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Item Absent animals in Patrick Deville's Kampuchéa(2023) Epp, MarlaThis article focuses on the ways in which encounters with animals, a frequent trope in travel literature, are reworked in Patrick Deville's Kampuchéa (2011) to reflect the current dire ecological situation. Deville's narrator is in South East Asia following the path of French naturalist Henri Mouhot, whose diary of his travels was published in 1868. Although the travel routes are similar and the basic components of a travel narrative remain, Mouhot's literary style is reconfigured to reflect the twenty-first-century traveller's awareness of the violent past of the region and anxiety over the future of the planet. If animals abound in Mouhot's diary, they are remarkable in Kampuchéa primarily through their absence. Deville does not, however, occlude them from his narrative, but rather writes about them in absentia. This article studies the implications of Deville's writing about animals without any meaningful face-to-face encounters. It further considers the repercussions of these lost moments of exchange and argues that Deville's commitment to writing about animals, even those who are absent, works to keep their looming extinction at the forefront of readers' minds.Item Academics in practice: moving beyond appreciation(2022) Cowling, Erin; Garza, Ana Karen RodasIn this short article, a professor and her student reflect on an ongoing project that brings them into close contact with theatrical adaptations. They discuss the ups and downs of working closely with Sor Juana’s Los empeños de una casa and Mexican actor Fernando Villa Proal of EFE TRES Teatro throughout the pandemic that started in early 2020 and has extended long into 2021. The piece also includes interview materials from theater practitioners who are interested in the overlap between theater and research. These are just some of the conclusions and suggestions that they have arrived at throughout this process, with an aim to bring academic and artistic practices into closer alignment.Item The account of Thoulis, king of Egypt, in the Chronographia of John Malalas(2014) Garstad, BenjaminThoulis first appears in the sixth-century chronicle of John Malalas. It has been suggested that his name is a corruption of the material found in the traditional Egyptian king-lists, but it seems more likely that he and the narrative associated with him are a fiction of more recent invention.Thoulis is modeled on Sesostris, Osiris, and Alexander the Great and the narrative of his exploits alludes to the stories of these figures. The focus of this narrative is an oracle which deflates the king’s arrogance and obliquely prophesies the doctrine of the Trinity. This oracle is consistent with the exploitation of ostensibly genuine oracles in the pagan-Christian polemics of the fourth century. Indeed, the account of Thoulis as a whole seems to have been drafted to advance the Christian position in this debate, apparently by one Bouttios in the late fourth century.Item The Achaemenid Persian empire in the west and Persian-period Yehud(2018) Ristau, Kenneth A.The disruption and caesura caused by the destruction of Jerusalem in 587 BCE are not easily overstated. In addition to precipitating severe ideological tremors that undermined the traditional political and religious claims of Jerusalem's inviolability and Yahweh's perpetual support for the house of David, the architectonic and demographic evisceration of the city and its environs as well as the concomitant collapse of the kingdom of Judah were undeniably dramatic. In the wake of destruction and collapse, Judean society splintered. On the one hand, the Babylonian campaigns in 597 and 587 produced exiles and refugees, which created or added to Diaspora communities throughout the greater Near East that had been growing and developing since the Neo-Assyrian period (ca. 732-604 BCE). On the other hand, the remnants left in the land coalesced into two distinct enclaves: one in Benjamin, centered on Mizpah, and a second in the highlands south of Jerusalem. These enclaves consisted of a few landholding families, an impoverished populace, and disenfranchised refugees with tribal sheikhs, clan chiefs, and family heads as the local leadership.Item Alexander the Great's liberation of Rome and an idiosyncratic model of World history in the Chronicle of John Malalas, the Excerpta Latina Barbari, and Fulgentius' De Aetatibus(2018) Garstad, BenjaminIn two sixth-century chronicles, the Greek original of the Excerpta Latina Barbari and the Chronographia of John Malalas, the Romans, Greeks, and Egyptians are said to have been freed by Alexander from a combination of eastern peoples including the Assyrians, Chaldaeans, and Persians. The statement is, without a doubt, unhistorical; nevertheless, such deviations from the received historical record rarely represent simple mistakes, but more often purposeful and meaningful manipulations. In this case, Alexander's liberation of the Greeks and Egyptians can be accounted for with reference to the Alexander Romance, a legendary account of his career, but the principal source on Alexander in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. But the Romans remain a puzzle. The notice on Nebuchadnezzar in the Excerpta, however, says that he conquered the Romans. This notice, moreover, seems