Staying Roman : conquest and identity in Africa and the Mediterranean, 439-700 /
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"In 416, when preaching a sermon on the psalms in late Roman Carthage, Augustine was able to ask his audience, 'Who now knows which nations in the Roman empire were what, when all have become Romans, and all are called Romans?'1 Yet already by the time Augustine addressed his Carthaginian audience the continued unity of the Roman Mediterranean was being called into question. The defeat and death of the Roman emperor Valens at Adrianople in 378 had set the stage for a new phase of conflict between the empire and its non-Roman neighbours ; and over the course of the fifth century Roman power collapsed in the West, where it was succeeded by a number of sub-Roman kingdoms. Questions that had seemed trivial to Augustine were suddenly and painfully alive : what did it mean to be 'Roman' in the changed circumstances of the fifth and later centuries? And (from a twenty-first-century perspective) what became of the idea of Romanness in the West once Roman power collapsed?"--
"What did it mean to be Roman once the Roman Empire had collapsed in the West? Staying Roman examines Roman identities in the region of modern Tunisia and Algeria between the fifth-century Vandal conquest and the seventh-century Islamic invasions. Using historical, archaeological and epigraphic evidence, this study argues that the fracturing of the empire's political unity also led to a fracturing of Roman identity along political, cultural and religious lines, as individuals who continued to feel 'Roman' but who were no longer living under imperial rule sought to redefine what it was that connected them to their fellow Romans elsewhere. The resulting definitions of Romanness could overlap, but were not always mutually reinforcing. Significantly, in late antiquity Romanness had a practical value, and could be used in remarkably flexible ways to foster a sense of similarity or difference over space, time and ethnicity, in a wide variety of circumstances"--
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Revision of the author's thesis (Ph. D.)--Harvard University, 2004, entitled: Staying Roman : Vandals, Moors, and Byzantines in late antique North Africa, 400-700. :
xviii, 438 pages : illustrations, maps ; 25 cm. :
Includes bibliographical references (pages 379-419) and index. :
9780521196970
Water and Roman urbanism : towns, waterscapes, land transformation and experience in Roman Britain /
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Water and Roman Urbanism: Towns, Waterscapes, Land Transformation and Experience in Roman Britain offers a new perspective for investigating Roman settlement and how urban spaces were created and experienced by focusing on the relationship between settlement and water and the meanings attributed to these places. Rather than a descriptive approach to the urban fabric it emphasises social context and cultural meaning through interpretative frameworks of analysis. Central are the cultural and experiential implications of water forming part of towns, rather than economic and practical arguments, and the way in which these places were used and altered over time. The book emphasises a social approach and has considerable implications for our understanding of life in the Roman period as a whole.
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1 online resource (xiii, 278 pages) :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004249752 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Brill's companion to the classics, fascist Italy and Nazi Germany /
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The first ever guide to the manifold uses and reinterpretations of the classical tradition in Mussolini's Italy and Hitler's Germany, Brill's Companion to the Classics, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany explores how political propaganda manipulated and reinvented the legacy of ancient Greece and Rome in order to create consensus and historical legitimation for the Fascist and National Socialist dictatorships. The memory of the past is a powerful tool to justify policy and create consensus, and, under the Fascist and Nazi regimes, the legacy of classical antiquity was often evoked to promote thorough transformations of Italian and German culture, society, and even landscape. At the same time, the classical past was constantly recreated to fit the ideology of each regime.
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1 online resource (xiii, 471 pages) :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004299061 :
2213-1426 ; :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.