Living On The Edge Of Empire

Dr Rob Collins and the curators of the remarkable collections from Hadrian's Wall present a striking new contribution to understanding the archaeology of a Roman frontier. This highly-illustrated volume showcases the artefacts recovered from archaeological investigations along Hadrian's Wall in order to examine the daily lives of those living along the Northern Frontier of the Roman Empire. Presented by theme, no other book offers such a diverse and thorough range of the rich material culture of the Wall. The accompanying text provides an ethnographic perspective, guiding us through the everyday lives of the people of frontier communities, from the Commanding Officer to the local farmer. This holistic view allows us an insight into the homes and communities, how people dressed, what they ate and drank, their religions and beliefs, domestic and military forms of security, and how they conducted their business and pleasure.

“Beautiful . . . an essential book for anyone with an interest in the material culture of the Roman frontier in its wider context.” —Current Archaeology Dr. Rob Collins and the curators of the remarkable collections from Hadrian’s Wall present a striking new contribution to understanding the archaeology of a Roman frontier. This highly illustrated volume showcases the artifacts recovered from archaeological investigations along Hadrian’s Wall in order to examine the daily lives of those living along the Northern Frontier of the Roman Empire. Presented by theme, no other book offers such a diverse and thorough range of the rich material culture of the Wall. The accompanying text provides an ethnographic perspective, guiding us through the everyday lives of the people of frontier communities, from the Commanding Officer to the local farmer. This holistic view allows us an insight into the homes and communities, how people dressed, what they ate and drank, their religions and beliefs, domestic and military forms of security, and how they conducted their business and pleasure. “With so many of the objects described and set in context in this fine book, it gives no more than a brief bright flash of lives once led, and yet provides such a spark for the imagination.” —Hexham Local History Society Newsletter

In this imaginative book, Maya Jasanoff uncovers the extraordinary stories of collectors who lived on the frontiers of the British Empire in India and Egypt, tracing their exploits to tell an intimate history of imperialism. Jasanoff delves beneath the grand narratives of power, exploitation, and resistance to look at the British Empire through the eyes of the people caught up in it. Written and researched on four continents, Edge of Empire enters a world where people lived, loved, mingled, and identified with one another in ways richer and more complex than previous accounts have led us to believe were possible. And as this book demonstrates, traces of that world remain tangible—and topical—today. An innovative, persuasive, and provocative work of history.

Perry examines the efforts of a loosely connected group of reformers to transform a colonial environment into one that more closely adhered to the practices of respectable, middle-class European society.

In Indonesia’s Riau Islands Province — a place envisioned as a distinctly “Malay Province” upon its legal formation in 2002 — ethnic Malays are the proud heirs and custodians of a rich legacy associated with a once-sprawling Malay empire that stretched across present-day transnational borders from Indonesia, to Singapore, to Malaysia. Malays of Bugis descent have long played a disproportionately central role in the history (and the historiography or “history-telling”) of the region that now encompasses Indonesia’s Riau Islands Province. While steadfastly “Malay”, members of this community readily acknowledge that their ethnically Bugis roots maintain an enduring historical and ideological salience in their everyday lives. However, transregional economic trends and rapid sociodemographic shift shaped by ongoing migration flows have led to feelings of “marginalization” (peminggiran) among the islands’ Malay-Bugis community. This has led them to claim that they are being gradually pushed to the literal and figurative “edges” of social life in the Riau Islands Province. Fears that a one-time ethnic “majority is becoming a minority” (mayoritas menjadi minoritas) have fuelled feelings of inter-ethnic resentment, and have shaped provincial government policies geared toward the “preservation” of Malay custom. While international focus continues to centre on Indonesia’s Chinese-pribumi divide as diagnostic of Indonesian inter-ethnic and religious relations on edge, a grounded assessment of ethnicity in the Riau islands offers an alternative perspective on these important issues.

There are several divisive issues that separate Christian from Christian in the current century. One issue is the church’s management of clergy sexual abuses of children, teens and adults. A second is the issue of sexual gender orientation and church membership. Contemporary Christian denominations often intermingle the divisive issue of clergy and religious leader sexual abusiveness with the equally divisive issue of sexual gender orientation. In this book Professors Krall and Schirch disentangle and discuss these two issues. They discuss their personal and their professional opinions about ways in which religious and spiritual teaching communities can avoid the institutional perils of abusive clericalism and divisive denominational management practices. Throughout the book, they apply Anabaptist-Mennonite principles of peace-making in situations of sexual violation. Case studies are provided. A feminist hermeneutic is applied. Each letter-essay is auto-ethnographic in style: the professional and the personal are deliberately blurred inside a framework of narrative and story. Each essay is deeply rooted in its author’s academic interests and in her personal life history. This book can be a text in graduate and undergraduate classrooms. It can also be used in denominational self-study programs.

This volume addresses the widespread medieval phenomenon of transgression as both a result of and the cause for the exclusion and persecution of those who were considered different. It is widely accepted that the essence of a manuscript cannot be fully grasped without studying its marginalia. Glosses sit on the margins of the text and clarify it, adding a whole new dimension to it and becoming an inextricable part of its content. Similarly, no society can be fully understood without knowledge of what lies on its margins, for the outliers of any given culture provide us with just as much information as its alleged foundational principles. In a time when the Western world ponders building walls up against perceived threats and frightening differences, this multidisciplinary collection of essays based on original and innovative pieces of research shows that it was mostly through tearing down walls that we learned our way forward.

In Living on the Edge in Leonardo's Florence, an internationally renowned master of the historian's craft provides a splendid overview of Italian history from the Black Death to the rise of the Medici in 1434 and beyond into the early modern period. Gene Brucker explores those pivotal years in Florence and ranges over northern Italy, with forays into the histories of Genoa, Milan, and Venice. The ten essays, three of which have never before been published, exhibit Brucker's graceful intelligence, his command of the archival sources, and his ability to make history accessible to anyone interested in this place and period. Whether he is writing about a case in the criminal archives, about a citation from Machiavelli, or the concept of modernity, the result is the same: Brucker brings the pulse of the period alive. Five of these essays explore themes in the premodern period and delve into Italy's political, social, economic, religious, and cultural development. Among these pieces is a lucid, synoptic view of the Italian Renaissance. The last five essays focus more narrowly on Florentine topics, including a fascinating look at the dangers and anxieties that threatened Florence in the fifteenth century during Leonardo's time and a mini-biography of Alessandra Strozzi, whose letters to her exiled sons contain the evidence for her eventful life.