Inventing Origins? Aetiological Thinking in Greek and Roman Antiquity /
:
Aetiologies seem to gratify the human desire to understand the origin of a phenomenon. However, as this book demonstrates, aetiologies do not exclusively explore origins. Rather, in inventing origin stories they authorise the present and try to shape the future. This book explores aetiology as a tool for thinking, and draws attention to the paradoxical structure of origin stories. Aetiologies reduce complex ambivalence and plurality to plainly causal and temporal relations, but at the same time, by casting an anchor into the past, they open doors to progress and innovation.
:
1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004500433
9789004500143
A commentary on Apollonius Rhodius Argonautica III 1-471 /
:
This is a commentary on the third book of Apollonius' Argonautica , one of the most influential and admired products of the Hellenistic era. The author sets out to deal comprehensively with all important aspects of the work; in particular, proper attention is paid for the first time to the poet's constant manipulation of the two Homeric epics; many thorny problems of text and interpretation are examined afresh; and a wealth of hitherto unadduced illustrative material drawn from Greek and Roman poetry of various genres and periods is used to shed light on a number of issues. The volume closes with a series of detailed digestive indexes dealing with diction, models and imitations, language and style, metre, transmission, mythology, religion, geography, ethnography and aetiology.
:
1 online resource (xxi, 424 pages) :
Includes bibliographical references and indexes. :
9789004329461 :
0169-8958 ; :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Disease in Babylonia /
:
This collection of articles is the first collection of studies on the specific subject of disease in Babylonia, based upon actual medical texts, with contributions by senior scholars who have spent years working on published and unpublished cuneiform medical texts. The volume contains editions of unpublished materials as well as syntheses of information about specific diseases in Babylonia, such as fever, published here for the first time. The volume will be important for anyone interested in the history of ancient medicine as well as being an important contribution to Assyriology.
:
1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789047404187 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Mental disorders in the classical world /
:
The historians, classicists and psychiatrists who have come together to produce Mental Disorders in the Classical World aim to explain how the Greeks and their Roman successors conceptualized, diagnosed and treated mental disorders. The Greeks initiated the secular understanding of mental illness, and have left us a large body of penetrating and thought-provoking writing on the subject, ranging in time from Homer to the sixth century AD. With the conceptual basis of modern psychiatry once again under intense debate, we need to learn from other rational approaches even when they lack modern scientific underpinnings. Meanwhile this volume adds a rich chapter to the cultural and medical history of antiquity. The contributors include a high proportion of the best-regarded scholars in this field, together with papers by some of its rising stars.
:
1 online resource (xv, 512 pages) :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004249875 :
0166-1302 ; :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Demons and illness from antiquity to the early-modern period /
:
In many near eastern traditions, including Christianity, Judaism and Islam, demons have appeared as a cause of illness from ancient times until at least the early modern period. This volume explores the relationship between demons, illness and treatment comparatively. Its twenty chapters range from Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt to early modern Europe, and include studies of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. They discuss the relationship between 'demonic' illnesses and wider ideas about illness, medicine, magic, and the supernatural. A further theme of the volume is the value of treating a wide variety of periods and places, using a comparative approach, and this is highlighted particularly in the volume's Introduction and Afterword. The chapters originated in an international conference held in 2013.
:
Includes index. :
1 online resource. :
9789004338548 :
2211-016X ; :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Thucydides' Pentekontaetia and Other Essays /
:
In this book Professor Pritchett offers five original essays under the titles: Thucydides' Pentekontaetia; Thucydides 1.61.3-5; Diodoros' Pentekontaetia; The Solar Year of Thucydides; Aetiology sans Topography. The initial lengthy essay focuses on seven crux passages in which Thucydides in Book 1 describes the growth of Athenian power, maintaining against recent critics that they are presented in chronological order. The study combines a review of the manuscript tradition with regard to corruptions in toponyms and numerals and a personal autopsy of the ancient sites. In a separate essay, Pritchett adduces new arguments in defense of Thucydides' seasonal chronological scheme. In the last essay, he takes sharp issue with a recent publication which attempts to attribute the origin of the ancient accounts of the Messenian wars and the battles of Hysiai, Thyreatis, and Phigaleia to legends evolved at festivals.
