The title of Anna Whitelock’s The Queen’s Bed: An Intimate History of Elizabeth’s Court makes is sound like a soap opera about royal lovers. Elizabeth’s regular bedfellows were not male lovers but female attendants. As the TLS reviewer , Helen Hackett, notes, “Sharing . . . . Continue Reading »
Giorgio Agamben notes in the preface to his recent Opus Dei: An Archaeology of Duty that “The word liturgy (from the Greek leitourgia , ‘public services’) is . . . relatively modern. Before its use was extended progressively, beginning at the end of the nineteenth century, we find . . . . Continue Reading »
The TLS reviewer of John O’Malley’s Trent: What Happened at the Council points out some of the omissions of the Council: “As O’Malley argues, however, what was not discussed is every bit as significant as what captured the delegates’ attention. There was barely a . . . . Continue Reading »
We speak blithely of modernity and the Enlightenment, as if the mere writing of a treatise suddenly changes the way people think. Margaret C. Jacob has spent a good part of her career retracing the conduits by which atomistic and mechanistic conceptions of the universe became part of the common . . . . Continue Reading »
Miles Hollingworth’s Saint Augustine of Hippo: An Intellectual Biography is an odd intellectual biography. He includes many generous quotations from Augustine, but Hollingworth sprinkles in references to Frantz Fanon, Whitehead, Cecil Day Lewis, C.S. Lewis and many other modern writers along . . . . Continue Reading »
As Raymond Van Dam points out ( Remembering Constantine at the Milvian Bridge ), one of Zosimus’s main complaints against Constantine was that he stopped the Secular Games ( Ludi Saeculares ), founded in 17 BC by Augustus and celebrated every saeculum (110 years) since. “Games” . . . . Continue Reading »
In the title essay of his 1980 collection, Pietas: Selected Studies in Roman Religion , the Dutch classicist Hendrik Wagenvoort traces the Roman notion that their success was a result of their piety back to the Roman conquest of Greece. How, the Greeks wondered, could the culturally inferior Romans . . . . Continue Reading »
In his contribution to The Old Testament in Byzantium , Robert Ousterhout examines the efforts of Eusebius and others to draw connections between Solomon’s temple and the church of the Holy Sepulcher: ““‘holy sites’ and relics previously associated with the Temple . . . . Continue Reading »
In the introduction to their Dumbarton Oaks symposium on The Old Testament in Byzantium , Paul Magdalino and Robert Nelson observe that the Byzantine empire’s use of the Old Testament seems to involve a strange reversion to Judaism: “the New Testament threw open the election of one . . . . Continue Reading »
In the aforementioned article, Charlesworth points to a passage from Procopius where he describes a bronze equestrian statue of Justinian, which was, the writer says, “arrayed as Achilles.” Charlesworth observes: “why should Justinian, in the sixth century, have chosen Achilles? . . . . Continue Reading »
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