir la recherche en mettant à l’épreuve les différentes théories énoncées dans la littérature savante. Il est désormais devenu essentiel d’étendre et de remodeler cette notion de pseudépigraphie qui touche également à celles d’« auctorialité », d’inspiration poétique, d’intention des auteurs antiques et de genres littéraires.

The Ancient Egyptians used it for both the living and the dead, the Greeks and Romans used it to signal their status, and it aided the Vikings in reaching the far shores of Europe and Eurasia. Textiles have surrounded us, literally and figuratively for millennia, but this common thread has long been ignored in scholarly research. With the inception of the Centre for Textile Research at the University of Copenhagen in 2005, however, this approach changed fundamentally, and today, every type of research discipline comes together to begin unravelling the stories told by textiles. How do we understand textiles and how do we talk about them? Who produced textiles, where, and for what purposes? How do we conduct research into the origins of materials? How did cultivating flax or raising sheep change the ancient landscape? How have we researched textiles so far? What can we learn from textiles about society, gender, and production? This volume engages with these questions and explores how the fabric of society has changed through researching textiles in all its facets, from archaeology and history to natural sciences. Taking as its starting point the research interests and career of its honorand, Eva Andersson Strand, this meticulously researched volume consists of three parts, covering the tools and techniques that form the basis of all research explores; how craftspeople made use of tools and techniques; and how textiles have been used over millennia to signify identity and status.

This collection of essays aims to offer a multi-disciplinary approach to nineteenth and early twentieth century scholarship on Jesus and early Christianity, which illustrates the width and depth of the questions that critical reflections on the historical Jesus raised in and beyond the field of liberal theology. More precisely, it focuses on Jesus scholarship as practiced in various disciplines and fields that engaged with the academic study of religion. On the other hand, this volume aims for a comprehensive, multi-perspectivist historicization of this scholarship, considering the full range of religious, cultural, racial, political, and national dynamics that hosted the many controversies over the historical Jesus.Divided into five sections, the eleven essays in this book are organized according to guiding themes and a loose chronological structure. The first section revisits the roots of the Forschung in Liberal-Protestant Germany, and especially focuses on the maturation of historical-critical consciousness in the work of Reimarus (and his predecessors), Schleiermacher and Strauss. The second section is concerned with the rise of the “oriental Jesus” against the background of the making of the academic, non-theological study of religion as a scientific discipline. The third section explores how themes related to the historical Jesus and the rise of Christianity were treated among different academic disciplines from the early second half of the nineteenth century onwards. The fourth section explores how the historical Jesus was at the same time further explored by the biblical scholars and theologians who integrated new comparative methods in their research. The fifth section, finally, highlights the cultural-political appropriations that were made of scholarly writings on Jesus, which not rarely constituted the bricks with which radical political movements built their houses.

The roles played by women in history, and even the very idea of what it is to be female, have always been in flux, changing over centuries, between cultures, and in response to diverse social and economic parameters. Even today, women’s roles and women’s rights continue to face changes and pressures. In establishing the series Women of the Past: Testimonies from Archaeology and History, the ambition is to build on the profound theoretical and empirical developments that have taken place over the last fifty years of gender-focused research and to explore them in a contemporary context.

The aim of this series is to shed light on not just the outstanding and extraordinary women who were trendsetters of their time, but also the not quite so outstanding women, often overshadowed by outstanding men, and the ordinary women, those who simply went about their everyday life and kept their world turning in their own quiet way. This edited volume, Women of the Past, Issues for the Present, is the inaugural volume of the series and shows the wide span of the series chronologically, geographically, and socially in terms of the research presented. From Roman slaves to Viking women, and from medieval wet-nurses to the nineteenth-century wives who supported their archaeologist husbands on excavation, this groundbreaking volume opens a new vista in our understanding of the past.

La congrégation bénédictine de Saint-Maur est l’ultime réforme bénédictine en France sous l’Ancien Régime. Elle toucha cent quatre-vingt-dix monastères d’héritage médiéval qui furent pour la plupart reconstruits. Entre réforme catholique et Lumières, les mauristes firent de l’érudition historique et patristique un domaine de prédilection et d’expression à la fois intellectuelle et religieuse qui marqua profondément la reconstruction monastique du XIXe siècle.

Vingt-quatre contributions portant sur toutes les périodes historiques et sur des thématiques chères au jeune émérite: l’histoire de la théologie et du christianisme, l’histoire de la Wallonie, l’histoire de l’Université catholique de Louvain, la bande dessinée et la littérature de jeunesse en tant que sources historiques.

With an investigation into the landscapes and environments – real, topical, imaginary, recalled and traversed by Propertius’ elegies – the contributors focus on the poet’s complex relationship not only with the images of the literary tradition and with those of artistic culture, but also with the images Rome, Italy and the Mediterranean offered him in his days. This results in the outlines of an original ‘imaginary’ in which the power of personal creation has given Assisi, Rome and the Empire a form going beyond the limits of time and space.

Although little is known of the process surrounding early modern childbirth, the lack of written testimonials and technical descriptions does not preclude the possibility of reconstructing the reality of this elusive space: drawing on the evidence of clothing, food, rites and customs, this collection of essays seeks to give tangible form to the experience of childbirth through the analysis of physical objects and rituals.

An important addition to the literature of material culture and ‘wordly goods’, this collection of twenty-three essays from international scholars offers a novel approach to the study of pre- and early modern birth by extending its reach beyond the birthing event to include issues concerning the management of pregnancy and post-partum healing.

Grouped into five broad areas, the essays explore the material advantages and disadvantages of motherhood, the food and objects present in the birthing room, the evidence and memorialization of death in childbirth, attitudes towards the pregnant body, the material culture of healing and the ritual items used during childbirth.

