This volume addresses one of the most far-reaching aspects of Petrarch research and interpretation: the essential interplay between Petrarch's texts and their material preparation and reception. The essays look at various facets of the interaction between Petrarchan philology and hermeneutics, working from the premise that in Petrarch's work philological issues are so authorially driven that we cannot in fact read or interpret him without understanding the relevant philological issues and reapplying them in our critical approach to his works. To read and interpret Petrarch we must come to...

Wealthy, conceited, hypochondriac (or perhaps just an invalid), obsessively religious, the orator Aelius Aristides (117 to about 180) is not the most attractive figure of his age, but because he is one of the best-known -- and he is intimately known, thanks to his Sacred Tales -- his works are a vital source for the cultural and religious and political history of Greece under the Roman Empire. The papers gathered here, the fruit of a conference held at Columbia in 2007, form the most intense study of Aristides and his context to have been published since the classic work of Charles...

Ancient Roman trade was severely hampered by slow transportation and by the absence of a state that helped traders enforce their contracts. In Trading Communities in the Roman World: A Micro-Economic and Institutional Perspective Taco Terpstra offers a new explanation of how traders in the Roman Empire overcame these difficulties. Previous theories have focused heavily on dependent labor, arguing that transactions overseas were conducted through slaves and freedmen. Taco Terpstra shows that this approach is unsatisfactory. Employing economic theory, he convincingly argues that the key...

The historians, classicists and psychiatrists who have come together to produce Mental Disorders in the Classical World aim to explain how the Greeks and their Roman successors conceptualized, diagnosed and treated mental disorders. The Greeks initiated the secular understanding of mental illness, and have left us a large body of penetrating and thought-provoking writing on the subject, ranging in time from Homer to the sixth century AD. With the conceptual basis of modern psychiatry once again under intense debate, we need to learn from other rational approaches even when they lack...

Moses Finley (1912-1986) was one of the most widely read scholarly historians and journalists of his age, having grown famous with The World of Odysseus; and he exercised a transformative influence on the study of the history of Greek and Roman antiquity. In this centenary volume distinguished ancient historians and Americanists analyse Finley's political and intellectual evolution, and attempt to understand the paradoxes of the young leftist and victim of McCarthyism whose work owes more to Weber than to Marx and of the young Jewish scholar (Moses Finkelstein) who distanced himself...

Across the Ocean contains nine essays, each dedicated to a key question in the history of the trade relations between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean from Antiquity to the Early Modern period: the role of the state in the Red Sea trade, Roman policy in the Red Sea, the function of Trajan's Canal, the pepper trade, the pearl trade, the Nabataean middlemen, the use of gold in ancient India, the constant renewal of the Indian Ocean ports of trade, and the rise and demise of the VOC.

The history of healthcare in the classical world suffers from notable neglect in one crucial area. While scholars have intensively studied both the rationalistic medicine that is conveyed in the canonical texts and also the 'temple medicine' of Asclepius and other gods, they have largely neglected to study popular medicine in a systematic fashion. This volume, which for the most part is the fruit of a conference held at Columbia University in 2014, aims to help correct this imbalance. Using the full range of available evidence - archaeological, epigraphical and papyrological, as well as the...