Elizabeth Minchin – författare

How could a poet who worked in an oral tradition maintain the momentum of his song? How could a poet such as Homer weave a tale which filled an evening or, perhaps, a whole long night? The answer lies in memory, as we have known. But this bald explanation does not do justice either to the complexity of memory or to the richness of the Homeric epics. Now that so much more information has become available to us, from cognitive psychology and linguistics, about the workings of the mind, we can identify with greater precision those contributions which memory makes to the composition and performance of oral traditional song. In this study the author shows that the demands made on the poet, who relies neither on rote memory nor on written notes, have led him adopt to certain memory-based strategies which have left their traces in the text. What we discover is that the poet in an oral tradition makes intense and creative use of those resources of memory, which are available to us all - episodic memory, auditory memory, visual memory, and spatial memory - to assist him both in the preparation of his song and at the moment of performance.

Homeric Voices is a study, from a compositional point of view, of the substantial speeches and exchanges of speech that Homer depicts in his songs. Drawing on research in sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, and cognitive psychology, Elizabeth Minchin considers the words that Homer attributes to his characters from two perspectives, as cognitive and as social phenomena. She asks how the poet worked with memory to generate the speech forms that he represents; and how Homeric speech constructs and reveals the social hierarchies that are bound up with age, status, and gender - with particular interest in gender - in the world of the poems.

This volume brings together academics and museum professionals responsible for ancient Mediterranean collections across Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand to report on their collections’ legacies and their ongoing value for research, education, and community engagement in the twenty-first century.An introductory chapter offers an overview of the themes that unite these Mediterranean collections: their colonial legacies, their more recent history, and the network of scholars who have fostered their development. Subsequent chapters offer thematic case studies from the perspective of curators, museum professionals, educators, and researchers working with collections across Australasia. They explore several themes, including museum archaeology, provenance studies, pedagogy, and participatory programming and engagement, and they address two issues that are of interest to everyone who engages with museum collections today: restitution and the ethical management and display of human remains. Taken together, these contributions situate the region’s collections on a global scale, highlighting their continued relevance in the present and for the future. The volume includes a distribution guide to all known ancient Mediterranean collections in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, a much-needed resource for students, provenance researchers, and museum professionals.This volume will be of interest to researchers in Mediterranean archaeology and related disciplines, to museum studies scholars and postgraduate students, and to a general audience.