Marco Formisano Bücher

Obwohl die paradoxe Realität des Krieges schwer zu definieren ist, ist der Krieg seit der Antike ein konstitutives Element der westlichen Kultur; aus historischer Perspektive eröffnet er Zugang zu einer breiten Palette von Spannungen zwischen verschiedenen Wissensmodellen und unterschiedlichen Traditionen. Die Essays in diesem Band nähern sich dem Phänomen Krieg von der Antike bis Clausewitz aus der Perspektive verschiedener Disziplinen. Besonderes Augenmerk gilt Texten, Bildern und ihrer Interaktion.

The relationship between theory and practice, between norms indicated in a text and their extra-textual application, is one of the most fascinating issues in the history and theory of science. Yet this aspect has often been taken for granted and never explored in depth. The essays contained in this volume provide a multi-layered and nuanced discussion of this relationship as it emerges in ancient Greek and Roman culture in a number of fields, such as agriculture, architecture, the art of love, astronomy, ethics, mechanics, medicine and pharmacology. The main focus is on the textuality of processes of transmission of knowledge and its application in various fields. Given that a text always contains complex and destabilizing aspects that cannot be reduced to the specific subject matter it discusses, to what extent can and do ancient texts support extra-textual applicability?

A collection of studies about the Passion of Perpetua, the diary written by the young Christian martyr Perpetua. This intriguing text is edited and translated before a team of distinguished scholars examine it from a wide range of perspectives: literary, narratological, historical, religious, psychological, and philosophical.

No scholar today would describe late antiquity as an age of „decline and fall“, as Gibbon did; instead, to use Marrou's term, it is seen as an „other antiquity“, which deserves to be investigated on its own terms. Yet the idea of a decadent period, accompanied by a fascination for the image of antiquity on the wane, continues to live in scholarly minds, as is suggested, after all, by the recurring insistence on the point that late antiquity was not a period of decline. This collection of papers engages in a productive way with the fascination exerted by the concept of an era in decline and a literary and artistic fin-de-siècle atmosphere, evoked in the very title 'Décadence'. Whether this fascination is seen as a question of the history of reception or as an ongoing phenomenon, it rarely emerges to the surface of scholarly discussions. This volume invites us to reconsider these questions by making decadent late antiquity a paradigm of interpretation in connection with a conscious and sophisticated re-use of the history of reception.