Archaeology as a discipline has undergone significant changes over the past decades, in particular concerning best practices for how to handle the vast quantities of data that the discipline generates. Much of this data has often ended up in physical - or, more recently, digital - archives and been left untouched for years, despite containing critical information. But as many recent research projects explore how best to unleash the potential of these archives through publication, digitization, and improved accessibility, attention is now turning to the best practices that should underpin this trend.

In this volume, scholars turn their attention to how best to work with and shape archaeological archives, and what this means for the field as a whole. The majority of case studies here explore archaeological sites in the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East, some of which are conflict zones today. However, the contributions also showcase more broadly the depth of research on archaeological archives as a whole, and offer reflections upon the relationship between archaeological practices and archival forms. In so doing, the volume is able to offer a unique dialogue on best practices for the dissemination and synthetization of knowledge from archives more generally, whether physical or digital.

Sympozjum Egejskie. Papers in Aegean Archaeology is a peer- reviewed series that has been designed to fulfil the role of a platform for presenting and introducing a wide range of new research approaches and themes within the broad area of Aegean Archaeology. This is primarily achieved through showcasing the work of newcomers to the discipline, in other words those scholars who are currently at the beginning of their research career in the field of Aegean Archaeology, as well as scholars working outside the traditional university structure such as independent scholars, professional field archaeologists, museum curators and conservators. It is our hope that this series will serve as a concise guide to the most recent research undertaken by early career scholars and the diverse and inspiring new trends in the archaeology of the Prehistoric Aegean, as well as shining a light on the future direction of the discipline.

On 20 October 1870 pope Pius IX adjourned the First Vatican Council, because of the Italian Rissorgimento troops approaching the city of Rome. Given that the Council had only opened less than a year prior, on 8 December 1869, the act was emblematic. The council, as the Catholic Church’s protective response against all things new – rationalism, liberalism, naturalism, materialism, and pantheism – was overtaken by history. Given its premature end not all documents prepared were completed and those that were promulgated, became among the most controversial documents in the nineteenth and twentieth-century Catholic Church, strongly defining its relations to other Christian confessions and modernity. Similarly, around one hundred years after the suspension of the First Vatican Council its historical and theological study was overtaken by the event of the Second Vatican Council, known for its rapprochement to the modern world. The history and results of the First Vatican Council were either forgotten or reinterpreted in light of this subsequent council’s decisions. In light of the 150th anniversary of this council, the editors and authors of this volume set themselves the goal of re-examining this tradition of historical and theological reception (and forgetting) of the First Vatican Council.

En 2017 paraissait, dirigé par Monique Maillard-Luypaert, Alain Marchandisse et Bertrand Schnerb, et avec pour sous-bassement un colloque organisé à Lille et Tournai par ces mêmes historiens, un volume qui, sous le titre Évêques et cardinaux princiers et curiaux (XIVe-début XVIe siècle). Des acteurs du pouvoir, apportait un ensemble de contributions, notamment biographiques, sur cette figure paradigmique de l’homme d’Église appelé à exercer une action politique d’envergure, parce qu’il est issu d’un milieu familial qui l’y prédestine ou parce qu’il sert, à la cour, un prince, un roi, un pape. Sous une bannière commune – Église et État –, un second colloque, cette fois organisé à Versailles, s’est voulu à la fois le prolongement et l’aménagement conceptuel du premier à une époque plus récente, la période moderne, voire le début des temps contemporains. Le présent volume en renferme les actes. Ils s’insèrent dans cinq volets spécifiques : Rome, son clergé de cour, et celui des autres États ; le conseil politique ; les chapelles princières ; les confesseurs princiers et les clergés de cour dans le monde chrétien, catholique ou non.

The Revelation of Jesus Christ, better known as the Apocalypse of John, or simply the Book of Revelation, has always fascinated its readers, both religious and non-religious. Its transmission and reception in a Christian context have given rise to a wide variety of interpretations and controversies. At the heart of this revelation are the enigmatic figures of a pregnant woman appearing in heaven and then fleeing into the desert, a prostitute appearing in the desert and riding a beast, and then the bride of the Lamb, as well as a great city called Babylon, Sodom, and Egypt. Cities, beast, and prostitute are usually interpreted as thinly veiled references to Rome and its empire, and in particular to the emperor Nero.

However, this reading raises a number of interpretative problems concerning the relationship between these different female figures and their relation to the beast, which duplicates into a beast from the sea and a beast from the land, and concerning the city that lies beneath Babylon. Although they do not all share the exact same point of view on the Apocalypse of John and on the solutions to these interpretative problems, the contributions gathered in this volume all question the received ideas in one way or another. What they have in common is a regard for the Apocalypse of John as a text strongly rooted in the Judaism of its time, and they place great emphasis on interpreting the text through attention to its author’s use of the Jewish Scriptures.

Pietro Metastasio (1698–1782) can be considered as the most renowned operatic dramatist of eighteenth-century Europe. His drammi per musica travelled all around Europe – and beyond – throughout the eighteenth century and the early years of the nineteenth. Courts, palaces, and public theatres were eager to perform his dramas, and so hundreds of composers set them to music, sometimes on more than one occasion.

This volume lets the surviving textual and musical traces speak for themselves. As a catalogue of the sources of five of Metastasio’s most successful titles – Didone abbandonata, Alessandro nell’Indie, Artaserse, Adriano in Siria, and Demofoonte –, it offers their most complete chronology up to date, as well as a detailed presentation of the printers and the theatres in which these texts became alive. In the case of the majority of these works, thousands of manuscripts and copies attest to more than one hundred complete musical versions and over two hundred and fifty productions. They may thus rightly be considered witnesses to the operatic fever that took Europe by storm in the Enlightenment.