Thomas Wiedemann
Biographic Data
| ID | 1107972 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Thomas Wiedemann |
| GIVEN NAMES | Thomas |
| FAMILY NAME | Wiedemann |
| SIGNATURE | WIEDEMANN T |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Bristol |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8081-4981 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 50 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 244 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 48 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1975 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2022 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
The construction of family in German feature films in the digital era
This paper critically examines images of domestic life in German cinema in the digital era. Based on the assumption that the film medium in Germany, which is largely sponsored by the state, reflects struggles for legitimate meaning, the discourse analysis of 20 outstanding German feature films dealing with family matters from the past decade reveals that despite cultural and technological changes, national film output mainly constructs idealistic…
Struggling for legitimate meaning
Given the state sponsorship of film production in Germany, this article examines general mechanisms in the formation of meaning in German filmmaking. With reference to Schimank’s framework of agent–structure dynamics and based on a constructivist understanding of the world, the results of 97 expert interviews with screenwriters, directors, producers, distributors, cinema theatre operators, funding representatives and public television editors, as…
Diskursanalyse für die Kommunikationswissenschaft
Years communication study in Europe
Years communication study in Europe
Grounded in Giddens’ structuration theory and using Bourdieu’s analytical tools this paper argues that Karl Bücher’s launch of Europe’s first communication department at Leipzig University in 1916 had a structural impact on the discipline’s development across the continent, which goes far beyond content or citations. The evaluation of the literature on the field’s history reveals that Bücher was the starting point of the discipline’s isomorphic s…
Peer review revisited
This paper is about peer review in the German field of communication study. It focuses on the journal Studies in Communication | Media (SCM) and examines the role and function of reviews for the production of knowledge. Taking into account recent skepticism towards the peer review process, the study is based on the most important findings of the research on peer review and conceptualizes reviews as a core communication element within the field, w…
Surviving in the Journalistic Field
This paper explores Catholic journalist Walter Hagemann's freedom of action during the Third Reich and seeks to provide insight into the history of journalism in Germany, especially regarding its autonomy. It refers to Pierre Bourdieu's sociology, which presumes a circular and dynamic relationship between individual practice and social structures. Accordingly, Hagemann's social position in the Nazi era (his “space of possibles”) is examined by re…
Adults and Children in the Roman Empire (Routledge Revivals)
Representing the Body of the Slave
Representing the Body of the Slave. Edited by Thomas Wiedemann and Jane Gardner. London and Portland, Ore.: Frank Cass, 2002. Pp. 195. $24.50 paper. Weidemann and Gardner's Representing the Body of the Slave crosses many boundaries: disciplinary, geographical, historical, and methodological. The editors begin by acknowledging the problematic outcomes of many such comparative studies of slavery. By presuming uniformity in the definitions or meanin…
Praxisorientierung als Überlebensstrategie
Based on Pierre Bourdieu's sociology, the paper reveals the academic and professional identity of Walter Hagemann, director of the Publizistik department at Mnster University and leading protagonist of German communication science after the Second World War. Extensive archive material, selected publications, and contemporary witnesses' information show that Hagemann, after a brilliant career as a journalist, reinvented the discredited national-so…
Representing the Body of the Slave
Debt-Bondage and Serfdom
Greeks saw all around them persons whose legal status gave them an intermediate position between the full citizens of self-governing democratic communities and chattel slaves in the absolute ownership of their masters—‘between free men and slaves’, as they were called by the second century AD lexicographer Pollux. It is interesting that Livy describes the events leading to the abolition of debt-bondage at Rome in terms reminiscent of the overthro…
The Treatment of Slaves
A result of the Greek and Roman tendency to see free men and slaves as distinct and exclusive status groups was that punishments prescribed by law for slaves were of a different degree of severity to those for free men. Interrogation is the usual method to bring out the truth about a criminal accusation. There was no feeling that the occasions on which interrogation under torture was called for should be restricted: on the contrary, by late antiq…
Introductory Outline
Societies which formally recognise the differences between their powerful and their weaker members have a variety of institutions which try to regulate and control the ways in which the good things in life are abstracted from the latter and allocated to the former to consume or in turn redistribute as they please: forced labour, indentures, apprenticeship, rent, taxes, gifts, the ‘free’ market—not to mention the relationships between husband and …
Moral Inferiors
