Here in This Island We Arrived

Shakespeare and Belonging in Immigrant New York

Elisabeth H. Kinsley

“Kinsley’s work is rich in detailed examples, and calls into question claims that Shakespearean performance in America had become, by the early twentieth century, the domain of ‘highbrow’ culture. Rather, by carefully drawing upon the multitude of Shakespearean performances in New York’s immigrant communities, this book shows that ‘Shakespeare’s meaning—and the terms of American belonging—was always in flux.’ Students of theatre, American studies, urban studies, and history will all be interested in this text.”
—Lisa Merrill, author of When Romeo Was a Woman: Charlotte Cushman and Her Circle of Female Spectators

Imagined Romes

The Ancient City and Its Stories in Middle English Poetry

C. David Benson

“The relation of medieval cultures to Rome is creatively conflicted: early Christianity defines itself against everything that ‘Rome’ stands for, while the Papacy models itself as a new empire. David Benson’s Imagined Romes takes us into the medieval city and trains us to understand how late medieval English readers of and visitors to the eternal city imagined its republican and imperial past. The resultant book—ever lucid and engaging—is full of illuminating surprises.”
—James Simpson, author of Under the Hammer: Iconoclasm in the Anglo-American Tradition

Green Worlds of Renaissance Venice

Jodi Cranston

“This wide-ranging exploration of the green world, pastoral, or ‘second nature’ of Venice helps rethink the complex and intricate world of pastoral, its production, and its experience. From palace and villa gardens to paintings, eclogues and plays, and sculptural figures, Jodi Cranston sets out the fictional and the actual modes of pastoralism in the light of both contemporary writers and modern critics who have extended their versions of pastoral.”
—John Dixon Hunt, author of A World of Gardens

Christians in Caesar’s Household

The Emperors’ Slaves in the Makings of Christianity

Michael Flexsenhar III

“With an incisive, cogent, and creative application of memory studies to early Christian literature, Michael Flexsenhar III’s Christians in Caesar’s Household presents us with a critical picture of how and why early Christian authors felt it so strategically important to memorialize Christian imperial slaves. Flexsenhar’s work demonstrates aptly that early Christianity fashioned itself imperially, using slavery to shape its identity in ways that will be, without a doubt, everlasting.”
—Chris L. de Wet, author of The Unbound God: Slavery and the Formation of Early Christian Thought

Mexican Costumbrismo

The Shape of Difficulty

Submit your paper for a Special Issue on “Institutional Entropy: Causes, Consequences, and Corrective Measures” for the Journal of Natural Resources Policy Research

Deadline: 1 May 2019

Guest Editors: Chennat Gopalakrishnan, University of Hawaii at Manoa, U.S.A
Laura M. McCann, University of Missouri, U.S.A

Son of God

Divine Sonship in Jewish and Christian Antiquity

Edited by Garrick V. Allen, Kai Akagi, Paul Sloan, and Madhavi Nevader

In antiquity, “son of god”—meaning a ruler designated by the gods to carry out their will—was a title used by the Roman emperor Augustus and his successors as a way to reinforce their divinely appointed status. But this title was also used by early Christians to speak about Jesus, borrowing the idiom from Israelite and early Jewish discourses on monarchy. This interdisciplinary volume explores what it means to be God’s son(s) in ancient Jewish and early Christian literature.

Through close readings of relevant texts from multiple ancient corpora, including. . . (more)

Mythopoeïa

ou l’art de forger les « mythes » dans l’« aire culturelle » syro-mésopotamienne, méditerranéenne et indo-européenne

Jérôme Pace

Religious and historical myths defined the worldviews and identities of ancient societies and form a fascinating, but difficult, object of study. In presenting a comparative analysis of several interrelated ancient mythical themes, such as the storm god, the young hero, chaos, combat with monsters, kingship, final judgment, organization of the cosmos, and the foundation of kingship, this thorough and groundbreaking study explores the possibility of a mythological—or “mythopoeic”—Indo-Mediterranean cultural space. . . (more)