Chapter 13 examines the development of Weimar Classicism, from the impact of Goethe’s own experiences in Italy to his collaboration with Friedrich Schiller. A crucial factor in any classicism, including that of Goethe and Schiller, is the absence of the ancients, and the chapter argues that Weimar Classicism was far from the settled, canonical project for which it is often taken. Rather, it emerged from historical crisis, above all the French Revolution, and it is characterised by internal tensions, between antiquity and modernity, desire and restraint.

This chapter explores Michel Foucault’s impact on the history of sexuality by emphasizing the disparate and evolving nature of his work and its often-controversial influence on the history of sexuality as a field. The essay begins by summarizing the arguments of the four volumes of Foucault’s History of Sexuality, while recalling the project’s turbulent history. The first volume maintained that sexuality’s history in the West was characterized by an “incitement to discourse” (rather than repression) which sealed the “Faustian pact” between sexuality and the pursuit of truth, while also drawing sexuality into power relations. Yet Foucault’s interest in early Christian sexual practices led him to reorient his project towards an exploration of classical antiquity and the role played by sexuality in practices of subjectivity. The essay’s second part examines how historians of sexuality have drawn on Foucault’s insights, focusing on the divergences between historians influenced by Foucault’s first volume (dealing with knowledge and power) and those inspired by the latter volumes (prioritizing subjectivity). After examining Foucault’s impact on feminism and queer theory, the essay concludes by noting that many historians of sexuality have made productive use of Foucault’s work without concurring with his philosophical conclusions.

This chapter looks into the constitutions of Antiquity, notably those of the Greek city states - the (old) constitution of Dreros and Athens (the Draconian and Solonian constitutions), and Rome - the twelve tables. Aristotle claims to have had access to 158 city state constitutions: every respectable city state had on. For the first time in history we see evidence that communities (cities) try to learn from examples set by other city-states. Rome, for example, sends out envoys to learn from (and copy) the Athenian constitution before enacting the laws in their own Twelve Tables

Victorian sculpture is less well-served by the scholarship than Victorian painting, and biblical sculpture ignored comparative to pieces inspired by Greco-Roman mythology. Rather than treat these as two separate strands, or, alternatively, assume that statues of Old Testament figures such as Eve and Rebecca were interchangeable with those of Venus and Psyche, this chapter thinks harder about how they relate. Looking first at free-standing sculpture, then at religious works in the private house, and finally at sculpture in the church, it hones in on affect to determine how the classical and biblical and the interactions and discrepancies between the two spoke to nineteenth-century British society, gender, belief and so on. As well as revisiting artists such as Thomas Woolner and John Gibson, it puts an emphasis too on women sculptors such as Emmeline Halse and on female representation, patronage and response to show that sculpture was as important in sermon-making as pictures.

Chapter 2 traces Albanian history through the Roman and Byzantine periods. The ancestors of contemporary Albanians were well integrated into these empires. The Latin influence on the Albanian language is correspondingly strong. In late antiquity, the Roman empire recruited an important part of its elite from the southwestern Balkans. The arrival of Slavic groups in the Balkans led to the collapse of state administration and the church and thus to a cultural turning point that was much more profound than in Western Europe. It was not until the ninth century that Byzantium was primarily re-Christianized. The Albanians came under the influence of the new Slavic states in the Balkans. Urban communities flourished particularly along the coast. The region was closely intertwined with the Venetian-Adriatic culture, but also with Byzantine civilization. With the decline of Byzantium, the southwestern Balkan region splintered into numerous small dominions. Venice, the Kingdom of Naples and, from the end of the fourteenth century, the Ottomans vied for influence. Albania was one of the first areas in the Balkans conquered by the Ottomans and nowhere was the resistance to the new empire as fierce as in Albania. Georg Kastriota Scanderbeg, who is revered as a national hero today, is symbolic of this resistence.

Veterinary medicine can be defined as the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of animal health problems in the context of human–animal relationships. This broad definition is used in this book to include many types of animal healing throughout history. However, this "concise" history of veterinary medicine does not attempt to include all important topics in the history of animal healing. Instead, the history of animal healing and veterinary medicine is framed using a global and world history approach. Activities are included at the end of each chapter that encourage readers to explore the veterinary history of their own region and nation. Every chapter considers how animal healing interacted with tensions between the economic, military, and cultural value, status, and uses of domesticated animals. Who were the animal healers? What was their social status? How were they trained? What skills and knowledge did they have? How did people explain or theorize, and respond to, animal health problems in each place and time period?