Associated with the compulsion to classify all men as either free or slave, came a tendency to assimilate this polarity to others: Greek and barbarian, intelligent and stupid, superior and inferior—and from there the shift to ‘good and bad’ was unavoidable. Slaves appear as frequently in Greek romances as they no doubt did in the households of the wealthy members of the educated elite who read these works for their entertainment. The moral inferi…
Resistance
In theory, it was unthinkable that a slave should have any such remedy (recognition of a slave’s right to appeal against ill treatment by taking asylum at a shrine side-stepped the issue of the master’s absolute power over his property). Thus the slaves’ ways of exerting pressure on their owners to treat them properly were extra-legal: one was the threat of murdering a bad master. Roman legislation required the interrogation under torture of all …
The True Freedom of the Spirit
Already some of the earliest Greeks to interest themselves in philosophical problems, the Sophists, had speculated about whether social inferiority implied moral inferiority, and about the circumstances under which slavery might be held to be justified. Aristotle developed the theory of ‘natural slavery’ which implied that, for their own good, inferior barbarians ought to become the slaves of superior Hellenes (racial theory which did not corresp…
Domestic Slaves and Rural Slaves
The uniform condition ascribed to slaves by Greek and Roman legal codes masks the fact that they performed a wide variety of different economic roles, all of which might equally be performed by dependants of free or citizen status. The kinds of services provided by slaves in Greek and Roman households were similar to those required from dependants in other societies. Xenophon describes how the wealthy landowner Iskhomakhos instructs his young wif…
Slaves Owned by the State
The right of ownership over a slave was not always vested in a single household. Chattel slaves could be shared between several persons, or owned by publicani (companies carrying out contracts on behalf of Roman state), or by a whole political community. Some positions of responsibility are political, whether the super-intendence is over the whole body of citizens, or limited to a particular activity or section of the population (like the control…
‘All Human Beings are either Free or Slave’
Both Greeks and Romans assigned their slaves a legal position which clearly separated them from other, ‘free’, members of the community. In the ancient Greek and Roman world, the polarity between ‘slave’ and ‘free’ seemed as natural a way of dividing up the human race as those between men and women or young and old. Property is a part of the household, and the art of acquiring property a part of household management; and so, just as in particular…
Manumission
Manumission appears to have been so much more frequent in the Roman world than in Greece that there is some justification for seeing it as a temporary phase through which an outsider, if he had proved reliable, would pass to Roman citizenship. At Athens, however, slavery was a ‘closed’ rather than an ‘open’ system; citizen status was not conferred by manumission—on the rare occasions when freed slaves were granted citizenship, this was a separate…
Status Symbol or Economic Investment?
Despite the myth that the virtuous Romans of old owned only a few slaves, some Roman slave-holdings were vast, and Athenaeus clearly thought that the purpose of owning such large numbers of slaves was primarily to demonstrate one’s wealth and status. The fact that slave-holdings were huge does not allow valid deductions to be made about the greater or lesser availability of slaves as the result of warfare, about the proportion of slaves in the po…
Rebellion
The increase in cattle-ranching in southern Italy led to particular problems in 185 BC there is no reason to connect the armed and unsupervised herdsmen with the Bacchanalian cult which was suppressed at the same time—except that both were seen as threats to law and order. The account of the background to the revolt stresses the unique problems created by the unprecedented numbers of slaves forcibly resettled in Italy and Sicily. The slaves got t…
Sources of Slaves
The jurist Marcianus listed the methods of obtaining slaves which Roman law recognised as legitimate: fraudulent self-sale, capture in war and descent from a female slave. Ownership of a slave could be acquired through inheritance, donation or sale—always assuming that the vendor was the slave’s legitimate owner. Just as in early modern West Africa, many slaves were bought from ‘barbarian’ tribes at recognised ‘Ports-of-Trade’. Although piracy wa…
Greek and Roman Slavery
Greek and Roman Slavery brings together fresh English translations of 243 texts and inscriptions on slavery from fifth and fourth century Greece and Rome. The material is arranged thematically, offering the reader a comprehensive review of the idea and practice of slavery in ancient civilization. In addition, a thorough bibliography for each chapter, as well as an extensive index, make this a valuable source for scholars and students
Emperors and Gladiators
Of all aspects of Roman culture, the gladiatorial contests for which the Romans built their amphitheatres are at once the most fascinating and the most difficult for us to come to terms with. They have been seen variously as sacrifices to the gods or, at funerals, to the souls of the deceased; as a mechanism for introducing young Romans to the horrors of fighting; and as a direct substitute for warfare after the imposition of peace.In this origin…
The Political Background To Ovid's Tristia 2
