Title: Temples and towns in Roman Iberia: the social and architectural dynamics of sanctuary designs from the third century B.C. to the third century A.D
Author: Mierse, William E
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: Classics | Archaeology | Art and Architecture | Architectural History | Art History
Publisher's Description: This is the first comparative study of Roman architecture on the Iberian peninsula, covering six centuries from the arrival of the Romans in the third century B.C. until the decline of urban life on the peninsula in the third century A.D. During this period, the peninsula became an influential cultural and political region in the Roman world. Iberia supplied writers, politicians, and emperors, a fact acknowledged by Romanists for centuries, though study of the peninsula itself has too often been brushed aside as insignificant and uninteresting. In this book William E. Mierse challenges such a view.By examining in depth the changing forms of temples and their placement within the urban fabric, Mierse shows that architecture on the peninsula displays great variation and unexpected connections. It was never a slavish imitation of an imported model but always a novel experiment. Sometimes the architectural forms are both new and unexpected; in some cases specific prototypes can be seen, but the Iberian form has been significantly altered to suit local needs. What at first may seem a repetition of forms upon closer investigation turns out to be theme and variation. Mierse brings to his quest an impressive learning, including knowledge of several modern and ancient languages and the archaeology of the Roman East, which allows him a unique perspective on the interaction between events and architecture.   [brief]
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Title: Myth, meaning, and memory on Roman sarcophagi 
Author: Koortbojian, Michael
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Classics | Art | Art History | Art and Architecture
Publisher's Description: Michael Koortbojian brings a novel approach to his study of the role of Greek mythology in Roman funerary art. He looks at two myths - Aphrodite and Adonis and Selene and Endymion - not only with respect to their appearance on Roman sarcophagi, but also with regard to the myths' significance in the greater fabric of Roman life. Moving beyond the examination of these sarcophagi as artistic achievements, he sets them in their broader historical and social contexts.Remembrance was an important factor in ancient social life and fueled the need for memorials. In helping us to understand the powerful allusions that Greek myths presented for the Romans, and the role of those allusions in preserving the memory of the dead, Koortbojian effectively widens our vision of the ancient world.   [brief]
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Title: Legislative leviathan: party government in the House
Author: Cox, Gary W
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Politics | American Studies
Publisher's Description: This book provides an incisive new look at the inner workings of the House of Representatives in the post-World War II era. Reevaluating the role of parties and committees, Gary Cox and Mathew McCubbins view parties in the House - especially majority parties - as a species of "legislative cartel." These cartels usurp the power, theoretically resident in the House, to make rules governing the structure and process of legislation. Possession of this rule-making power leads to two main consequences. First, the legislative process in general, and the committee system in particular, is stacked in favor of majority party interests. Second, because the majority party has all the structural advantages, the key players in most legislative deals are members of that party and the majority party's central agreements are facilitated by cartel rules and policed by the cartel's leadership.Debunking prevailing arguments about the weakening of congressional parties, Cox and McCubbins powerfully illuminate the ways in which parties exercise considerable discretion in organizing the House to carry out its work.This work will have an important impact on the study of American politics, and will greatly interest students of Congress, the presidency, and the political party system.   [brief]
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Title: The building program of Herod the Great
Author: Roller, Duane W
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Classics | Architecture | Ancient History | Archaeology
