Author: Heidi Wendt File Type: pdf In his sixth satire, Juvenal speculates about how Roman wives busy themselves while their husbands are away, namely, by entertaining a revolving door of exotic visitors who include a eunuch of the eastern goddess Bellona, an impersonator of Egyptian Anubis, a Judean priestess, and Chaldean astrologers. From these self-proclaimed religious specialists women solicit services ranging from dream interpretation to the coercion of lovers. Juvenals catalogue suggests the popularity of such freelance experts at the turn of the second century and their familiarity to his audience, whom he could expect to get the joke. Heidi Wendt investigates the backdrop of this enthusiasm for the religion of freelance experts by examining their rise during the first two centuries of the Roman Empire. Unlike civic priests and temple personnel, freelance experts had to generate their own authority and legitimacy, often through demonstrations of skill and learning in the streets, in marketplaces, and at the temple gates, among other locations in the Roman world. Wendt argues that these professionals participated in a highly competitive form of religious activity that intersected with multiple areas of specialty, particularly philosophy and medicine. Over the course of the imperial period freelance experts grew increasingly influential, more diverse with respect to their skills and methods, and more assorted in the ethnic coding of their practices. Wendt argues that this context engendered many of the innovative forms of religion that flourished in the second and third centuries, including phenomena linked with Persian Mithras, the Egyptian gods, and the Judean Christ. The evidence for freelance experts in religion is abundant, but scholars of ancient Mediterranean religion have only recently begun to appreciate their impact on the empires changing religious landscape. At the Temple Gates integrates studies of Judaism, Christianity, mystery cults, astrology, magic, and philosophy to paint a colorful portrait of religious expertise in early Rome. **Review Wendt has produced a valuable and well-written monograph, which explicates an important dimension - or cluster of dimensions - of ancient Mediterranean life. What emerges from her synthetic study is a compelling portrait of a complex and competitive world of ancient religious experts, imbued with exotic associations, and operating outside or on the margins of established institutions...Wendt ought to be congratulated for providing a viable alternative to the religions model that has for too long dominated scholarship of the early Roman Empire.--Bryn Mawr Classical Review A comprehensive and remarkable study of the ecosystem of religious beliefs during the first two centuries of the Roman Empire, At the Temple Gates is a must read for anyone interested in the end of Antiquity and the beginning of Christianity, as well as for scholars working on the exchanges and influences among various institutions or groups.--Reading Religion At the Temple Gates has the potential to transform the way scholars think about religion in the Roman world. By identifying the practices of freelance religious specialists, Wendt challenges the basic categories that scholars rely on in their work on Roman-period religion, such as Judaism, Christianity, magic, and philosophy, and shows that ancient people would have understood these specialists as engaged in the same sort of practices promoting and selling ideas and services related to the gods, often in competition with others doing the same thing. She argues that this is how Paul himself would have been seen. If this is true, it completely changes the perception of Paul as unique--the first Christian writer and founder of communities--and places him instead as a Judean religious expert, a player in a competitive marketplace of religious claims and ideas. --Caroline Johnson Hodge, author of If Sons, Then Heirs A Study of Kinship and Ethnicity in the Letters of Paul At the Temple Gates is a splendid book. Heidi Wendt invites us to look beyond the temples and institutions of ancient religion to the messy urban landscape of freelance experts. As Wendt shows in wonderful detail, these experts peddled their skills and exotic knowledge just outside, and in supplement to, publicly sanctioned cults. This earned them the disapproval of cultural elites in antiquity and later. Wendt now restores them to the center of attention. --Clifford Ando, David B. and Clara E. Stern Professor of Classics, History and Law, University of Chicago Research Fellow, Department of Biblical and Ancient Studies, University of South Africa In this rich and stimulating book, Heidi Wendt discusses status and activities of the many freelance or self-legitimized specialists of religion that are attested in the early Roman Empire. In this important contribution to the ways we have been studying imperial religions and cultures, the author takes the proposition seriously that, underlying the many obvious differences stressed by ancient observers and modern scholars, the Empire had a fundamental religious and cultural unity. Her courageous study shows how much there is to gain from this approach. --Fritz Graf, author of Roman Festivals in the Greek East About the Author Heidi Wendt is Assistant Professor of New Testament and Christian Origins at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio. She has written articles in the Journal of Roman Studies, the Journal of Biblical Literature, and the Journal of Ancient Judaism and teaches courses on Judeans and Christians in the Roman Empire, and the Greco-Roman context of New Testament literature.