to intentionally parallel a brief description of Alexander in the Excerpta. Some examination of the details seems to reveal a model of history that placed more emphasis on symmetry and symbolism than on accuracy. The eastern peoples under Nebuchadnezzar and the western nations under Alexander successively achieve dominion over the world, that is, they each establish a world kingdom. Nebuchadnezzar plays the role of the conqueror and Alexander that of the liberator. Thus, there is demonstrable recourse to the rhetoric employed to describe the Persian Wars and other conflicts with eastern powers that goes back to Herodotus and the beginnings of Greek historiography. The broader circulation of this model seems to be evident in echoes of it that can be found in the contemporary De aetatibus mundi of Fulgentius.Item Alexander the Great, the disguised dinner guest(2018) Garstad, BenjaminThe Alexander Romance depicts Alexander going alone to the court of Darius disguised as his own messenger, dining with the Persians and advancing his own reputation as a munificent king. This episode substitutes a fictional scene for a number of dramatic banqueting incidents in the historical record that cast Alexander in a negative light, specifically, the burning of Persepolis, the proskynesis affair, and the wedding at Susa, which are all banqueting scenes concerned with Alexander's generosity, reputation, and relations with the Persians. It is also an opportunity for intertextual allusion, especially to Homer and Herodotus. It is, further, only one of many occasions in the Romance when Alexander is said to go alone to visit his enemies in disguise; these episodes integrate the composition and evince a concern with the treatment of ambassadors. It is finally one of the only instances of the explicit characterization of Alexander in the Romance.Item Alexander’s gate and the unclean nations: translation, textual appropriation, and the construction of barriers(2016) Garstad, BenjaminThe Alexander Romance and the Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius deserve a place in any discussion of the impact of the translator’s work on the construction of memory in multicultural societies. Both works are remarkable as the products and the objects of translation throughout the middle ages. Successive recensions of the Alexander Romance were translated, either from the original Greek or from Latin translations, into numerous vernacular languages until there were popular versions of the Romance in circulation from Iceland to Indonesia. The Apocalypse was first written in Syriac at the isolated monastery of Singara, but under the impulse of the initial Arab conquests it was translated into Greek and then Latin for a readership that stretched from one end of the Mediterranean to the other; translations into various vernaculars were made throughout the middle ages in places as far apart as England and Russia. The remarkable extent to which translation made both the Romance and the Apocalypse available to ever wider audiences has long been recognized. What has not necessarily been appreciated to the same extent is the cultural impact of these translations, especially in regard to the contact and conflict of cultures. I would like to redress this neglect by drawing attention to the implications of a single episode, one borrowed from the Apocalypse into a later recension of the Romance and perhaps the most famous incident in either work: Alexander walling up the Unclean Nations, the agents of the End Times, beyond the Mountains of the North. Up to the appearance of this incident Alexander had been seen, as he perhaps still is, as a conqueror who extended not only his own realm, but the cultural sphere of the Greeks as well, drawing barbarian peoples into the civilized world of the oikoumene. Under the impact of the Arab conquests, I will argue, Alexander was given the very different, but just as formidable, task of excluding foreign and exotic peoples from a world which was ideally homogeneous, represented by his confining of the Unclean Nations. This act symbolizes the reaction which characterized the next several centuries of Byzantine strategy, of retrenchment, defense of the frontiers, and assimilation of all deviant groups (pagans, heretics, and Jews) within the borders. The memory of Alexander inspired by repeated translations of the Romance and Apocalypse spawned this xenophobic response not only in Byzantium, but throughout Europe, until the Turks were at the gates of Vienna in 1683. Perhaps its legacy can still be discerned today in the inclination toward eschatological hysteria provoked by the perceived aggression of the Muslim world.Item Alexander’s return to Greece in the Alexander romance(2016) Garstad, BenjaminThe Alexander Romance, a largely fictional account of Alexander the Great, is full of odd and arresting discrepancies with the more trustworthy historical accounts of the conqueror’s career. The route of the campaign described in the Romance is not the least of these inconsistencies, taking Alexander, as it does, along roads he never traveled and to places he never saw. Perhaps the oddest and most remarkable deviation from the historical record in the Romance’s version of Alexander’s itinerary is not a visit to some unlikely, exotic, or fabulous locale, but his return to Greece in the midst of his eastern