Publisher's Description: Herod the Great, King of Judaea from 444 B.C., is known as one of the world's great villains. This notoriety has overshadowed his actual achievements, particularly his role as a client king of Rome during Augustus's reign as emperor. An essential aspect of Herod's responsibilities as king of Judaea was his role as a builder. Remarkably innovative, he created an astonishing record of architectural achievement, not only in Judaea but also throughout Greece and the Roman east. Duane W. Roller systematically presents and discusses all the building projects known to have been initiated by Herod, and locates this material in a broad historical and cultural context.Bringing together previously inaccessible material, Roller enriches our understanding of the enigmatic Herod and provides new insights into Roman architecture. Herod was instrumental in the diffusion of the Augustan architectural revolution into the provinces and was the first to build outside Italy such Italian architectural forms as the basilica, amphitheater, villa, and Italian temple. Herod's legacy provided a groundwork for the architectural Romanization of the east, influencing the construction of the great temple complexes and palaces so familiar from later Roman architecture.Herod, like Augustus himself, was not only interested in architecture but also in diplomatic and financial contacts among cities of the region. In addition to providing a repertorium of the building projects, this study is also an exploration of international relations in the eastern Mediterranean at the beginning of the Roman imperial period.   [brief]
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Title: Looking at lovemaking: constructions of sexuality in Roman art, 100 B.C.-A.D. 250
Author: Clarke, John R 1945-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Art | Classics | Art and Architecture | Art History | History | Gender Studies
Publisher's Description: What did sex mean to the ancient Romans? In this lavishly illustrated study, John R. Clarke investigates a rich assortment of Roman erotic art to answer this question - and along the way, he reveals a society quite different from our own. Clarke reevaluates our understanding of Roman art and society in a study informed by recent gender and cultural studies, and focusing for the first time on attitudes toward the erotic among both the Roman non-elite and women. This splendid volume is the first study of erotic art and sexuality to set these works - many newly discovered and previously unpublished - in their ancient context and the first to define the differences between modern and ancient concepts of sexuality using clear visual evidence.Roman artists pictured a great range of human sexual activities - far beyond those mentioned in classical literature - including sex between men and women, men and men, women and women, men and boys, threesomes, foursomes, and more. Roman citizens paid artists to decorate expensive objects, such as silver and cameo glass, with scenes of lovemaking. Erotic works were created for and sold to a broad range of consumers, from the elite to the very poor, during a period spanning the first century B.C. through the mid-third century of our era. This erotic art was not hidden away, but was displayed proudly in homes as signs of wealth and luxury. In public spaces, artists often depicted outrageous sexual acrobatics to make people laugh. Looking at Lovemaking depicts a sophisticated, pre-Christian society that placed a high value on sexual pleasure and the art that represented it. Clarke shows how this culture evolved within religious, social, and legal frameworks that were vastly different from our own and contributes an original and controversial chapter to the history of human sexuality.   [brief]
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Title: Made in God's image?: Eve and Adam in the Genesis mosaics at San Marco, Venice 
Author: Jolly, Penny Howell
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Art | Art History | Medieval Studies | Women's Studies | Religion
Publisher's Description: The stunning mosaics that illustrate the story of Creation in the church of San Marco in Venice are the focus of Penny Howell Jolly's compelling and provocative book. Scholars of medieval art have long been interested in the Genesis mosaics because they copy a nearly destroyed fifth-century illuminated Greek manuscript known as the Cotton Genesis. But instead of seeing the mosaics as a vehicle for reconstructing a lost cycle of paintings, Jolly presents them as a social document revealing the essential misogyny that existed in thirteenth-century Venice. Jolly analyzes more than twenty scenes, one by one in narrative order, and her perceptive reading goes well beyond what the Genesis Vulgate text says about Eve and Adam. The mosaics establish Eve as the culpable character from the very moment of her Creation, says Jolly, and depict her as dangerous and unrepentant at the end. Incorporating both feminist religious and narratological studies, Jolly poses important questions on the nature of visual language as opposed to verbal language. The very ability of visual forms to recall a rich variety of references is one source of their power, and propaganda must have enough breadth of reference to be read by diverse groups. The San Marco cupola, Jolly maintains, is dealing in powerful propaganda, and her pictorial observations offer an articulate and refreshing new view of this well-known work.   [brief]
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Title: How fascism ruled women: Italy, 1922-1945
Author: De Grazia, Victoria
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: History | European History | Women's Studies
