This provocation contests the familiar construction of classical Athens as an ideal exemplar of democratic politics through a focus on the city’s material fabric, its visual artworks, and the performances which took place within its public spaces. It highlights the city’s ongoing process of material re-building (particularly following the Per…[Read more]

A review of Sören Petershans’s revised dissertation entitled Offenbarung des Namens und versöhntes Leben: Eine Untersuchung zur Gotteslehre bei Kornelis Heiko Miskotte, Arbeiten zur Systematischen Theologie 11 (Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2016).

‘If God Meant to Interfere’: Evolution and Theodicy in Blood Meridian

Taking the late ninth-century Breton Gesta Sactorum Rotonensium as a starting point, this article aims to demonstrate that there is more to the biblical quotations and allusions employed by early medieval hagiographers than initially meets the eye. By juxtaposing the stories these quotations are in with their ‘original’ biblical context, as wellas…[Read more]

A response to Erin Runions’ monograph, The Babylon Complex: Theopolitical Fantasies of War, Sex, and Sovereignty (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014)

Most scholarship of the last few decades on the book of Revelation has focused on its colonial conditions and heated, even forceful, political engagement, making conflicting conclusions about to what extent it “reproduces” or “resists” imperial ideology. Of particular focus has been the striking image of the lamb on the throne, an image that am…[Read more]

The story of the discovery of the Nag Hammadi texts – a tale about a hapless Arab peasant who uncovers the buried secrets of early Christianity – has accompanied most scholarly and popular explorations of Nag Hammadi literature. As a colonialist relic, however, it is more than a quirky tale of the accidents of history. It represents and per…[Read more]

This essay is an intellectual history, one of affect theory both within and without biblical studies, rendered as an ecology of thought. It is an “archive of feelings,” a series of thematic portraits, and a description of the landscape of the field of biblical studies through a set of frictions and express discontentments with its legacies, as wel…[Read more]

Book review of The Republican Aventine and Rome’s Social Order, by Lisa Marie Mignone , 2016. Ann Arbor (MI): University of Michigan Press; ISBN 978-0-472-11988-2 hardback $70.00; 264pp., 12 figures, 2 tables

This chapter examines the underpinnings of Roman architecture by exploring some critical issues related to the architecture of central Italy primarily during the first half of the first millennium BCE. Four categories of buildings are considered, namely domestic architecture, civic architecture, defensive architecture, and sacred architecture. It…[Read more]

Book review of Ancient Samnium. Settlement, Culture, and Identity between History and Archaeology
By Rafael Scopacasa. Pp. xvi + 352, figs. b&w 22, tables 12. Oxford University Press, Oxford 2015. £75, $125. ISBN-13: 978-0-19-871376-0.

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This extended review highlights an increasingly important aspect of the contemporary performance reception of the Odyssey in the UK, with growing numbers of practitioners and companies moving away from the straightforward dramatisation (or revisionist dramatic contestation) of Homer’s epic tale, and towards a deepening engagement with epic s…[Read more]

Our lack of reliable information concerning the physical and choreographic aspects of ancient tragic performance permits modern writers to construct their own imaginative re-creations of the ancient text/body relationship in a wide variety of modes. The range of ways in which texts translated or adapted from ancient tragedy are capable of…[Read more]

The translation of ancient tragedy is often considered at a linguistic level, as if the drama consisted simply of words being written, spoken and heard. This article contends that translation for the stage is a process in which literary decisions have physical, as well as verbal, outcomes. It traces existing formulations concerning the links…[Read more]

Alice Oswald’s recitation of her 2011 poem Memorial is an intensely modest, self-effacing performance. Yet it is also one which invites us to consider key questions about the ancient practice, and modern re-performance, of epic poetry. Oswald explicitly cites the antiphonal lament of Homeric funerary ritual as an influence upon her r…[Read more]

Ted Hughes’ version of Euripides’ Alcestis (1999) is a play which diverges significantly from its ancient source-text, most notably in an interpolated sequence during which the drunken Heracles re-enacts his own labours, before experiencing traumatic visions. This article identifies this un-Euripidean interlude as a characteristic instance of int…[Read more]

This review-essay discusses George Brant’s play Grounded (2013) in the context of its production at the Gate Theatre (London). It begins with a critical examination of my own “mis-seeing” of the play’s protagonist as a version of the tragic Heracles. The analysis which follows compares key aspects of The Pilot’s narrative with Euripides’ Heracles…[Read more]

A study of grappling (both athletic and martial) from ancient Egypt to Victorian England. It was written as a Classics & Ancient History PhD thesis, so half the verbiage focuses on the ancient world.

This monograph is the first in-depth examination of articulated Roman plate armour since H. Russell Robinson published his ground-breaking reconstructions of lorica segmentata in The Armour of Imperial Rome. With detailed discussion of all the significant evidence (including previously unpublished material), the book looks at each of the principal…[Read more]