At the intersection of rhetoric, historiography, and the history of reading, Anthologies of Historiographical Speeches offers an introduction to a little-known rhetorical and bibliographic genre: the anthologies of speeches excerpted from history books from antiquity to the early modern period.

Anthologies of speeches excerpted from history books constitute a relatively little-known rhetorical and bibliographic genre. From ancient times to the present day, the practice of culling characters’ orations from one or more works and publishing them independently of their original source has produced new and different ways of reading and using history. Anthologies of Historiographical Speeches offers an introduction to the very diverse questions that arise from the study of the genre through a variety of approaches and methodological tools. Lying at the point where rhetoric and historiography intersect, the essays included in this volume focus on the rhetorical aspects of the collections, as well as on their production, transmission, and reception from antiquity to the early modern period.

A detailed comparative analysis of speaker-audience interactions in Greek historiography, Josephus, and Acts that examines historians’ use of speeches as a means of instructing/persuading their readers and highlights Luke’s distinctive depiction of the apostles as adaptable yet frequently alienating orators.

A detailed comparative analysis of speaker-audience interactions in Greek historiography, Josephus, and Acts that examines historians’ use of speeches as a means of instructing/persuading their readers and highlights Luke’s distinctive depiction of the apostles as adaptable yet frequently alienating orators.

This volume constitutes the first large-scale collaborative reflection on Xenophon’s Anabasis, gathering experts on Greek historiography and Xenophon. It is structured in three sections: the first section provides a linear reading of the Anabasis through chapters on select episodes (from Book 1 through Book 7), including the opening, Cyrus’ characterisation, the meeting of Socrates and Xenophon, Xenophon’s leadership, the marches through Armenia and along the Black Sea coast and the service under Seuthes in Thrace. The second section offers an in-depth exploration of hitherto overlooked recurrent themes. Based on new approaches and scholarly trends, it focuses on topics such as the concept of friendship, the speeches of characters other than Xenophon, the suffering of the human body, the role of rumour and misrepresentation, and the depiction of emotions. The third section offers a more thorough investigation of the manifold reception of this work (in Antiquity, Byzantium, Renaissance, modern period, in cinema studies and illustrations). Finally, in acknowledgement of the Anabasis’ long history as a pedagogical text, the volume contains an envoi on the importance and benefits of teaching Xenophon and the Anabasis, more specifically.

The overall purpose of the studies collected together in this volume is to explain the shaping of Hispanic historiography in the Early Modern period by examining the continuities and discursive complicities between the writing, criticism, theory and censorship of history. This book sheds light on the so-far neglected circulation of ideas and practices between these four areas, and highlights the constitutive nature of a wide spectrum of forms of censorship from repression to criticism in shaping the interests, principles, methods and problems of Early Modern Hispanic historiography. Examining the various fronts that converge in this disciplining discourse of history helps expand and improve our understanding of the relations between historiography and civil and ecclesiastic literary censorship, and the implications of the ideological control of historical writing and theory. In many respects their hypotheses, results and conclusions can be extrapolated to Western historiography in the Early Modern period. This book will be of interest to historians of both historiography and Hispanic censorship in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and in general to scholars of historical, literary and political culture in the Early Modern age.

Since its founding in 1943, Medievalia et Humanistica has won worldwide recognition as the first scholarly publication in America to devote itself entirely to medieval and Renaissance studies. Since 1970, a new series, sponsored by the Modern Language Association of America and edited by an international board of distinguished scholars and critics, has published interdisciplinary articles. In yearly hardcover volumes, the new series publishes significant scholarship, criticism, and reviews treating all facets of medieval and Renaissance culture: history, art, literature, music, science, law, economics, and philosophy. Volume 46 is a special issue presenting the results of an international conference on the Latin Josephus, which was held at the University of Bochum, Germany, in September 2019. It comprises six articles on a wide variety of aspects of the Latin Josephus tradition and a review of a recently published edition of Josephus’s De Bello Iudaico, book 1.