Publisher's Description: Italy has been made; now we need to make the Italians," goes a familiar Italian saying. Mussolini was the first head of state to include women in this mandate. How the fascist dictatorship defined the place of women in modern Italy and how women experienced the Duce 's rule are the subjects of Victoria de Grazia's new work. De Grazia draws on an array of sources - memoirs and novels, the images, songs, and events of mass culture, as well as government statistics and archival reports. She offers a broad yet detailed characterization of Italian women's ambiguous and ambivalent experience of a regime that promised modernity, yet denied women emancipation.Always attentive to the great diversity among women and careful to distinguish fascist rhetoric from the practices that really shaped daily existence, the author moves with ease from the public discourse about femininity to the images of women in propaganda and commercial culture. She analyzes fascist attempts to organize women and the ways in which Mussolini's intentions were received by women as social actors. The first study of women's experience under Italian fascism, this is also a history of the making of contemporary Italian society.   [brief]
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Title: Fascist modernities: Italy, 1922-1945
Author: Ben-Ghiat, Ruth
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: European Studies | History | Intellectual History | European History
Publisher's Description: Ruth Ben-Ghiat's innovative cultural history of Mussolini's dictatorship is a provocative discussion of the meanings of modernity in interwar Italy. Eloquent, pathbreaking, and deft in its use of a broad range of materials, this work argues that fascism appealed to many Italian intellectuals as a new model of modernity that would resolve the contemporary European crisis as well as long-standing problems of the national past. Ben-Ghiat shows that - at a time of fears over the erosion of national and social identities - Mussolini presented fascism as a movement that would allow economic development without harm to social boundaries and national traditions. She demonstrates that although the regime largely failed in its attempts to remake Italians as paragons of a distinctly fascist model of mass society, twenty years of fascism did alter the landscape of Italian cultural life. Among younger intellectuals in particular, the dictatorship left a legacy of practices and attitudes that often continued under different political rubrics after 1945.   [brief]
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Title: Roman honor: the fire in the bones
Author: Barton, Carlin A 1948-
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: Classics | Ancient History | Classical History | Classical Politics | Classical Religions | Comparative Literature
Publisher's Description: This book is an attempt to coax Roman history closer to the bone, to the breath and matter of the living being. Drawing from a remarkable array of ancient and modern sources, Carlin Barton offers the most complex understanding to date of the emotional and spiritual life of the ancient Romans. Her provocative and original inquiry focuses on the sentiments of honor that shaped the Romans' sense of themselves and their society. Speaking directly to the concerns and curiosities of the contemporary reader, Barton brings Roman society to life, elucidating the complex relation between the inner life of its citizens and its social fabric. Though thoroughly grounded in the ancient writings - especially the work of Seneca, Cicero, and Livy - this book also draws from contemporary theories of the self and social theory to deepen our understanding of ancient Rome. Barton explores the relation between inner desires and social behavior through an evocative analysis of the operation, in Roman society, of contests and ordeals, acts of supplication and confession, and the sense of shame. As she fleshes out Roman physical and psychological life, she particularly sheds new light on the consequential transition from republic to empire as a watershed of Roman social relations. Barton's ability to build productively on both old and new scholarship on Roman history, society, and culture and her imaginative use of a wide range of work in such fields as anthropology, sociology, psychology, modern history, and popular culture will make this book appealing for readers interested in many subjects. This beautifully written work not only generates insight into Roman history, but also uses that insight to bring us to a new understanding of ourselves, our modern codes of honor, and why it is that we think and act the way we do.   [brief]
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Title: Fulk Nerra, the neo-Roman consul, 987-1040: a political biography of the Angevin count
Author: Bachrach, Bernard S 1939-
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: History | Medieval Studies | Medieval History
