Rethinking the Mediterranean
Journal Data
| Type | SOURCE_BOOK |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (GB) |
| ISBN-13 | 9780199265459 |
| Open Library | OL18533600W |
| Total publications | 15 |
| Coverage period | 2005 - 2005 |
| Language | EN |
| Cited by | 66 |
| h-index | 1 |
| i10-index | 1 |
"The volume brings together some of those who have been most active and prominent in recent Mediterranean debates. The focus is in large apart on the ancient and medieval worlds, 3500 B.C. to A.D. 1500, but the book is also concerned to discover what the Mediterranean has meant to others (from Paris to Brazil). The book as a whole is markedly reflexive: how should we use the Mediterranean, and why (apart form those exquisite sunsets) are we fixated on it?"--BOOK JACKET
Practical Mediterraneanism
At the beginning of a new century, I confess to a feeling of astonishment that we are still talking about the utility, or otherwise, of the concept of ‘the’ Mediterranean. I do not mean that I am astonished to find that the Mediterranean Sea is still there, although the ecological mess we seem to be making of the planet might give one pause before accepting even this apparently simple certainty (and certainly the fish that were once a defining fe…
The East–West Orientation of Mediterranean Studies and the Meaning of North and South in Antiquity
Historians of both classical and late antiquity have a natural tendency to view the world they study as fundamentally divided into East and West. The reasons are obvious. Greeks were in the east, Romans in the west. The Roman Empire brought the parts together for some centuries before the successors of Constantine divided it definitively once again. Christianity perpetuated the split between East and West, and papal authority in the West confront…
Travel Sickness
Thus the late antique Life of Homer by one Proclus (possibly not the famous Platonist).He implicitly contrasts the limited mobility of the Homeric age with the greater ease of maritime communications characteristic of Roman imperial times. He offers us a perception of increasing Mediterranean mobility.
The Eastern Mediterranean in Early Antiquity
‘Mediterraneanism’ involves itself with a region, and as such it needs to define its subject of study and set its borders. While the aim of the approach is to be trans-historical—inspired as it is by Braudel’s longue durée—it should be obvious that historical circumstances defined what belonged to the Mediterranean world at any given point in time. Political and economic conditions determined what regions were in contact with those at the Mediter…
Mediterraneans
We talk of the Mediterranean and of the Mediterranean Sea, and we often assume we mean much the same thing. But here lies the root of a significant confusion. ‘Mediterranean’ means that which is between the surrounding lands. Yet histories and geographies of ‘the Mediterranean’ may concern themselves mainly with the lands that surround the Mediterranean Sea and the peoples who have inhabited them, to the extent of paying rather little attention t…
Ecology and Beyond
One of the fundamental notions put forward by P. Horden and N. Purcell in their important book The Corrupting Sea is the necessity of separating history in the Mediterranean from a history of the Mediterranean. The former was Fernand Braudel’s purpose in his famous book The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. The latter is Horden and Purcell’s ambition. They hold that such an approach can isolate what might be calle…
Ritual Dynamics in the Eastern Mediterranean
One of the many monuments the Athenians proudly showed their youth and the visitors to their city was the ship with which Theseus was believed to have sailed to Crete. In the course of the centuries the ship’s wooden parts rotted, and the Athenians had to replace them, providing ancient philosophers with an unsolved puzzled: did Theseus’ ship remain the same even though its rotten components were continually being replaced? I cannot help thinking…
The Mirage of Greek Continuity
P. Walcot’s influential book Greek Peasants, Ancient and Modern (1970) best illustrates the mirage of Greek continuity and the persistence of ‘an uncritically survivalist argument’.His ‘ancient peasants’ include not only ‘Hesiod and his fellow Boeotians’and ‘early Greek peasant society’,but also Greek society in the classical period, since Walcot, following a suggestion of the sociologist A. W. Gouldner, argues that the set of values of the early…
Alphabet Soup in the Mediterranean Basin
Figure 13.1 captures, in graphic form, an arresting phenomenon. In a nutshell, the past two decades or so have witnessed the emergence of a number of academic journals which deal, to a greater or lesser extent, with the historical Mediterranean. The sample is admittedly a small one; the circulation of many rather limited; the life-span of a few regrettably brief. Nonetheless, the pattern is clear enough to invite review and contextualization, and…
