Imprinting Antiquity: Reinventing the Past through Sixteenth-Century Prints

Imprinting Antiquity: Reinventing the Past through Sixteenth-Century Prints

Fisher, Kylie

Doctor of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University, 2020, Art History

Early modern prints were pivotal in the construction and dissemination of information and ideas throughout society, thereby functioning as agents in the cultivation of cultural belief and memory. This dissertation considers the understudied role of engravings of ancient architectural monuments, classical figural statues, and pseudo-antique objects in shaping a shared conception of ancient Rome in historically-removed viewers during the early sixteenth century. Although it is well-established that Renaissance humanists and art connoisseurs were obsessed with all things antique, the socio-cultural function of engravings of antiquities from that period, until now, has not been analyzed in detail. This study examines the ways in which prints of antiquities reinvented the urban topography and artistic culture of ancient Rome and what effect such images had on how the amorphous phenomenon of antiquity was understood during the early modern era. In so doing, it argues that engravings of classical remains served as lenses through which to imagine, and more significantly, as visual stimuli for remembering antiquity in ways that engendered ideological meaning about the ancient pagan city in relationship to its early modern Christian counterpart. Chapter ones provides an overview of the dominant intellectual pursuits of Renaissance Rome and explores how the printmaking enterprise intersected in profound ways with local humanist and antiquarian activities. The second and third chapters focus on engravings of extant classical ruins and statues. By analyzing how these images manipulated the appearances of the remains they depict, these chapters investigate how such “printed proxies” offered original viewers presumed insights into the historical, material, and cultural character of the ancient city, thereby establishing an implicit paragone between old and new Rome. Chapter four examines another type of all'antica portrayal, images of fictive objects that purport to depict rea (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Erin Benay (Committee Chair); Catherine Scallen (Committee Member); Emily Peters (Committee Member); Peter Knox (Committee Member) 

 

 

Civilizational Memory: The Transformation of Palmyra as a Cultural Patrimony of The West

Civilizational Memory: The Transformation of Palmyra as a Cultural Patrimony of The West

Abdul Samad, Bincy

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2020, American Culture Studies

A UNESCO-listed world heritage site located in the Syrian desert, Palmyra has been an ancient global crossroads of trade and culture. It has drawn tourists and scholars from all over the world and represented a palimpsest of eastern and western histories and cultures. In August 2015, the advance of ISIS into Palmyra and its calculated destruction of ancient monuments in Palmyra shocked the global community and led to an outpouring of grief. This dissertation examines the ways in which institutions and scholars in Europe and the United States responded to this sense of intense loss and argues that the international effort to rescue and preserve Palmyra has made Palmyra a cultural patrimony of the West. Focusing on digital and physical recuperations of Palmyrene monuments by various Western-based digital initiatives, I argue that Palmyra has been appropriated into an archive of Western civilizational memory. Edward Said's scholarship on the east/west binary and colonial discourse provides a framework for my analysis of the West's appropriation of Palmyra as its cultural heritage and the visual colonialism that is exemplified in the recreations of Palmyrene artifacts and monuments. I engage the scholarship of Maurice Halbwachs and Astrid Erll, among others, to explore the role of memory in transforming the significance of Palmyra and the perceived threat to Western civilizational memory. Virtual collaborative projects on Palmyra such as the #New Palmyra project, The Palmyra Portrait Project, “The Legacy of Ancient Palmyra,” and the Institute for Digital Archaeology serve as key sources in this dissertation. These efforts to reclaim Palmyra by the West as a patrimony of the West must be juxtaposed against the reality that Palmyra's antiquities have always remained present in the lives of Syrians and people living in the region. Therefore, the real Palmyra that once stood majestically in the Syrian desert is lost in translation and transference.

Committee: Sridevi Menon (Advisor); Kenneth W. Borland (Other); Andrew Schocket (Committee Member); Sara Khorshidifard (Committee Member) 

 

Ovid's Tristia as Testimony to Trauma

Ovid's Tristia as Testimony to Trauma

Neely, Elizabeth

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2021, Greek and Latin

This project takes advantage of modern trauma theory to develop a new reading and understanding of Ovid's first book of exile poetry, the Tristia. Using trauma theory, clinical research data, and traditional philology, this paper demonstrates that the language that Ovid uses to describe his experience of banishment and life in exile reveals that this period of his life included several potentially traumatic events. Shoshanna Felman's and Dori Laub's concepts of testimony and witnessing, strongly influenced the reading of the text as a reflection of the poet's personal experiences instead of either literal facts or empty artifice as scholars have previously done. This approach opens up new ways of understanding Ovid's experiences from the time that his banishment was announced through the third year of his exile. Through the lens of trauma theory, this project discovers how Ovid understood and expressed his separation from Rome, sense of self, relationship to poetry and language, and methods of coping with the pain.