Publisher's Description: This is the first comprehensive biography of Fulk Nerra, an important medieval ruler, who came to power in his teens and rose to be master in the west of the French Kingdom. Descendant of warriors and administrators who served the French kings, Fulk in turn built the state that provided a foundation for the vast Angevin empire later constructed by his descendants.Bernard Bachrach finds the terms "constructed" and "built" more than metaphorical in relation to Fulk's career. He shows how Fulk and the Angevin counts who followed him based their long-term state building policy on Roman strategies and fortifications described by Vegetius. This creative adaptation of Roman ideas and tactics, according to Bachrach, was the key to Fulk's successful consolidation of political power. Students of medieval and military history will find here a colorful, impressively researched biography.   [brief]
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Title: Jewish life in renaissance Italy
Author: Bonfil, Roberto
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Jewish Studies | Renaissance History | European History
Publisher's Description: With this heady exploration of time and space, rumors and silence, colors, tastes, and ideas, Robert Bonfil recreates the richness of Jewish life in Renaissance Italy. He also forces us to rethink conventional interpretations of the period, which feature terms like "assimilation" and "acculturation." Questioning the Italians' presumed capacity for tolerance and civility, he points out that Jews were frequently uprooted and persecuted, and where stable communities did grow up, it was because the hostility of the Christian population had somehow been overcome.After the ghetto was imposed in Venice, Rome, and other Italian cities, Jewish settlement became more concentrated. Bonfil claims that the ghetto experience did more to intensify Jewish self-perception in early modern Europe than the supposed acculturation of the Renaissance. He shows how, paradoxically, ghetto living opened and transformed Jewish culture, hastening secularization and modernization.Bonfil's detailed picture reveals in the Italian Jews a sensitivity and self-awareness that took into account every aspect of the larger society. His inside view of a culture flourishing under stress enables us to understand how identity is perceived through constant interplay - on whatever terms - with the Other.   [brief]
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Title: Dwelling in the text: houses in American fiction 
Author: Chandler, Marilyn R
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Literature | American Literature
Publisher's Description: What is a house? And what can architecture tell us about individual psychology, national character and aspiration? The house holds a central place in American mythology, as Marilyn Chandler demonstrates in a series of "house tours" through American novels, beginning with Thoreau's Walden and ending with Toni Morrison's Beloved and Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping .Chandler illuminates the complex analogies between house and psyche, house and family, house and social environment, and house and text. She traces a historical path from settlement to unsettledness in American culture and explores all the rituals in between: of building, decorating, inhabiting, and abandoning houses. She notes the ambivalence between our desire for rootedness and our romanticization of wide open spaces, relating these poles to the tension between materialism and spirituality in our national character.At a time when housing has become a problem of unprecedented dimensions in America, this look at the place of houses and homes in the American imagination reveals some sources of the attitudes, assumptions, and expectations that underlie the designing and building of the homes we buy, sell, and dream about.   [brief]
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Title: The origins of modernism in Russian architecture 
Author: Brumfield, William Craft 1944-
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Architecture | Architectural History | Russian and Eastern European Studies
Publisher's Description: The dramatic transformation of Russian architecture from the 1880s to the 1917 revolution reflected the profound changes in Russian society as it entered the modern industrial age. William Craft Brumfield examines the extraordinary diversity of architectural styles in this period and traces the search by architects and critics for a "unifying idea" that would define a new architecture. Generously illustrated with archival materials and with the author's own superb photographs, this is the first comprehensive study by a Western scholar of a neglected period in European architectural and cultural history.Brumfield explores the diverse styles of Russian modernism in part by analyzing the contemporary theoretical debate about them: the relation between technology and style, the obligation of architecture to society, and the role of architecture as an expression of national identity. Steeped in controversy, Russian modernism at the beginning of the century foreshadowed the radical restructuring of architectural form in the Soviet Union during the two decades after the revolution. This authoritative work provides a new understanding of Russian architecture's last brief entrepreneurial episode and offers insight on our own era, when individual freedom and initiative may once again find expression in Russian architecture.   [brief]
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Title: Final judgments: duty and emotion in Roman wills, 200 B.C.-A.D. 250