:
1 online resource (288 pages) : illustrations. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004673533
The art is long : on the sacred disease and the scientific tradition /
:
This volume examines the fifth-century medical treatise, On the Sacred Disease , as a sophistic speech, and considers its position within the scientific tradition. The first part concerns conceptions of science, magic, and medicine; and establishes the antiquity of medicine as a specialized skill. The latter part analyzes the treatise in light of sophistic oratory, and explores its reception of traditional beliefs. This analysis shows that traditional beliefs, competition, and rhetoric contributed to the intellectual tradition of science. Traditional views are shown to have influenced ideas concerning physiology, and disease aetiology and transmission, Competition, expressed in the terms of sophistic debate, sharpened the author's arguments. On the Sacred Disease is important evidence for the influence on fifth-century medicine of both sophistic rhetoric and of older medical traditions.
:
1 online resource (viii, 171 pages) : illustrations. :
Includes bibliographical references and indexes. :
9789004377288 :
0925-1421 ; :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Editing and Commenting on Statius' Silvae /
:
The Silvae by Statius dethroned Virgil from the Studio in Naples, fostered the creation of a new genre, offered a model for court poetry, and seduced the most prestigious Humanists in the most vibrant centres of Renaissance Italy and the Netherlands. The collection preserves magnificent buildings otherwise lost; speaks of stones otherwise unknown; and memorializes people, rituals, and social relationships that would have passed into oblivion in silence. This volume offers a fresh look into approaches to the Silvae by editors and commentators, both at the time of the rediscovery of the poems and today.
:
1 online resource :
9789004528413
9789004529069
Explaining, Interpreting, and Theorizing Religion and Myth : Contributions in Honor of Robert A. Segal /
:
In Explaining, Interpreting, and Theorizing Religion and Myth: Contributions in Honor of Robert A. Segal , nineteen renowned scholars offer a collection of essays addressing the persisting question of how to approach religion and myth as academic categories. Taking their cue from the work of Robert A. Segal, they discuss how to theorize about religion and myth from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. With cases from ancient Greece and Mesopotamia to East Asia and the modern world by and large, and engaging with diverse disciplines such as psychology, philosophy, anthropology, history, film, theology, and religious studies among others, the volume establishes a synthesis that demonstrates the pervasiveness as well as the pitfalls of the categories "religion" and "myth" in the world.
:
1 online resource. :
9789004435025
9789004435018
Universal Science : An Introduction to Islamic Metaphysics.
:
The Universal Science ( ʿIlm-i kullī ) by Mahdī Ḥāʾirī Yazdī , is a concise, but authoritative, outline of the fundamental discussions in Islamic metaphysics. For many years used as a textbook in Iran, this short text offers English readers a readily accessible, lucid, and yet deeply learned, guide through the Sadrian, Avicennan, and Illuminationist schools of thought, whilst also demonstrating how the 'living tradition' of Shīʿī philosophy engages with central ontological, epistemological, aetiological, and psychological questions. Discussions include the primacy of existence; the proper classifications of quiddity; and the manifold properties of causality and causal explanation. This is the first of the various influential works authored by this leading Shīʿah intellectual to have been translated into English from the original Persian.
:
1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004343115 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Myth and History in the Historiography of Early Rome /
:
The histories of early Rome written in antiquity by the likes of Livy and Dionysius of Halicarnassus include many sensational stories, from the she-wolf suckling the twins to the miraculous conception of Servius Tullius and the epiphany of the Dioscuri at Lake Regillus. Even the more sober parts of the narrative are of dubious historicity, and certainly include a good deal of rhetorical invention, aetiologies and folktales. The essays composing this volume attempt to analyse these stories to explore the porous boundaries and the hybrid borrowings between myth, history and historiography, and the limits of historical knowledge.
:
1 online resource :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004534490
9789004534506