Rome Across Time And Space

An exploration of the significance of medieval Rome, both as a physical city and an idea with immense cultural capital.

What is mathematics, and what aspects of it should be taught in schools? How and to whom should it be taught, and how should its understanding be assessed? These questions continue to drive curriculum development, school organization, teaching methods, and research agendas. No one today doubts that mathematics should be taught in our schools, but this was not always so. Mathematics Education Across Time and Place aims to help mathematics teachers, teacher educators, and anyone else interested in mathematics education appreciate the path this discipline has taken through the ages. To understand the historical and social context for schools and the place of mathematics within them, we meet a variety of mathematics educators from different times and places. Though fictional, their lives and social circumstances are based on historical documents and professional sources. They range from ancient Greece to modern Zimbabwe; from Persia to British Columbia; from Islamic Baghdad to revolutionary Paris; from Elizabethan England to twentieth-century New York; and from the rural one-room schools of North America to the modern comprehensive secondary school. By sharing the teachers’ lives, we come to understand how they developed their love for teaching mathematics, and how their work fit into the larger social context of their time.

Volume two reveals the extraordinary diversity of ancient Roman religion. A comprehensive sourcebook, it presents a wide range of documents illustrating religious life in the Roman world - from the foundations of the city in the eighth century BC to the Christian capital more than a thousand years later. Each document is given a full introduction, explanatory notes and bibliography, and acts as a starting point for further discussion. Through paintings, sculptures, coins and inscriptions, as well as literary texts in translation, the book explores the major themes and problems of Roman religion, such as sacrifice, the religious calendar, divination, ritual, and priesthood. Starting from the archaeological traces of the earliest cults of the city, it finishes with a series of texts in which Roman authors themselves reflect on the nature of their own religion, its history, even its funny side. Judaism and Christianity are given full coverage, as important elements in the religious world of the Roman empire.

Rome and Religion in the Medieval World provides a panoramic and interdisciplinary exploration of Rome and religious culture. The studies build upon or engage Thomas F.X. Noble’s interest in Rome, especially his landmark contributions to the origins of the Papal States and early medieval image controversies. Scholars from a variety of disciplines offer new viewpoints on key issues and questions relating to medieval religious, cultural and intellectual history. Each study explores different dimensions of Rome and religion, including medieval art, theology, material culture, politics, education, law, and religious practice. Drawing upon a wide range of sources, including manuscripts, relics, historical and normative texts, theological tracts, and poetry, the authors illuminate the complexities of medieval Christianity, especially as practiced in the city of Rome itself, and elsewhere in Europe when influenced by the idea of Rome. Some trace early medieval legacies to the early modern period when Protestant and Catholic theologians used early medieval religious texts to define and debate forms of Roman Christianity. The essays highlight and deepen scholarly appreciation of Rome in the rich and varied religious culture of the medieval world.

This collection examines the image of Rome through Arabic, Greek, Hebrew, Latin, and Persian descriptions of the eternal city. Placing the twelfth-century renaissance into a Mediterranean context. The city of Rome is revealed as a multi-vocal object of desire and a contested ideal.

This book presents a fresh perspective on eleventh- and twelfth-century Irish architecture, and a critical assessment of the value of describing it, and indeed contemporary European architecture in general, as “Romanesque”. Medieval Irish Architecture and the Concept of Romanesque is a new and original study of medieval architectural culture in Ireland. The book’s central premise is that the concept of a “Romanesque” style in eleventh- and twelfth-century architecture across Western Europe, including Ireland, is problematic, and that the analysis of building traditions of that period is not well served by the assumption that there was a common style. Detailed discussion of important buildings in Ireland, a place marginalised within the “Romanesque” model, reveals the Irish evidence to be intrinsically interesting to students of medieval European architecture, for it is evidence which illuminates how architectural traditions of the Middle Ages were shaped by balancing native and imported needs and aesthetics, often without reference to Romanitas. This book is for specialists and students in the fields of Romanesque, medieval archaeology, medieval architectural history, and medieval Irish studies.

Prominently located on the Arx, the northern summit of the Capitoline hill, S. Maria in Aracoeli is the most significant medieval church of Rome to survive to the present day. Second major church of the Lesser Brothers or fratres minores in the Italian peninsula, and Roman headquarters of the Order, the Aracoeli played a vital role in the interaction between the Franciscans and the papacy, the friars and the laity, and the religious and civic authorities, as reflected in its art and architecture. On the basis of an interdisciplinary approach combining archaeological analysis with the finding of new archival evidence, reinterpretation of documents and literary and epigraphic sources, this book offers a reconstruction of the original church, its monuments and its Benedictine as well as eighth/ninth-century predecessors, which differs radically from earlier hypotheses. This reassessment in turn allows the author to revisit a number of major questions, including the Franciscans’ physical and theoretical appropriation of the past, the adaptation of an ancient site by a ‘modern’ religious order, the use and functions of space, the interaction between friars, laity and artists, and the contribution of the Roman Franciscans to the development of Marian devotion, thus shedding new light on the social, political and religious history of late-medieval Italy and its impact beyond the peninsula, from England to Bohemia and the Holy Land.