campaign. Whereas, in fact, Alexander crossed the Hellespont never to see Macedonia or Greece again, in the Romance he comes back to put down an uprising of the Greeks and lay waste Thebes before he finally defeats Darius and completes the conquest of the Persian Empire. As Stoneman notes, the narrative here is “[l]ike a film running in reverse,” and the effect can be just as comical and disconcerting.Item Ancient rhetoric and Paul's apology: the compositional unity of 2 Corinthians(2004) Garstad, BenjaminIt is always gratifying to see New Testament literature dealt with as a species of Graeco-Roman literature rather than as an idiosyncratic phenomenon in the Greek culture of the Roman Empire. Long's insightful book is a fine example of such a treatment. The purpose of his work is to argue the integrity of 2 Corinthians by reading it as an example of a forensic apologetic epistle. The perceived discontinuities, which have provided fodder for those exegetes who see 2 Corinthians as a composite of a number of different letters, are understood as deliberate breaks separating the distinct elements found in Greek and Latin oratorical theory and practice. Altogether, Long's monograph is thorough—perhaps excessively so—and convincing.Item Apocalypse(2012) Pseudo-Methodius; Garstad, BenjaminThis volume contains two texts that crossed the Mediterranean in Late Antiquity. The Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius was one of the first works composed in response to the Arab invasions and the establishment of the Muslim empire in the seventh century. In a matter of decades, it was translated from its original Syriac into Greek and from Greek into Latin. (Both the Greek and Latin texts are presented here.) The Apocalypse enjoyed immense popularity throughout the Middle Ages, informing expectations of the end of the world, responses to strange and exotic invaders like the Mongols and Turks, and even the legendary versions of the life of Alexander the Great. An Alexandrian World Chronicle (Excerpta Latina Barbari) was considered important by no less a humanist than Joseph Scaliger. He recognized it as a representative of an early stage in the Christian chronicle tradition that would dominate medieval historiography. The original Greek text may have been a diplomatic gift from the court of Justinian to a potential ally among Frankish royalty, translated two centuries later by the Franks themselves in their efforts to convert the pagan Saxons. In addition presenting a universal chronicle with a comprehensive ethnography and geography, the Excerpta offer a Euhemeristic narrative of the gods and another account of Alexander.Item Assembling sovereignty: Canadian claims to the Athabasca district prior to Treaty No. 8(2020) Irwin, RobertRecent Canadian legal scholarship has emphasised the centrality of treaties between the colonial state and First Nations in the assertion of Canadian sovereignty over Indigenous lands. Historical interpretations, meanwhile, would suggest that sovereignty, rather than asserted, is assembled over time. Historically, sovereignty is understood to be contingent and layered; it is assembled through a series of ‘detours, improvisations and tinkering.’ This paper looks at the historical circumstances of Canadian sovereignty in the Athabasca district prior to the making of Treaty No. 8 with the First Nations. British sovereignty claims to Rupert's Land and the Northwestern Territories (including the area that came to be known as the Athabasca district), were assembled through the practices and activities of the Hudson's Bay Company. These claims were transferred to Canada in 1869 and Canada hesitantly and quietly took measures to further assemble and express its sovereignty in these lands. Canada surveyed and inventoried the Athabasca district's resources, commenced exploratory work on petroleum resources, provided relief from famine, financially supported schools for Indigenous children, and established and enforced a system of law. By the time Treaty No. 8 was negotiated in 1899, Canada had thus taken a series of steps to assemble and express its sovereignty in the district. Rather than establishing, asserting or legitimating Canadian sovereignty, Treaty No. 8 may be better understood as another measure in the process of assembling it.Item Assembling sovereignty: Canadian claims to the Athabasca district prior to Treaty No. 8(2020) Irwin, RobertRecent Canadian legal scholarship has emphasised the centrality of treaties between the colonial state and First Nations in the assertion of Canadian sovereignty over Indigenous lands. Historical interpretations, meanwhile, would suggest that sovereignty, rather than asserted, is assembled over time. Historically, sovereignty is understood to be contingent and layered; it is assembled through a series of ‘detours, improvisations and tinkering.’ This paper looks at the historical circumstances of Canadian sovereignty in the Athabasca district prior to the making of Treaty No. 8 with the First Nations. British sovereignty claims to Rupert's Land and the Northwestern Territories (including the area that came to be known as the Athabasca district), were assembled through the practices and activities of the Hudson's Bay Company. These claims were transferred to Canada in 1869 and Canada hesitantly and quietly took measures to further assemble and express its sovereignty in these lands. Canada surveyed and inventoried the Athabasca district's resources, commenced exploratory work on petroleum resources, provided relief from famine, financially supported schools for Indigenous children, and established and enforced a system of law. By the time Treaty No. 8 was negotiated in 1899, Canada had thus taken a series of steps to assemble and express its sovereignty in the district. Rather than establishing, asserting or legitimating Canadian sovereignty, Treaty No. 8 may be better understood as another measure in the process of assembling it.Item Augustine's time of death in City of God 13(2019) Hannan, Sean"Only a living person can be a dying one," writes Augustine in De ciuitate dei 13.9. For Augustine, this strange fact offers us an occasion for reflection. If we are indeed racing toward the end on a cursus ad mortem, when do we pass the finish line? A living person is "in life" (in uita), while a dead one is post mortem. But as ciu. 13.11 asks: is anyone ever in morte, "in death?" This question must be asked alongside an earlier one, which had motivated Augustine's struggle in Confessiones 11.14.17 to make sense of time from the very beginning: quid est enim tempus? What is at stake here is whether or not there is such a thing as an instant of death: a moment when someone is no longer alive but not yet dead, a moment when they are "dying" (moriens) in the present tense. If we want to understand Augustine's question about the time of death in ciu. 13, then we have to frame it in terms of the interrogation of time proper in conf. 11.Item Authari in Paul the Deacon’s Historia Langobardorum, Secundus of Trent, and the Alexander tradition in early Lombard Italy(2016) Garstad, BenjaminThe vivid anecdotes in Paul the Deacon’s account of the Lombard king Authari have regularly been explained as the result of Lombard oral tradition, but, when compared with the historical and legendary accounts of Alexander the Great probably available in sixth-century Italy, they seem rather more likely to have a literary source. Authari seems to be modeled on Alexander, and the resulting portrait is not a flattering one. He is compared unfavorably to Agilulf, his successor as king and as husband to Queen Theudelinda. The author of this invidious comparison appears to be Secundus of Trent, one of Paul’s sources. Secundus’s authorship has not previously been widely considered, because it was generally assumed that his historiola must have been a severely abbreviated chronicle, without any kind of literary elaboration. If, however, we allow for the possibility that his history was more expansive and full-bodied, we can see Secundus pursuing a personally and politically important interest in his comparison of Authari and Agilulf. Not only did Secundus write under the patronage of Agilulf and Theudelinda—and so owed Agilulf some support—he officiated at the baptism of their son, Adaloald, while Authari had forbidden Catholic baptism to his Lombard subjects.Item AΦEΣIMOΣ: a new reading in the Opramoas dossier from Rhodiapolis(2013) Bailey, ColinAlthough the Opramoas dossier at Rhodiapolis has been reconstructed and carefully studied, the size and extent of the inscription continue to invite analysis. This article focuses on the restoration of an adjective describing the days on which Opramoas' distributions took place. It traces some implications of the use of άφεσιμος and suggests that Opramoas described them as such in order to further advertise his munificence.Item Barbarian interest in the Excerpta Latina Barbari(2011) Garstad, BenjaminJoseph Justus Scaliger dubbed the text of Parisinus Latinus 4884, the sole surviving witness to a Merovingian Latin translation of a now lost Greek world chronicle, the Excerpta Latina Barbari. The name was essentially a judgement on the linguistic abilities of the translator, but it is suggestive. What is there in the chronicle to appeal to the 'barbarian' inhabitants of Gaul? An answer to this question can offer some insight into the provenance of a neglected, but intriguing text. It will be proposed that the Greek original of the Excerpta was composed as a gift for the Austrasian king Theudebert I and was intended to elicit his aid in the war against the Ostrogothic rulers of Italy. The translation is another matter. It seems to have been undertaken about two centuries later in the context of the missionary push to the north and east from Frankish territory.Item Belus in the Sacred History of Euhemerus(2004) Garstad, BenjaminEuhemerus of Messene (fl. c. 300 b.c.e.) wrote a fictitious narrative called the Sacred History (Hiera Anagraphe) in which he claimed to have sailed to Panchaea, an island beyond Arabia on the Ocean, and there discovered a stele on which was written the story of the time when the gods were mortal men and rulers of the whole earth. Ever since, there have been arguments over whether Euhemerus was an atheist or a revolutionary philosopher, whether he was an historian or a theologian, and whether he wrote in response to the political, or the religious reality of his day. Although the discussion of Zeus in the Sacred History is known to us only at third hand (from Eusebius’ summary of Diodorus’ rendition, and from Lactantius’ citations of Ennius’ Latin translation), it seems clear that Belus of Babylon held a place of importance in the story, and