Children Memory And Family Identity In Roman Culture

Investigations into the daily life of Roman families show that children were key actors in the process of the construction of social memory: they were the pivotal point of the transmission of family tradition and values in both elite and non-elite families. This collection of essays draws together the perspectives of various disciplines to provide a multifaceted picture of the Roman family based on a wide range of evidence drawn from the 1st century BCE to Late Antiquity and theChristian period. The contributors define the notion of memory, discuss the role of children in the transmission of social memory and social identities, and also deal with threats to familial memory, in the cases of children deliberately or accidentally excluded from tradition, long believed to beinvisible, such as those born at home to slaves, or outcast because of illness or their unusual status, for example as the offspring of an incestuous relationship.

This collection of essays draws together the perspectives of various disciplines to provide a multifaceted picture of the Roman family based on a wide range of evidence drawn from the 1st century BCE to Late Antiquity and the Christian period.

This stimulating collection of essays by prominent scholars honours Turid Karlsen Seim. Bodies, Borders, Believers brings together biblical scholars, ecumenical theologians, archaeologists, classicists, art historians, and church historians, working side by side to probe the past and its receptions in the present. The contributions relate in one way or another to Seim's broad research interests, covering such themes as gender analysis, bodily practices, and ecumenical dialogue. The editors have brought together an international group of scholars, and among the contributors many scholarly traditions, theoretical orientations, and methodological approaches are represented, making this book an interdisciplinary and border-crossing endeavour. A comprehensivebibliography of Seim's work is included.

This book, built around the study of the representation of age and identity in 23,000 Latin funerary epitaphs from the Western Mediterranean in the Roman era, sets out how the use of age in inscriptions, and in turn, time, varied across this region. Discrepancies between the use of time to represent identity in death allow readers to begin to understand the differences between the cultures of Roman Italy and contemporary societies in North Africa, Spain and southern Gaul. The analysis focuses on the timescapes of cemeteries, a key urban phenomenon, in relation to other markers of time, including the Roman invention of the birthday, the revering of the dead at the Parentalia and the topoi of life’s stages. In doing so, the book contributes to our understanding of gender, the city, the family, the role of the military, freed slaves and cultural changes during this period. The concept of the timescape is seen to have varied geographically across the Mediterranean, bringing into question claims of cultural unity for the Western Mediterranean as a region. Mediterranean Timescapes is of interest to students and scholars of Roman history and archaeology, particularly that of the Western Mediterranean, and ancient social history.

Explores how the everyday experiences of children, and their imaginative and creative worlds, are collected, interpreted and displayed in museums and on monuments, and represented through objects and cultural lore.

This collection employs a multi-disciplinary approach treating ancient childhood in a holistic manner according to diachronic, regional and thematic perspectives. This multi-disciplinary approach encompasses classical studies, Egyptology, ancient history and the broad spectrum of archaeology, including iconography and bioarchaeology. With a chronological range of the Bronze Age to Byzantium and regional coverage of Egypt, Greece, and Italy this is the largest survey of childhood yet undertaken for the ancient world. Within this chronological and regional framework both the social construction of childhood and the child’s life experience are explored through the key topics of the definition of childhood, daily life, religion and ritual, death, and the information provided by bioarchaeology. No other volume to date provides such a comprehensive, systematic and cross-cultural study of childhood in the ancient Mediterranean world. In particular, its focus on the identification of society-specific definitions of childhood and the incorporation of the bioarchaeological perspective makes this work a unique and innovative study. Children in Antiquity provides an invaluable and unrivalled resource for anyone working on all aspects of the lives and deaths of children in the ancient Mediterranean world.

A story well-told and subsequently imbibed by its recipients has the power to shape one’s beliefs, identity, and way of life. So, what happens when a person or community is swept up in such a story? In this study, Shaw draws upon the dual methodologies of Narrative Transportation and Social Identity theories to consider how 1 Peter’s use of Old Testament narratives and καλέω language serves to ‘transport’ it’s recipients into an identity defined as ‘elect sojourners’. Amidst suffering, 1 Peter ‘calls’ the Anatolian believers to a priestly ministry, blessing their antagonists as they await their eternal glory in Christ.

In Late Antiquity the emergence of Christian asceticism challenged the traditional Greco-Roman views and practices of family life. The resulting discussions on the right way to live a good Christian life provide us with a variety of information on both ideological statements and living experiences of late Roman childhood. This is the first book to scrutinise the interplay between family, children and asceticism in the rise of Christianity. Drawing on texts of Christian authors of the late fourth and early fifth centuries the volume approaches the study of family dynamics and childhood from both ideological and social historical perspectives. It examines the place of children in the family in Christian ideology and explores how families in the late Roman world adapted these ideals in practice. Offering fresh viewpoints to current scholarship Ville Vuolanto demonstrates that there were many continuities in Roman ways of thinking about children and, despite the rise of Christianity, the old traditions remained deeply embedded in the culture. Moreover, the discussions about family and children are shown to have been intimately linked to worries about the continuity of family lineage and of the self, and to the changing understanding of what constituted a meaningful life.