Although the view dies hard that the poetry which Ovid wrote during his years in exile at Tomi consists largely of the ‘querulous and sycophantic’ complaints of a weak man unable to come to terms with a personal disaster, it has been recognized for many years that the Tristia and the Epistolae ex Ponto are not mere expressions of emotion but are as well thought out and constructed as any other of the doctus poeta's products. Of these poems, Trist…
Ancient Slavery and the Ideal of Man
Greek and Roman Slavery
Greek and Roman Slavery brings together fresh English translations of 243 texts and inscriptions on slavery from fifth and fourth century Greece and Rome. The material is arranged thematically, offering the reader a comprehensive review of the idea and practice of slavery in ancient civilization. In addition, a thorough bibliography for each chapter, as well as an extensive index, make this a valuable source for scholars and students
The regularity of manumission at Rome
The institution of slavery has served to perform different functions in different societies. The distinction between ‘closed’ and ‘open’ slavery can be a useful one: in some societies slavery is a mechanism for the permanent exclusion of certain individuals from political and economic privileges, while in others it has served precisely to facilitate the integration of outsiders into the community. ‘The African slave, brought by a foray to the tri…
Ancient Slavery and the Ideal of Man
Adults and Children in the Roman Empire
The Fetiales
In recent years many historians have rightly emphasised aggressive imperialism as a key element in Roman political life in the Middle and Late Republic. This has led to reconsideration of the significance of the ‘just war’ theory associated with the college of fetiales . ‘On the basis of this fetial law of the Roman people, it can be understood that no war is justified unless it is waged after compensation has been demanded ( sc. and refused by t…
Cicero and the End of the Roman Republic
Histories of the late Republic and biographies of Cicero havepreviously tended to treat political and cultural developments asessentially separate. In Cicero and the End of the Roman Republic, Thomas Wiedemann takes a fresh approach, looking at Cicero's literaryworks in the context of his public life, and of contemporary politicaland social issues.Wiedemann explores Cicero's role in thecreation of a new and effective Roman' cultural identity dema…
Greek and Roman Slavery
Greek and Roman Slavery
Struggling for legitimate meaning
Given the state sponsorship of film production in Germany, this article examines general mechanisms in the formation of meaning in German filmmaking. With reference to Schimank’s framework of agent–structure dynamics and based on a constructivist understanding of the world, the results of 97 expert interviews with screenwriters, directors, producers, distributors, cinema theatre operators, funding representatives and public television editors, as…
The Roman Household
Petitioning a Fourth-Century Emperor
In different societies there are different ways by which new ideas can be circulated to those who will have to decide whether they ought to be implemented. Where the responsibility for putting innovations into practice is spread over a large number of individuals, we like to think that there is a "free market" in ideas as in other commodities: proposals for reforms are advertised in print, and distributed to as wide a section of informed opinion …
Years communication study in Europe
Grounded in Giddens’ structuration theory and using Bourdieu’s analytical tools this paper argues that Karl Bücher’s launch of Europe’s first communication department at Leipzig University in 1916 had a structural impact on the discipline’s development across the continent, which goes far beyond content or citations. The evaluation of the literature on the field’s history reveals that Bücher was the starting point of the discipline’s isomorphic s…
Praxisorientierung als Überlebensstrategie
Based on Pierre Bourdieu's sociology, the paper reveals the academic and professional identity of Walter Hagemann, director of the Publizistik department at Mnster University and leading protagonist of German communication science after the Second World War. Extensive archive material, selected publications, and contemporary witnesses' information show that Hagemann, after a brilliant career as a journalist, reinvented the discredited national-so…
The Political Background To Ovid's Tristia 2
Although the view dies hard that the poetry which Ovid wrote during his years in exile at Tomi consists largely of the ‘querulous and sycophantic’ complaints of a weak man unable to come to terms with a personal disaster, it has been recognized for many years that the Tristia and the Epistolae ex Ponto are not mere expressions of emotion but are as well thought out and constructed as any other of the doctus poeta's products. Of these poems, Trist…
Ancient Slavery and the Ideal of Man
Ancient Slavery and the Ideal of Man
Petitioning a Fourth-Century Emperor
In different societies there are different ways by which new ideas can be circulated to those who will have to decide whether they ought to be implemented. Where the responsibility for putting innovations into practice is spread over a large number of individuals, we like to think that there is a "free market" in ideas as in other commodities: proposals for reforms are advertised in print, and distributed to as wide a section of informed opinion …
The Figure of Catiline in the Historia Augusta
Any educated Roman in late antiquity would immediately have recognized the figure of Catiline, for the simple reason that Sallust, together with Vergil, Cicero, and Terence, formed the core of the school curriculum. When his grandson starts school, Ausonius rejoices in a second chance to read the Catiline and the Histories ( Ep . 22.61 ff.)