may help us to answer some of our questions in regard to Euhemerus. The narratives of Euhemerus and his followers are united by the basic theory that the gods of myth were ancient human kings and by certain consistent features, including travels throughout the world by the “gods” to encourage civilization and their own worship. In Euhemerus’ own narrative the first item of note on Zeus’ itinerary is a visit to Belus in Babylon.Item Beneath the ordinary: toward a Deweyan aesthetics of place(2021) Beauclair, AlainA prominent undercurrent in the tradition of American philosophy concerns the endeavor to recover hope through a return to the ordinary and everyday. Ralph Waldo Emerson envisions and inaugurates such a path for the American scholar: I read with joy some of the auspicious signs of the coming days, as they glimmer already through poetry and art, through philosophy and science, through church and state.... Instead of the sublime and beautiful; the near, the low, the common, was explored and poetized. ([12] 56) Emerson's call for the American scholar seeks to not only democratize the objects of our concern, but to engage in a wholesale reconstruction in how we know, how we choose, indeed, even in how we perceive, all in an attempt to make the world readily available again. No longer should we view everyday experience as a shade of some pure and distant truth, as an ephemera that blinds or distracts us from the genuine target of our understanding. For Emerson, the pursuit of knowledge is not undertaken by those who clamber out of the cave and forsake what is "near, low and common" for that which is eternal, infinite, and beyond. Not merely disparaging the metaphysical quest for certainty and its search for the fixed, the final, the transcendent and absolute, Emerson is renewing (and reversing) the Socratic call for paideia, demanding that the American scholar undergo a "conversion of the soul" such that we can see our world for what it is. Only this time we are to find and fashion the truths of this world not by escaping it, by denying the veracity of sensation or setting the soul free from the body, but by turning our eyes back toward that which sits at our feet, by reclaiming what has become all too familiar such that it can once again stand forth and become "warm with the currents of new life" ([12] 57). Emerson's demand is that we summon those words and works that best enable us to fulfill our proper office, which is not to disregard or disown the throes of ordinary experience in favor of an interminable a priori truth, but to rediscover, reclaim, and rewrite the potency of the everyday, whereby the scholar will take as his or her role "to cheer, to raise and to guide men by showing them facts among appearances" ([12] 58). Such a project is fundamentally imaginative, striving to recover the threads of thinking in the face of bewilderment, to poetize when circumstance confounds agency and fate overwhelms intelligence, and find the way out of despair through the recognition that our words and actions are rife with meaning when we are overwhelmed by the specter of conformity. In a word, Emerson's is a project of hope that restores purpose, value, and promise to what has too often been dismissed as "low and common."Item The Berlin commentary on Martianus Capella's De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii, book II(1998) Westra, H. J.; Kupke, T.; Garstad, Benjamin; Martianus CapellaCompleting Prof. Westra's 1994 edition of Book I (published by Brill as "Mittellateinische Studien und Texte, 20"), this critical edition presents the only complete, late medieval Latin commentary on Book II of Martianus Capella's influential handbook of the Seven Liberal Arts. It also provides an Index of Proper Names to both Book I and II. Using his allegorical interpretation of the programmatic marriage of Mercury (eloquence) and Philology (learning) as a speculative, proto-scientific method of enquiry, the commentator provides encyclopedic coverage of medieval philosophy, theology, science, myth, language, literature and education. Intellectually the author is still connected with early scholasticism and the School of Chartres, being more sympathetic to Neoplatonism than to the newly arrived Aristotelians. The present edition has been keyed to Dick's as well as Willis' edition of Martianus Capella.Item Breaking down unity: an analysis of 1 Chronicles 21.1–22.1(2005) Ristau, Kenneth A.This study is a structural and thematic analysis of 1 Chron. 21.1–22.1, and conveys some general observations about its likely communicative intent for the post-exilic community that wrote and received the book of Chronicles. The central argument is that the disunity and conflicts in the core relationships between Yahweh–king, Yahweh–Israel, king–Israel, and king–army in the opening verses of the census narrative, while in tension with the Chronicler’s general tendency to idealize the Urzeit, are actually a key part of the message and purpose of this narrative in Chronicles and for the community of the text. It is argued that the narrative highlights the centrality of Jerusalem, the temple, the cult, and the absolute sovereignty of Yahweh; it circumscribes and nuances the role of David and the monarchy in the ‘history’ of the cult; and it advances particular relational principles for the post-exilic leaders and their community.