Author: Champlin, Edward 1948-
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Classics | Ancient History
Publisher's Description: Freed from the familial and social obligations incumbent on the living, the Roman testator could craft his will to be a literal "last judgment" on family, friends, and society. The Romans were fascinated by the contents of wills, believing the will to be a mirror of the testator's true character and opinions. The wills offer us a unique view of the individual Roman testator's world. Just as classicists, ancient historians, and legal historians will find a mine of information here, the general reader will be fascinated by the book's lively recounting of last testaments.Who were the testators and what were their motives? Why do family, kin, servants, friends, and community all figure in the will, and how are they treated? What sort of afterlife did the Romans anticipate? By examining wills, the book sets several issues in a new light, offering new interpretations of, or new insights into, subjects as diverse as captatio (inheritance-seeking), the structure of the Roman family, the manumission of slaves, public philanthropy, the afterlife and the relation of subject to emperor.Champlin's principal argument is that a strongly felt "duty of testacy" informed and guided most Romans, a duty to reward or punish all who were important to them, a duty which led them to write their wills early in life and to revise them frequently.   [brief]
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Title: On Roman time: the codex-calendar of 354 and the rhythms of urban life in late antiquity
Author: Salzman, Michele Renee
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Classics | Religion | Classical History
Publisher's Description: Because they list all the public holidays and pagan festivals of the age, calendars provide unique insights into the culture and everyday life of ancient Rome. The Codex-Calendar of 354 miraculously survived the Fall of Rome. Although it was subsequently lost, the copies made in the Renaissance remain invaluable documents of Roman society and religion in the years between Constantine's conversion and the fall of the Western Empire.In this richly illustrated book, Michele Renee Salzman establishes that the traditions of Roman art and literature were still very much alive in the mid-fourth century. Going beyond this analysis of precedents and genre, Salzman also studies the Calendar of 354 as a reflection of the world that produced and used it. Her work reveals the continuing importance of pagan festivals and cults in the Christian era and highlights the rise of a respectable aristocratic Christianity that combined pagan and Christian practices. Salzman stresses the key role of the Christian emperors and imperial institutions in supporting pagan rituals. Such policies of accomodation and assimilation resulted in a gradual and relatively peaceful transformation of Rome from a pagan to a Christian capital.   [brief]
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Title: William Faulkner and the tangible past: the architecture of Yoknapatawpha 
Author: Hines, Thomas S
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Architecture | Architectural History | Literature | American Literature | United States History
Publisher's Description: The world of William Faulkner is seen from a new perspective in Thomas Hines's imaginative and many-faceted study. Hines assesses the impact of the built environment on Faulkner's consciousness and shows how the architecture of the writer's fictional county of Yoknapatawpha reflects the actual architecture of Oxford, Mississippi, and neighboring areas. Over 110 distinctive photographs, in both color and black-and-white, beautifully complement the text, making this book both a reading and viewing pleasure.Much has been written on the role of nature in Faulkner's work, but architecture and the built environment - the opposite of nature - have been virtually ignored. Arguing that nature and architecture are of equal importance in Faulkner's cosmos, Hines examines the writer's use of architectural modes - primitive, classical, gothic, and modern - to demarcate caste and class, to convey mood and ambience, and to delineate character. Hines provides not only another way of understanding Faulkner's work but also a means of appreciating the power of architecture to reflect what Faulkner called "the comedy and tragedy of being alive."Hines's gifts as an architectural historian and photographer and his intimate knowledge of Faulkner country are evident throughout this handsome book. Combining cultural, intellectual, architectural, and literary history, William Faulkner and the Tangible Past will take Faulkner lovers, as well as lovers of architecture, on a fascinating tour of Yoknapatawpha County.   [brief]
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Title: Possessing nature: museums, collecting, and scientific culture in early modern Italy
Author: Findlen, Paula
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: History | History and Philosophy of Science | European History | Renaissance History