B. Gentili and G. Cerri, Le teorie del discorso storico nel pensiero greco e la storiografia romana arcaica (Filologia e critica xv). Rome
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Greek and Roman Slavery
Greek and Roman Slavery
The regularity of manumission at Rome
The institution of slavery has served to perform different functions in different societies. The distinction between ‘closed’ and ‘open’ slavery can be a useful one: in some societies slavery is a mechanism for the permanent exclusion of certain individuals from political and economic privileges, while in others it has served precisely to facilitate the integration of outsiders into the community. ‘The African slave, brought by a foray to the tri…
The Fetiales
In recent years many historians have rightly emphasised aggressive imperialism as a key element in Roman political life in the Middle and Late Republic. This has led to reconsideration of the significance of the ‘just war’ theory associated with the college of fetiales . ‘On the basis of this fetial law of the Roman people, it can be understood that no war is justified unless it is waged after compensation has been demanded ( sc. and refused by t…
Herbert Grziwotz, Der moderne Verfassungsbegriff und die ‘Römische Verfassung’ in der deutschen Forschung des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts (Rechtshistorische Reihe LI). Frankfurt etc
Herbert Grziwotz, Der moderne Verfassungsbegriff und die ‘Römische Verfassung’ in der deutschen Forschung des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts (Rechtshistorische Reihe LI). Frankfurt etc.: P. Lang, 1986. Pp. 449. ISBN 3-8204-8816-2. - Volume 78
Adults and Children in the Roman Empire
Adults and Children in the Roman Empire
The Roman Household
With the help of a wide variety of source material, particularly legal documents and inscriptions, some of it made available for the first time in English, this book illustrates the activities associated with the household, demonstrating the different and frequently conflicting roles and moral values expected from its various members: male and female, old and young, freedman and slave
The Roman Household
From Nero to Vespasian
The Spanish denarii refer to the 'Freedom' and to the 'Life-force of the Roman People', with images of Mars the avenger and a liberty-cap. Perhaps the most interesting issue shows personifications of Spain and Gaul with a Victory between them, and the legend 'Harmony of the Spanish and Gallic Provinces'; the reverse represents the 'Victory of the Roman People' driving in a two-horse chariot. The similarity between C. Iulius Vindex's issues and th…
Tiberius to Nero
From Augustus on, as Cassius Dio noted, politics had ceased to be 'public'. The most fascinating source of the information about the Julio-Claudians is to be found in the surviving portions of Tacitus' Annals. Tiberius' first reported action after Augustus' death was to write to all the Roman armies. By inheriting the imperial household, the domus Caesaris, Tiberius controlled greater material resources than were available to any other Roman, eit…
Final judgements. Duty and emotion in Roman wills 200 B.C.–A.D. 250
Final judgements. Duty and emotion in Roman wills 200 B.C.–A.D. 250
The Cambridge Ancient History
The period described in Volume 10 of the second edition of The Cambridge Ancient History begins in the year after the death of Julius Caesar and ends in the year after the fall of Nero, the last of the Julio-Claudian emperors. Its main theme is the transformation of the political configuration of the state and the establishment of the Roman Empire. Chapters 1-6 supply a political narrative history of the period. In chapters 7-12 the institutions …
Cicero and the End of the Roman Republic
Histories of the late Republic and biographies of Cicero havepreviously tended to treat political and cultural developments asessentially separate. In Cicero and the End of the Roman Republic, Thomas Wiedemann takes a fresh approach, looking at Cicero's literaryworks in the context of his public life, and of contemporary politicaland social issues.Wiedemann explores Cicero's role in thecreation of a new and effective Roman' cultural identity dema…
Spectacles of Death in Ancient Rome
The elaborate and inventive slaughter of humans and animals in the arena fed an insatiable desire for violent spectacle among the Roman people. Donald G. Kyle combines the words of ancient authors with current scholarly research and cross-cultural perspectives, as he explores * the origins and historical development of the games * who the victims were and why they were chosen * how the Romans disposed of the thousands of resulting corpses * the c…
Reflections of Roman political thought in Latin historical writing
Isolating ‘political thought’ in Latin historical narratives is more difficult than in the works of historians who wrote in Greek. Explicit theorizing was not a Roman characteristic. But that does not mean that what Roman historical writers wrote did not reflect their conceptions of political institutions and structures and of how they changed over time. The further that a particular statement about historical events deviates from ‘real’ history …
Fifty years of research on ancient slavery
(2000). Fifty years of research on ancient slavery: The Mainz Academy project. Slavery & Abolition: Vol. 21, No. 3, pp. 152-158
Emperors and Gladiators
Of all aspects of Roman culture, the gladiatorial contests for which the Romans built their amphitheatres are at once the most fascinating and the most difficult for us to come to terms with. They have been seen variously as sacrifices to the gods or, at funerals, to the souls of the deceased; as a mechanism for introducing young Romans to the horrors of fighting; and as a direct substitute for warfare after the imposition of peace.In this origin…
History (27 works) · Art (23 works) · Classical Antiquity Studies (22 works) · Philosophy (19 works) · History (17 works) · Political science (16 works) · Ancient history (13 works) · Classics (12 works) · Law (12 works) · Colonialism, slavery, and trade (11 works)