The Roman Empire during the reigns of Septimius Severus and his successors (AD 193 225) enjoyed a remarkably rich and dynamic cultural life. It saw the consolidation of the movement known as the second sophistic, which had flourished during the second century and promoted the investigation and reassessment of classical Greek culture. It also witnessed the emergence of Christianity on its own terms, in Greek and in Latin, as a major force extending its influence across literature, philosophy, theology, art and even architecture. This volume offers the first wide-ranging and authoritative...

This book surveys the Severan period's many developments in literature, philosophy, religion, art, archaeology and culture.

The aesthetic changes in late Roman literature speak to the foundations of modern Western culture. The dawn of a modern way of being in the world, one that most Europeans and Americans would recognize as closely ancestral to their own, is to be found not in the distant antiquity of Greece nor in the golden age of a Roman empire that spanned the Mediterranean, but more fundamentally in the original and problematic fusion of Greco-Roman culture with a new and unexpected foreign element-the arrival of Christianity as an exclusive state religion. For a host of reasons, traditionalist scholarship...

Featuring some of the major voices in the world of art history, this volume explores the methodological aspects of comparison in the historiography of the discipline. The essays assess the strengths and weaknesses of comparative practice in the history of art, and consider the larger issue of the place of the comparative in how art history may develop in the future. The contributors represent a comprehensive range of period and geographic command from antiquity to modernity, from China and Islam to Europe, from various forms of art history to archaeology, anthropology and material culture...

In the opening decades of the twentieth century, Germany was at the cutting edge of arts and humanities scholarship across Europe. However, when many of its key thinkers--leaders in their fields in classics, philosophy, archaeology, art history, and oriental studies--were forced to flee to England following the rise of the Nazi regime, Germany's loss became Oxford's gain.

From the mid-1930s onwards, Oxford could accurately be described as an "ark of knowledge" of western civilization: a place where ideas about art, culture, and history could be rescued, developed, and disseminated freely....