March 2007 Issue
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| FEATURES | ||||||||
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'Deus le Vult' – A Crusades Roundup This month sees the publication of two major new books on the Crusades, providing a fresh approach to an ever popular subject. Christopher Tyerman's God's War is an ambitious attempt to produce a one volume synthesis on the Crusade, accessible to the general reader, while Peter Edbury and Sophia Kalopissi-Verti edited a collection of papers on Crusader archaeology from a round table conference in Cyprus in 2005. | |||||||
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The Literature of Roman Gardens Whether searching for horticultural instruction, spiritual enlightenment, a place for quiet contemplation, or a good place for a murder, the Romans wrote about gardens in many different ways. Victoria Emma Pagán’s new book, Rome and the Literature of Gardens, explains how the garden as a setting, and garden rhetoric, was exploited by Roman writers. | |||||||
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Of all the new books that have passed over the desks of the Oxbow staff this month, these, for whatever reason, are the ones that grabbed their attention.
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| NEWS AND HAPPENINGS | ||||||||
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New Releases | ||||||||
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Cooking up the Past: Food and Culinary Practices in the Neolithic and Bronze Age Aegean
This volume focuses on the ways in which the production and consumption of food developed in the Aegean region in the Neolithic and Early Bronze Age, to see how this was linked to the appearance of more complex forms of social organisation. Sites from Macedonia in the north of Greece down to Crete are discussed and chronologically the papers cover not only the Neolithic and Early Bronze Age but extend into the Middle and Late Bronze Age and Classical period as well. The evidence from human remains, animal and fish bones, cultivated and wild plants, hearths and ovens, ceramics and literary texts is interpreted through a range of techniques, such as residue and stable isotope analysis. A number of key themes emerge, for example the changes in the types of food that were produced around the time of the Final Neolithic-Early Bronze Age transition, which is seen as a particularly critical period, the ways in which foodstuffs were stored and cooked, the significance of culinary innovations and the social role of consumption. | |||||||
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Euripides: Helen
A Helen who has always been faithful to her husband Menelaus; who never went to Troy, but was carried off to Egypt, where she remains throughout the Trojan War; who is falsely blamed for destruction in which she had no part, or rather a part in name only-this is the paradoxical heroine of Euripides' Helen. The story is not his invention: Helen's association with Egypt goes back at least to the Odyssey, and the idea that a divinely fashioned counterfeit went to Troy in her place can be traced back to a poem or poems of Stesichorus, a century and a half before Euripides' play was performed in 412 BC. We can only speculate about Stesichorus' treatment of the myth of the two Helens, but to Euripides the idea of an image designed to deceive by the gods themselves suggested a world in which nothing is precisely what it seems to be, in which appearance and reality are all too easily confused. Helen plays with this premise in ways that make it by turns amusing and disturbing, playful and full of serious quandaries. The real Helen did not commit the deeds for which she is famous, and yet she cannot escape a reputation based on what the world believes her to be, rather than on what she is. Menelaus seems far less than the hero of Troy he vaunts himself to be, not least because the Trojan War now appears, as almost everyone in the play remarks, to have been fought over nothing at all. And yet, with the disappearance of the phantom Helen, Menelaus does reclaim his wife at last and the real Helen plots a brilliant deception that will bring them both home again in triumph. Helen is an extraordinary performance that has disturbed critics because it refuses to conform to their expectations of its genre, appearing to many to be a philosophical divertissement or a romantic comedy rather than a tragedy. And yet an Athenian tragedy it surely was, despite its foreshadowings of comedy to come. At its heart is Helen herself, her beautiful body betrayed by her ugly name (to use the soma/onoma antithesis deployed so often in the play), unable at first to convince anyone, even her husband, that she is not her image, but finally, through long struggle, able to make herself whole. | |||||||
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Conferences we will be attending TRAC/RAC: Seventh Roman Archaeology Conference/Seventeenth Theoretical Roman Archaeology Conference BANEA: The British Association for Near Eastern Archaeology IFA Annual Conference: Institute of Field Archaeologists |
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