The efforts to decode the mystery of the Antikythera mechanism, a unique machine surviving from around 70–60 BC, extend more than a century since its discovery in an ancient shipwreck off the coast of a Greek island. Although the first experts who looked at the device were baffled by its gear mechanisms, dating, and purpose, this chapter explains how many of these inscrutable aspects slowly came to be clarified and deciphered. The author illustrates the immense efforts it can take to ‘solve’ an enigma: in this case, the combined work of historians, epigraphers, radiographers, X-ray machines, mechanics, filmmakers, and multinational technology companies. The chapter also displays the valuable insights which can come from such endeavours. Decoding the Antikythera mechanism challenged common assumptions about technological skill and astronomical knowledge in antiquity, but it also encouraged innovations in modern technology and revealed something of humanity’s search to understand the cosmos.

There is a tendency, at least among secular readers, to bracket off Dante’s faith as something no longer true, something to which we no longer subscribe. Yet that would seem to miss not just an aspect of the Divine Comedy, but its central point. The episodes in the Inferno this volume focuses on, paradigmatic for the whole work, point to a problem of faith – lack of a shared belief, misreadings of important stories, failed allegiance, and broken promises. But it is the choice of Virgil as a guide, lost because of his belief in “false and lying gods,” that teaches us how to read ancient books whose culture we no longer share. How indeed can we believe in them?

This chapter analyzes the white supremacist fear of racial hybridity and scientific racism’s uncertain and contradictory construction of whiteness through a reading of Edgar Allan Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1837) and Maxwell Philip’s Emmanuel Appadocca, or Blighted Life: A Tale of the Boucaneers (1854). Both New World novels, respectively written in light of and in response to the Jacksonian Indian removal and the passing of the Fugitive Slave Law, articulate the fractured Black Atlantic world by representing and critically contesting Anglo-Saxonism’s cultural pathology. The essay shows how antebellum debates about the “racial” character of two different antiquities – ancient Egypt and the medieval Norse settlement of America – function as an imaginary filter for negotiating fears of racial hybridity and degeneration in the removal/antebellum present. Next to uncertainties as to the civilizational significance of writing, these literary works reveal a Black Atlantic literary counterdiscourse that explores the economic and social undercurrents of racial slavery – a form of labor whose continued existence depended on the incessant circulation of imaginary “scientific” constructions of a “natural” hierarchy within mankind.

Chapter 1 situates the reader within the landscape of Blackness in the twenty-first century. In addition to laying out the task at hand (untangling representations of blackness in Greek antiquity), this chapter underlines the dangerous consequences that occur when scholars conflate modern tropes with ancient material.

In my view, there is no artwork that captures the modern sense of time as profoundly as Christian Marklay’s installation, The Clock – first produced in 2010, and, since its opening, repeatedly staged in galleries around the world, to amazed reviews. It is, as Zadie Smith declared, ‘sublime’. The Clock is made up of around 12,000 short film and television clips that run on a 24-hour loop. In every single clip, you can see a watch or clock which shows the exact time at which you are watching The Clock. The synchronization is both funny and uncanny. If you start watching at 2.10, each of the short extracts contains a timepiece showing 2.10 – often several clips for the same minute. At 2.11, it is all 2.11 – and so on for twenty-four hours. At 6.00, a string of hatted men suggests a cocktail; tea is taken repeatedly between 4.00 and 4.30, tea-time; high noon looms and awaits its gunshots. The joy or frustration of interruption is replayed again and again with an extraordinary fascination.

The chapter traces the historical origins of the right to life from antiquity to the modern era. It encompasses the Code of Hammurabi and the American Declaration of Independence as milestones along a long road.

Why speak of ‘reception’ in classical antiquity, rather than ‘allusion’ or ‘intertextuality’? This chapter begins by assessing the reasons for the emergence of the term reception in the scholarship of the last thirty years, identifying (a) a shift away from unilateral models of ‘influence’; (b) a postmodern promotion of the status of the ‘copy’; (c) a pedagogical need for multiplication of access points into the ancient world. But the idea of ‘reception’ has been applied primarily to post-antique cultures: why? Speaking of reception helps us break down the idea that antiquity itself was sealed off from later cultures, and that it was a homogeneous monoculture through which a single, cohesive tradition ran. It puts the emphasis on discontinuity, and the specificity and idiosyncrasy of each act of receiving; such acts can therefore be understood as ‘theorisations’ of the idea of tradition. This approach to literary history creates an equivalence between all receptions, however apparently ‘central’ or ‘marginal’. It also spotlights the political embeddedness and materiality of each act of reception. The chapter closes by considering how the volume’s contributions further this agenda.

This introductory chapter provides broad overviews of science, religion, and magic, placing them in historical contexts and establishing some preliminary connections between them. After a brief summary of European society around the year 1400, including the effects of the Black Plague on urbanization and feudalism, the chapter outlines four major themes that run throughout the book: the influence of classical antiquity; the relationship between God and nature; the problem of occult or hidden causes; and the interconnectedness of the premodern world.