Jamie Wood - Böcker

Isidore of Seville (560—636) was a crucial figure in the preservation and sharing of classical and early Christian knowledge. His compilations of the works of earlier authorities formed an essential part of monastic education for centuries. Due to the vast amount of information he gathered and its wide dissemination in the Middle Ages, Pope John Paul II even named Isidore the patron saint of the Internet in 1997. This volume represents a cross section of the various approaches scholars have taken toward Isidore’s writings. The essays explore his sources, how he selected and arranged them for posterity, and how his legacy was reflected in later generations’ work across the early medieval West. Rich in archival detail, this collection provides a wealth of interdisciplinary expertise on one of history’s greatest intellectuals.

This volume interrogates the assumption that Visigothic practices and institutions were mere imitations of the Byzantine empire. Contributors rethink these practices not as uncritical and derivative adoptions of Byzantine customs, but as dynamic processes in dialogue with not only the Byzantine empire but also with the contemporary Iberian context, as well as the Roman past. The goal of the volume is to approach Visigothic customs not as an uncritical adoption and imitatio of contemporary Roman models (an acculturation model), but as unique interpretations of a common pool of symbols, practices, and institutions that formed the legacy of Rome. The contributors argue that it is necessary to reconsider the idea of imitatio imperii as a process that involved specific actors taking strategic decisions in historically contingent circumstances.

Social Control in Late Antiquity: The Violence of Small Worlds explores the small-scale communities of late antiquity - households, monasteries, and schools - where power was a question of personal relationships. When fathers, husbands, teachers, abbots, and slave-owners asserted their own will, they saw themselves as maintaining the social order, and expected law and government to reinforce their rule. Naturally, the members of these communities had their own ideas, and teaching them to 'obey their betters' was not always a straightforward business. Drawing on a wide variety of sources from across the late Roman Mediterranean, from law codes and inscriptions to monastic rules and hagiography, the book considers the sometimes conflicting identities of women, slaves, and children, and documents how they found opportunities for agency and recognition within a system built on the unremitting assertion of the rights of the powerful.

Social Control in Late Antiquity: The Violence of Small Worlds explores the small-scale communities of late antiquity - households, monasteries, and schools - where power was a question of personal relationships. When fathers, husbands, teachers, abbots, and slave-owners asserted their own will, they saw themselves as maintaining the social order, and expected law and government to reinforce their rule. Naturally, the members of these communities had their own ideas, and teaching them to 'obey their betters' was not always a straightforward business. Drawing on a wide variety of sources from across the late Roman Mediterranean, from law codes and inscriptions to monastic rules and hagiography, the book considers the sometimes conflicting identities of women, slaves, and children, and documents how they found opportunities for agency and recognition within a system built on the unremitting assertion of the rights of the powerful.

Re-reading intra-war modernist poetics through war poetryUniquely foregrounds the concept of 'combat gnosticism' bringing this influential thesis in war writing to bear on modernist studiesBrings together combatant war poetry and the ignored war poems of 'home front' poets into a single genealogical account that also contains a theory of the modernist long poemConsiders the work of a range of canonical modernists within a much broader artistic milieu than is the normRecovers several neglected poems that serve to recalibrate the existing genealogy of intra-war aestheticsDemonstrates the centrality of the problem of imagining otherness within modernist poeticsThis study examines the work of the principle architects of Anglo-American modernist poetics T.S. Eliot, H.D., Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Edward Thomas and Wallace Stevens and their response to the challenge of combatant war poetries. It argues that these civilian poets sought to negotiate directly with the combatant's gnosticism, specifically with the combatant's assertion that only those present at a catastrophe could properly represent its horrors. The modernists rightly identified that gnosticism was a threat to their own representational claims on an increasingly traumatic modernity. How was the imagination to be salvaged in order that it could still feel into the wounded experience of others? In response to this challenge, the modernists drafted their own imagined war poems, developing in the process several different and contradictory poetic systems. Whereas scholarship ordinarily tells the story of intra-war modern poetry as a series of different schools the trench lyric, the home front elegy and the modernist long poem each moving in a different direction, this study brings those traditions back together into one history by treating them as idiosyncratic responses to the same aesthetic problem.

This study examines the work of the principle architects of Anglo-American modernist poetics T.S. Eliot, H.D., Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Edward Thomas and Wallace Stevens and their response to the challenge of combatant war poetries. It argues that these civilian poets sought to negotiate directly with the combatant's gnosticism, specifically with the combatant's assertion that only those present at a catastrophe could properly represent its horrors. The modernists rightly identified that gnosticism was a threat to their own representational claims on an increasingly traumatic modernity. How was the imagination to be salvaged in order that it could still feel into the wounded experience of others? In response to this challenge, the modernists drafted their own imagined war poems, developing in the process several different and contradictory poetic systems. Whereas scholarship ordinarily tells the story of intra-war modern poetry as a series of different schools the trench lyric, the home front elegy and the modernist long poem each moving in a different direction, this study brings those traditions back together into one history by treating them as idiosyncratic responses to the same aesthetic problem.

The Fantasy AGE Campaign Builder’s Guide is an indispensable resource for aspiring and experienced Game Masters alike. It provides advice and examples on such topics as designing entertaining and effective encounters, crafting interesting locations, customizing adversaries, and much more. It also includes tables to help generate campaign elements when a bit of spontaneity and randomness is desired. Each chapter in the Campaign Builder’s Guide is devoted to a different topic, each approached with a mixof advice, mechanical assistance, and ultimately ready to use examples. Whether you’re designing your own pantheon of fantasy deities fora campaign or seeking to alter setting,characters, and rules to emulate a particular sub-genre of fantasy, the Campaign Builder’sGuide has the advice and tools you need.

Isidore of Seville (560—636) was a crucial figure in the preservation and sharing of classical and early Christian knowledge. This volume represents a cross section of the various approaches scholars have taken toward Isidore’s writings.

This volume interrogates the assumption that Visigothic practices and institutions were mere imitations of the Byzantine empire. Contributors rethink these practices not as uncritical and derivative adoptions of Byzantine customs, but as dynamic processes in dialogue with not only the Byzantine empire but also with the contemporary Iberian context, as well as the Roman past. The goal of the volume is to approach Visigothic customs not as an uncritical adoption and imitatio of contemporary Roman models (an acculturation model), but as unique interpretations of a common pool of symbols, practices, and institutions that formed the legacy of Rome. The contributors argue that it is necessary to reconsider the idea of imitatio imperii as a process that involved specific actors taking strategic decisions in historically contingent circumstances.