Committee: William Batstone (Advisor); Zoe Plakias (Other); Julia Nelson-Hawkins (Committee Member); Dana Munteanu (Committee Member) 

 

Hymnic Ecology: An Ecocritical Reading of the Homeric Hymn to Pan

Hymnic Ecology: An Ecocritical Reading of the Homeric Hymn to Pan

Maynard, Matthew

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2024, Greek and Latin

This dissertation presents a new study of Homeric Hymn 19, to Pan. I emphasize how this text, as the fullest literary treatment of Pan from the early period of the god's cult outside of its native Arcadia, is a crucial document to how Pan was regarded in the fifth and fourth centuries and to the nature of the praise he received from his worshipers. While several book-length discussions of the longer poems of the Homeric Hymns now exist, the shorter poems in the collection have received comparatively little attention. The first half of the dissertation offers a step in the direction of ameliorating this imbalance by providing for the Hymn to Pan the kind of detailed historical and literary analysis that others have carried out on the long hymns. Chapter One considers questions of the hymn's date, place of origin, and performative context, and Chapter Two takes the form of a commentary on the text of the hymn. The Hymn to Pan is remarkable for its indulgent and celebratory depiction of wilderness environments, an attitude some have felt to be generally lacking in the literature of the ancient Greeks. The second half of the dissertation uses ecocriticism to consider this aspect of the hymn. In Chapter Three I describe a careful organization observable in the poet's treatment of natural and constructed spaces that serves to invite reflection on the relationship between humans and the places of the earth that are hostile to human habitation. A fourth chapter turns to a discussion of how wilderness appears in other Homeric Hymns. I show that, while we often find engagement with ecological modes of thinking in hymnic compositions, the Hymn to Pan is unique among surviving hymns for its focalization of this theme and for the inseparable association it establishes between a god and his landscape.

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Committee: Sarah Iles Johnston (Advisor); Thomas Hawkins (Committee Member); Fritz Graf (Committee Member) 

 

 

 

 

Mediterranean Islands in Late Antiquity: A Cultural and Environmental History, c. 300–600 CE

Mediterranean Islands in Late Antiquity: A Cultural and Environmental History, c. 300–600 CE

Kotva, Alyssa

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2025, History

Although they sit at the very center of the late antique world, Mediterranean islands have tended to be part of the scenery more often than they have been major participants in the historiography of Late Antiquity. This dissertation demonstrates that, as material economic zones and as conceptually potent spaces, islands were in fact central to the political and cultural developments that shaped the Mediterranean region between ca. 300 and 600 CE. Late Roman administrative structures, the development of Christian ecclesiastical networks, and the uneven fragmentation of Mediterranean economic systems connected islands and islanders to centers of power. Moreover, it argues that the idea that islands are both ‘other' and ‘universal' spaces with marvelous and transformative connotations and that they form a coherent geographic category, developed in large part during Late Antiquity, and emerged through the textual and educational techniques of knowledge production. This idea was only intensified rather than diminished as Christian thinkers adopted and responded to earlier traditions. Both these material and cultural features of late antique islands, finally, were animated by ancient and late ancient epistemology and phenomenology. Drawing on a wide range of literary, documentary, material and scientific sources, this dissertation reveals how biology, geology, culture, and trade compounded and connected on late antique islands.

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Committee: Kristina Sessa (Advisor); Paolo Squatriti (Committee Member); Christopher Otter (Committee Member); David Brakke (Committee Member) 

 

The Best and Most Serious People: Meritocratic Discourse in Late Antiquity

The Best and Most Serious People: Meritocratic Discourse in Late Antiquity

Lee, Trevor

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2026, Greek and Latin

This dissertation investigates the role of merit as a public ideology in the late Roman bureaucracy and imperial apparatus. I argue that the later empire discursively legitimized itself as a functioning meritocracy in which its high officials and emperors had earned their positions through tangible accomplishments and personal virtues. By analyzing the works of Libanius and Synesius of Cyrene, I first observe from an individual perspective how merit justified power and advancement in the public imagination amidst a reality riddled with nepotism, corruption, and failure. The second half of this project examines merit on a systemic level through the broader genre of panegyric and the discourse on bureaucratic venality. By situating the relevant sources within modern ideological theory, I consider how the late Roman culture of merit ultimately legitimized the system of imperial rule and dampened internal criticisms against it. In conjunction with the positive ideal of supposed meritocrats at the head of the imperial apparatus, the normative values embedded within the numerous critiques of poor rulership in our sources inadvertently reinforced the unconscious assumption that late antique society was ideally meritocratic. In this regard, the late Roman ideology of merit's first and foremost function was the continual reproduction of imperial domination.

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Committee: Alan Ross (Advisor); Megan Nutzman (Committee Member); Gaia Gianni (Committee Member); Anthony Kaldellis (Other) 

 

Communities, Connectivity and Complexity in Roman Britain: New Archaeological Agendas

Communities, Connectivity and Complexity in Roman Britain: New Archaeological Agendas

Martin Pitts, Penny Coombe, Eleri Cousins, Andrew Gardner and Lisa Lodwick†

 

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC 4.0 License. It is free to read, download and share on the BAR Digital platform.

This volume kick-starts debate on the future of archaeological research on Roman Britain. Focusing on new approaches to socio-economic, cultural, power and material dynamics, it addresses pressing issues facing the field. Since the deconstruction of ‘Romanisation’, a lack of consensus has seen the fragmentation of approaches, theories, methodologies and archaeological specialisms. Contributors propose innovative ways forward that collectively embrace the themes of communities, connectivity, and complexity. ‘Communities’ concerns both professional communities in field archaeology, museums, heritage, and universities and emphasises approaches that address the diverse patchwork of ancient communities that inhabited Britannia. ‘Connectivity’ challenges the perceived parochialism of Romano-British studies, advocating the connection of research communities and the integration of Romano-British data with those from the rest of the Roman world. ‘Complexity’ underlines the generation of specialised knowledge and increasingly complex datasets, and the challenges of producing new, methodologically and theoretically innovative, historical narratives for specialist and public audiences.

 

Citable Link

Published: 2026

Publisher: BAR Publishing

License:

Language: English

ISBN(s)

• 9781407364162 (ebook)
• 9781407364155 (paperback)

BAR Number: B704

Series

• Archaeology of Roman Britain
• BAR British Series