Travel and Experience in the Mediterranean of Louis XV
Travel in Enlightenment culture was seen as differing essentially from travel in earlier periods. Circumscribed by extensive commercial and diplomatic networks, travel took place within an administrative framework that facilitated the gathering of knowledge around the world. Transformed by the development of new navigational technologies—specifically the invention of the marine chronometer and mathematically rigorous cartography—the relationship …
Egypt and the Concept of the Mediterranean
These remarks began as a response to a pair of papers in the Columbia colloquium, those of Herzfeld and Armstrong, and they retain that character even as they take up ideas raised in other papers in this volume and reflect on the place of Egypt in The Corrupting Sea itself. Those two original papers have in common that they step back from the Mediterranean itself to those who create and represent it as a category, a concept, or a political fact. …
Four Years of Corruption
‘A second instalment will ⃛ allow us an opportunity to respond to criticisms of the first, in the interests of the debate that we should like to promote.’ When we wrote those words, in the Introduction to The Corrupting Sea (p. 4), the second instalment that we had in mind was volume 2 of the project, now provisionally entitled Liquid Continents (LC). Since that volume is still ‘in progress’, however, we are grateful for the opportunity to offer …
Mediterranean Reception in the Americas
The Ancient Mediterranean experience and its transmission throughout the ages has been the main theme of the Western tradition for centuries, helping to shape such a wide set of cultural contexts that we could hardly list them all. Perhaps the best way to perceive the range of Mediterranean influence would be to indicate the non-Mediterranean contexts, in the Orient, Southern Africa, Asia, Oceania, or in the Americas. There are many places outsid…
The Ancient Mediterranean
Routine, more-or-less legitimate, organized exactions of materials or labour, or of their symbolic equivalents, are located in a complex conceptual and practical matrix of behaviour and attitudes. This framework includes the purposes, expectations and irregularities of the exactors and the avoidance or hostility of those from whom exactions are made. It varies quantitatively, in levels and in the parameters within which it is possible in a given …
Rethinking the Mediterranean
In this collection of essays, an international group of renowned scholars attempt to establish the theoretical basis for studying the ancient and medieval history of the Mediterranean Sea and the lands around it. In so doing they range far afield to other Mediterraneans, real and imaginary, as distant as Brazil and Japan. Their work is an essential tool for understanding the Mediterranean, pre-modern and modern alike. It speaks to ancient and med…
Rethinking the Mediterranean
In this collection of essays, an international group of renowned scholars attempt to establish the theoretical basis for studying the ancient and medieval history of the Mediterranean Sea and the lands around it. In so doing they range far afield to other Mediterraneans, real and imaginary, as distant as Brazil and Japan. Their work is an essential tool for understanding the Mediterranean, pre-modern and modern alike. It speaks to ancient and med…
Practical Mediterraneanism
At the beginning of a new century, I confess to a feeling of astonishment that we are still talking about the utility, or otherwise, of the concept of ‘the’ Mediterranean. I do not mean that I am astonished to find that the Mediterranean Sea is still there, although the ecological mess we seem to be making of the planet might give one pause before accepting even this apparently simple certainty (and certainly the fish that were once a defining fe…
The East–West Orientation of Mediterranean Studies and the Meaning of North and South in Antiquity
Historians of both classical and late antiquity have a natural tendency to view the world they study as fundamentally divided into East and West. The reasons are obvious. Greeks were in the east, Romans in the west. The Roman Empire brought the parts together for some centuries before the successors of Constantine divided it definitively once again. Christianity perpetuated the split between East and West, and papal authority in the West confront…
Travel Sickness
Thus the late antique Life of Homer by one Proclus (possibly not the famous Platonist).He implicitly contrasts the limited mobility of the Homeric age with the greater ease of maritime communications characteristic of Roman imperial times. He offers us a perception of increasing Mediterranean mobility.