Author: Virginia Cox File Type: pdf In her award-winning, critically acclaimed Womens Writing in Italy, 1400--1650, Virginia Cox chronicles the history of women writers in early modern Italy -- who they were, what they wrote, where they fit in society, and how their status changed during this period. In this book, Cox examines more closely one particular moment in this history, in many ways the most remarkable for the richness and range of womens literary output.A widespread critical notion sees Italian womens writing as a phenomenon specific to the peculiar literary environment of the mid-sixteenth century, and most scholars assume that a reactionary movement such as the Counter-Reformation was unlikely to spur its development. Cox argues otherwise, showing that womens writing flourished in the period following 1560, reaching beyond the customary feminine genres of lyric, poetry, and letters to experiment with pastoral drama, chivalric romance, tragedy, and epic. There were few widely practiced genres in this eclectic phase of Italian literature to which women did not turn their hand. Organized by genre, and including translations of all excerpts from primary texts, this comprehensive and engaging volume provides students and scholars with an invaluable resource as interest in these exceptional writers grows. In addition to familiar, secular works by authors such as Isabella Andreini, Moderata Fonte, and Lucrezia Marinella, Cox also discusses important writings that have largely escaped critical interest, including Fontes and Marinellas vivid religious narratives, an unfinished Amazonian epic by Maddalena Salvetti, and the startlingly fresh autobiographical lyrics of Francesca Turina Bufalini. Juxtaposing religious and secular writings by women and tracing their relationship to the male-authored literature of the period, often surprisingly affirmative in its attitudes toward women, Cox reveals a new and provocative vision of the Italian Counter-Reformation as a period far less uniformly repressive of women than is commonly assumed. Praise for Womens Writing in Italy, 1400--1650Exhaustive and insightful... This is an amazing book, a major achievement in the field of womens studies. -- Renaissance QuarterlyThis is a definitive study and will surely remain so for many years to come. -- ChoiceVirginia Cox has written a magisterial study of the major trends in womens writing in Renaissance and Counter-Reformation Italy... This is indeed an impressive volume and one which deserves to be read and studied. It will change the way we think about womens writing in early modern Italy. -- Modern Language Review

Author: Svetlana Savranskaya File Type: pdf With some irony, the way the USSR separated itself from its empire and its own peaceful end may seem to be its most beneficial contributions to history. These episodes are, in any case, masterpieces of history.-Jacques Levesque, The Enigma of 1989When, where, why did the Cold War end? How did it manage to end peacefully? The answers are in this wonderful collection of crucial historical documents, penetrating essays by experts, plus the record of a revealing symposium including former Soviet and American officials. An invaluable source book on the end of the 20th century.-William C. Taubman, Amherst College, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Khrushchevo The Man and His EraEvocative, illuminating, insightful This volume is a brilliant collection of documents, conversations, and essays. It is absolutely indispensable for understanding the end of the Cold War.-Melvyn Leffler, University of Virginia, G.L. Beer Prize-winning author of For the Soul of MankindThe National Security Archive ... deserves the highest praise for its dedication to work and truth, and for overcoming numerous obstacles created by bureaucrats and other excessively cowardly and greedy custodians of the truth about the past. (From the Foreword)-Anatoly S. Chernyaev, adviser to Mikhail Gorbachev, author of My Six Years with GorbachevThe conference held at ... Musgrove [included in this volume]...illuminated one of the most important periods in 20th century history ... The National Security Archive [has] rendered a service to historians and the public as a whole. (From the Foreword)-Jack F. Matlock Jr., Former U.S. Ambassador, author of Autopsy on an EmpireAbout The EditorsSvetlana Savranskaya is Director of RussiaEurasia Programs at the National Security Archive.Thomas Blanton is Executive Director of the National Security Archive.Vladislav Zubok is Professor of history at Temple University.Twenty years in the making, this collection presents 122 top-level Soviet, European and American records on the superpowers role in the annus mitabilis of 1989. Consisting of Politburo minutes diary entries from Gorbachev s senior aide, Anatoly Chernyaev meeting notes and private communications of Gorbachev with George H.W. Bush, Margaret Thatcher, Helmut Kohl and Francois Mitterrand and high-level CIA analyses, this volume offers a rare insiders look at the historic, world-transforming events that culminated in the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the end of the Cold War. Most of these records have never been published before.Complementing the documents are the proceedings of an extraordinary face-to-face mutual interrogation of Russian and American former senior officials from 1998. Anchored by scholars and documents, the meeting - featuring Gorbachev advisers Anatoly Chernyaev and Georgy Shakhriazarov, Shevardnadze aide Sergei Tarasenko, U.S.Ambassador Jack Matlock and CIA chief Soviet analyst Douglas MacEachin uproduced fascinating insights into superpower policy-making during the miraculous year of 1989.

Author: Eric Tagliacozzo File Type: pdf Asia Inside Out reveals the dynamic forces that have historically linked regions of the worldae(tm)s largest continent, stretching from Japan and Korea to the South China Sea, the Indian Ocean, and the Middle East. Connected Places, the second installment in this pioneering three-volume survey, highlights the transregional flows of goods, ideas, and people across natural and political boundariesaesea routes, delta ecologies, and mountain passes, ports and oasis towns, imperial capitals and postmodern cities. It challenges the conventional idea that defines geopolitical regions as land-based, state-centered, and possessing linear histories. Exploring themes of maritime connections, mobile landscapes, and spatial movements, the authors examine significant sites of linkage and disjuncture from the early modern period to the present. Readers discover how eighteenth-century pirates shaped the interregional networks of Vietnamae(tm)s Tonkin Gulf, how Kashmiri merchants provided intelligence of remote Himalayan territories to competing empires, and how for centuries a vibrant trade in horses and elephants fueled the Indian Ocean economy. Other topics investigated include cultural formations in the Pearl River delta, global trade in Chittagongae(tm)s transformation, gendered homemaking among mobile Samurai families, border zones in Qing China and contemporary Burma, colonial spaces linking India and Mesopotamia, transnational marriages in Omanae(tm)s immigrant populations, new cultural spaces in Korean pop, and the unexpected adoption of the Latin script by ethnically Chinese Muslims in Central Asia. Connected Places shows the constant fluctuations over many centuries in the making of Asian territories and illustrates the confluence of factors in the historical construction of place and space.