Publisher's Description: In 1500 few Europeans regarded nature as a subject worthy of inquiry. Yet fifty years later the first museums of natural history had appeared in Italy, dedicated to the marvels of nature. Italian patricians, their curiosity fueled by new voyages of exploration and the humanist rediscovery of nature, created vast collections as a means of knowing the world and used this knowledge to their greater glory.Drawing on extensive archives of visitors' books, letters, travel journals, memoirs, and pleas for patronage, Paula Findlen reconstructs the lost social world of Renaissance and Baroque museums. She follows the new study of natural history as it moved out of the universities and into sixteenth- and seventeenth-century scientific societies, religious orders, and princely courts. Findlen argues convincingly that natural history as a discipline blurred the border between the ancients and the moderns, between collecting in order to recover ancient wisdom and the development of new textual and experimental scholarship. Her vivid account reveals how the scientific revolution grew from the constant mediation between the old forms of knowledge and the new.   [brief]
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Title: The view from Vesuvius: Italian culture and the southern question
Author: Moe, Nelson 1961-
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: European Studies | European History | Intellectual History | Politics | European Literature
Publisher's Description: The vexed relationship between the two parts of Italy, often referred to as the Southern Question, has shaped that nation's political, social, and cultural life throughout the twentieth century. But how did southern Italy become "the south," a place and people seen as different from and inferior to the rest of the nation? Writing at the rich juncture of literature, history, and cultural theory, Nelson Moe explores how Italy's Mezzogiorno became both backward and picturesque, an alternately troubling and fascinating borderland between Europe and its others. This finely crafted book shows that the Southern Question is far from just an Italian issue, for its origins are deeply connected to the formation of European cultural identity between the mid-eighteenth and late nineteenth centuries. Moe examines an exciting range of unfamiliar texts and visual representations including travel writing, political discourse, literary texts, and etchings to illuminate the imaginative geography that shaped the divide between north and south. His narrative moves from a broad examination of the representation of the south in European culture to close readings of the literary works of Leopardi and Giovanni Verga. This groundbreaking investigation into the origins of the modern vision of the Mezzogiorno is made all the more urgent by the emergence of separatism in Italy in the 1990s.   [brief]
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Title: Displaying the Orient: architecture of Islam at nineteenth-century world's fairs 
Author: Çelik, Zeynep
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Architecture | European History | Cultural Anthropology | Middle Eastern History
Publisher's Description: Gathering architectural pieces from all over the world, the Paris Universal Exposition of 1867 introduced to fairgoers the notion of an imaginary journey, a new tourism en place . Through this and similar expositions, the world's cultures were imported to European and American cities as artifacts and presented to nineteenth-century men and women as the world in microcosm, giving a quick and seemingly realistic impression of distant places.Çelik examines the display of Islamic cultures at nineteenth-century world's fairs, focusing on the exposition architecture. She asserts that certain sociopolitical and cultural trends now crucial to our understanding of historical transformations in both the West and the world of Islam were mirrored in the fair's architecture. Furthermore, dominant attitudes toward cross-cultural exchanges were revealed repeatedly in Westerners' responses to these pavilions, in Western architects' interpretations of Islamic stylistic traditions, and in the pavilions' impact in such urban centers.Although the world's fairs claimed to be platforms for peaceful cultural communication, they displayed the world according to a hierarchy based on power relations. Çelik's delineation of this hierarchy in the exposition buildings enables us to understand both the adversarial relations between the West and the Middle East, and the issue of cultural self-definition for Muslim societies of the nineteenth century.   [brief]
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Title: Renaissance Paris: architecture and growth, 1475-1600 
Author: Thomson, David 1912-
Published: University of California Press,  1985
Subjects: Art | Architecture
Publisher's Description: In the modern literature on Renaissance art and architecture, Paris has often been considered the Cinderella of the European capitals. The prestigious buildings that were erected soon after François I decided in 1528 to make Paris his residence have long since been lost. Thomson, however, restores t . . . [more]
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