The Eastern Mediterranean in Early Antiquity
‘Mediterraneanism’ involves itself with a region, and as such it needs to define its subject of study and set its borders. While the aim of the approach is to be trans-historical—inspired as it is by Braudel’s longue durée—it should be obvious that historical circumstances defined what belonged to the Mediterranean world at any given point in time. Political and economic conditions determined what regions were in contact with those at the Mediter…
Mediterraneans
We talk of the Mediterranean and of the Mediterranean Sea, and we often assume we mean much the same thing. But here lies the root of a significant confusion. ‘Mediterranean’ means that which is between the surrounding lands. Yet histories and geographies of ‘the Mediterranean’ may concern themselves mainly with the lands that surround the Mediterranean Sea and the peoples who have inhabited them, to the extent of paying rather little attention t…
Ecology and Beyond
One of the fundamental notions put forward by P. Horden and N. Purcell in their important book The Corrupting Sea is the necessity of separating history in the Mediterranean from a history of the Mediterranean. The former was Fernand Braudel’s purpose in his famous book The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. The latter is Horden and Purcell’s ambition. They hold that such an approach can isolate what might be calle…
Ritual Dynamics in the Eastern Mediterranean
One of the many monuments the Athenians proudly showed their youth and the visitors to their city was the ship with which Theseus was believed to have sailed to Crete. In the course of the centuries the ship’s wooden parts rotted, and the Athenians had to replace them, providing ancient philosophers with an unsolved puzzled: did Theseus’ ship remain the same even though its rotten components were continually being replaced? I cannot help thinking…
The Mirage of Greek Continuity
P. Walcot’s influential book Greek Peasants, Ancient and Modern (1970) best illustrates the mirage of Greek continuity and the persistence of ‘an uncritically survivalist argument’.His ‘ancient peasants’ include not only ‘Hesiod and his fellow Boeotians’and ‘early Greek peasant society’,but also Greek society in the classical period, since Walcot, following a suggestion of the sociologist A. W. Gouldner, argues that the set of values of the early…
Alphabet Soup in the Mediterranean Basin
Figure 13.1 captures, in graphic form, an arresting phenomenon. In a nutshell, the past two decades or so have witnessed the emergence of a number of academic journals which deal, to a greater or lesser extent, with the historical Mediterranean. The sample is admittedly a small one; the circulation of many rather limited; the life-span of a few regrettably brief. Nonetheless, the pattern is clear enough to invite review and contextualization, and…
Travel and Experience in the Mediterranean of Louis XV
Travel in Enlightenment culture was seen as differing essentially from travel in earlier periods. Circumscribed by extensive commercial and diplomatic networks, travel took place within an administrative framework that facilitated the gathering of knowledge around the world. Transformed by the development of new navigational technologies—specifically the invention of the marine chronometer and mathematically rigorous cartography—the relationship …
Egypt and the Concept of the Mediterranean
These remarks began as a response to a pair of papers in the Columbia colloquium, those of Herzfeld and Armstrong, and they retain that character even as they take up ideas raised in other papers in this volume and reflect on the place of Egypt in The Corrupting Sea itself. Those two original papers have in common that they step back from the Mediterranean itself to those who create and represent it as a category, a concept, or a political fact. …
Four Years of Corruption
‘A second instalment will ⃛ allow us an opportunity to respond to criticisms of the first, in the interests of the debate that we should like to promote.’ When we wrote those words, in the Introduction to The Corrupting Sea (p. 4), the second instalment that we had in mind was volume 2 of the project, now provisionally entitled Liquid Continents (LC). Since that volume is still ‘in progress’, however, we are grateful for the opportunity to offer …
Mediterranean Reception in the Americas
The Ancient Mediterranean experience and its transmission throughout the ages has been the main theme of the Western tradition for centuries, helping to shape such a wide set of cultural contexts that we could hardly list them all. Perhaps the best way to perceive the range of Mediterranean influence would be to indicate the non-Mediterranean contexts, in the Orient, Southern Africa, Asia, Oceania, or in the Americas. There are many places outsid…
The Ancient Mediterranean
Routine, more-or-less legitimate, organized exactions of materials or labour, or of their symbolic equivalents, are located in a complex conceptual and practical matrix of behaviour and attitudes. This framework includes the purposes, expectations and irregularities of the exactors and the avoidance or hostility of those from whom exactions are made. It varies quantitatively, in levels and in the parameters within which it is possible in a given …
Rethinking the Mediterranean
In this collection of essays, an international group of renowned scholars attempt to establish the theoretical basis for studying the ancient and medieval history of the Mediterranean Sea and the lands around it. In so doing they range far afield to other Mediterraneans, real and imaginary, as distant as Brazil and Japan. Their work is an essential tool for understanding the Mediterranean, pre-modern and modern alike. It speaks to ancient and med…