New Books in Ancient History New Books Network

Anthony Grafton is the Henry Putnam University Professor of History at Princeton, where he has taught since 1975. He is an historian of early modern Europe, and the author and co-author of over a dozen books, including The Footnote: A Curious History (Harvard University Press, 1997), and Inky Fingers: The Making of Books in Early Modern Europe (Harvard University Press, 2020).
In November 2006 he spoke to the Institute about Christianity and the Transformation of the Book: Origen, Eusebius, and the Library of Caesarea (Harvard University Press, 2006), which he co-wrote with Megan Hale Williams.
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Plato is a philosophical writer of unusual and ingenious versatility. His works engage in argument but are also full of allegory, imagery, myth, paradox and intertextuality. He astutely characterises the participants whom he portrays in conversation. Sometimes he composes fictive dialogues in dramatic form while at other times he does so as narratives. 
In How Plato Writes: Perspectives and Problems (Cambridge UP, 2023), world-renowned scholar Malcolm Schofield illustrates the variety of the literary resources that Plato deploys to achieve his philosophical purposes. He draws key passages for discussion particularly, but not only, from Republic and the less well-known Laws and also shows how reconstructing the original historical context of a dialogue and of its assumed readership is essential to understanding Plato's approach. The book will open the eyes of readers of all levels of expertise to Plato's masterly ability as a writer and how an understanding of this is crucial if we are to appreciate his philosophy.
Malcolm Schofield is Emeritus Professor of Ancient Philosophy and Fellow of St John's College, Cambridge University
Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.
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Composed within the first Christian century by a Roman named Hermas, the Shepherd remains a mysterious and underestimated book to scholars and laypeople alike. 
In The Shepherd of Hermas As Scriptura Non Grata: From Popularity in Early Christianity to Exclusion from the New Testament Canon (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023), Robert D. Heaton argues that early Christians mainly received the Shepherd positively and accepted it unproblematically alongside texts that would ultimately be canonized, requiring decisive actions to exclude it from the late-emerging collection of texts now known as the New Testament. Freshly evaluating the evidence for its popularity in patristic treatises, manuscript recoveries, and Christian material culture, Heaton propounds an interpretation of the Shepherd of Hermas as a book meant to guide his readers toward salvation. Ultimately, Heaton depicts the loss of the Shepherd from the closed catalogue of Christian scriptures as a deliberate constrictive move by the fourth-century Alexandrian bishop Athanasius, who found it useless for his political, theological, and ecclesiological objectives and instead characterized it as a book favored by his heretical enemies. While the book’s detractors succeeded in derailing its diffusion for centuries, the survival of the Shepherd today attests that many dissented from the church’s final judgment about Hermas’s text, which portends a version of early Christianity that was definitively overridden by devotion to Christ himself, rather than principally to his virtues.
Robert D. Heaton teaches New Testament, Christian Origins, and Early Christianity at Anderson University in Indiana. He also hosts podcasts for New Books in Religion. His research focuses on the New Testament canon and other early Christian literature, especially subcanonical books like The Shepherd of Hermas and the Apostolic Fathers. For more about Rob and his work, please see his website.
Jonathon Lookadoo is Associate Professor at the Presbyterian University and Theological Seminary in Seoul, South Korea. While his interests range widely over the world of early Christianity, he is the author of books on the Epistle of Barnabas, Ignatius of Antioch, and the Shepherd of Hermas, including The Christology of Ignatius of Antioch (Cascade, 2023).
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Personhood is central to the worldview of ancient India. Across voluminous texts and diverse traditions, the subject of the puruṣa, the Sanskrit term for "person," has been a constant source of insight and innovation. Yet little sustained scholarly attention has been paid to the precise meanings of the puruṣa concept or its historical transformations within and across traditions. In Puruṣa: Personhood in Ancient India (Oxford UP, 2024), Matthew I. Robertson traces the history of Indic thinking about puruṣas through an extensive analysis of the major texts and traditions of ancient India.
Through clear explanations of classic Sanskrit texts and the idioms of Indian traditions, Robertson discerns the emergence and development of a sustained, paradigmatic understanding that persons are deeply confluent with the world. Personhood is worldhood. Puruṣa argues for the significance of this "worldly" thinking about personhood to Indian traditions and identifies a host of techniques that were developed to "extend" and "expand" persons to ever-greater scopes. Ritualized swellings of sovereigns to match the extent of their realm find complement in ascetic meditations on the intersubjective nature of perceptually delimited person-worlds, which in turn find complement in yogas of sensory restraint, the dietary regimens of Ayurvedic medicine, and the devotional theologies by which persons "share" and "eat" the expansive divinity of God. Whether in the guise of a king, an ascetic, a yogi, a buddha, or a patient in the care of an Ayurvedic physician, fully realized persons know themselves to be coterminous with the horizons of their world.
Offering new readings of classic works and addressing the fields of religion, politics, philosophy, medicine, and literature, Puruṣa: Personhood in Ancient India challenges us to reexamine the goals of ancient Indian religions and yields new insights into the interrelated natures of persons and the worlds in which they live.
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A vivid and intimate glimpse of ancient life under the sway of cosmic and spiritual forces that the modern world has forgotten.
Life: The Natural History of an Early Christian Universe (U California Press, 2024) immerses the reader in the cosmic sea of existences that made up the late ancient Mediterranean world. Loosely structured around events in the biography of one early Christian writer and traveler, this book weaves together the philosophical, religious, sensory, and scientific worlds of the later Roman Empire to tell the story of how human lives were lived under different natural and spiritual laws than those we now know today.
This book takes a highly literary and sensory approach to its subject, evoking an imagined experience of an ancient natural and supernatural world, rather than merely explaining ancient thought about the natural world. It mixes visual and literary genres to give the reader a sensory and affective experience of a thought-world that is very different from our own. An experimental intellectual history, Life invites readers into the premodern cosmos to experience a world that is at once familiar, strange, and deeply compelling
Mike Chin is Associate Professor of Classics at the University of California Davis
Michael Motia is a Lecturer in the Religious Studies and Classics Department at UMass Boston (michael.motia@umb.edu)
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The contributions to Visnu-Narayana: Changing Forms and the Becoming of a Deity in Indian Religious Traditions (Austrian Academy of Sciences Press, 2023) deal with the complex history of the Indian deity Visnu-Narayana. This conception of God evolved in various traditions in India, especially in South India, during the first millennium CE. The history of this development is reconstructed here by various means, including philological exegesis, the history of ideas, and iconographic evidence. In their respective discussions, the contributors examine a range of textual material in Sanskrit, Tamil, and Manipravala, including the early Cankam literature of the 3rd to 6th century CE; the Vaisnava text corpus, in particular the Nalayiradivviyapirabandham (6th-9th century CE); Puranic literature, especially the Visnupurana (5th-6th century CE); Pancaratra literature; and the later (10th-14th century CE) literature of the philosophical and theological tradition of theistic Visistadvaita Vedanta, in which Visnu-Narayana plays a central role. Also examined is how Visnu-Narayana came to be seen as a solitary supreme God, with a reconstruction of the theological arguments supporting this monotheism.
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