In this history, a mere handful of visionary men pulled Rome back from the brink of a catastrophic civil war, and then fought off assaults by Mithridates the Great and Tigranes the Great. They rescued the Republic and asserted Roman supremacy over Anatolia and Armenia. This story is told in Sulla and Silo, the first book in this series. The second book, Caesar and Sertorius, describes how ruthless diplomacy and military brilliance extended Roman power from the English Channel and Mauritania to the Indus Valley, to create a single State covering more than twice the area of any Empire before it. This greatly expanded Roman Republic now had great opportunities while facing even greater problems. It still had the political structures of the old Roman Republic, but with racial, social, economic and cultural paradigms that would no longer fit into the old moulds. Over the next two centuries the centre of financial, intellectual and cultural dynamism moved irrevocably towards Babylon, but political power remained entrenched in Italy. The pressures of these opposing forces threatened to destroy the Republic from within. This book dramatically recounts the key events of this transformation from Republic to Federation in what came to be called The Transition Age.

Anat Tcherikover unveils a chronological order in the remarkably diverse world of High Romanesque sculpture in central-western France. She traces a regional school which formed against the background of the powerful feudal principality of Aquitaine, and was itself commensurably important andtherefore representative of the main artistic trends of the time. These involved a constant tension between two different sculptural modes. On the one hand, architectural decorations in the spirit of the eleventh century manifested a final flowering of great intricacy. On the other, monumentalfigure sculpture was being revived independently at a fast pace, leading directly to proto-Gothic. A combination of political prominence, economic prosperity, and a keen response to ecclesiastical reform made the school one of the most innovative of its time.

The Damning, Absurd, and Revelatory History of Race in America Told through the History of a Single Family Historian Julie Winch uses her sweeping, multigenerational history of the unforgettable Clamorgans to chronicle how one family navigated race in America from the 1780s through the 1950s. What she discovers overturns decades of received academic wisdom. Far from an impermeable wall fixed by whites, race opened up a moral gray zone that enterprising blacks manipulated to whatever advantage they could obtain. The Clamorgan clan traces to the family patriarch Jacques Clamorgan, a French adventurer of questionable ethics who bought up, or at least claimed to have bought up, huge tracts of land around St. Louis. On his death, he bequeathed his holdings to his mixed-race, illegitimate heirs, setting off nearly two centuries of litigation. The result is a window on a remarkable family that by the early twentieth century variously claimed to be black, Creole, French, Spanish, Brazilian, Jewish, and white. The Clamorgans is a remarkable counterpoint to the central claim of whiteness studies, namely that race as a social construct was manipulated by whites to justify discrimination. Winch finds in the Clamorgans generations upon generations of men and women who studiously negotiated the very fluid notion of race to further their own interests. Winch's remarkable achievement is to capture in the vivid lives of this unforgettable family the degree to which race was open to manipulation by Americans on both sides of the racial divide.

l'Esprit du Chemin is a guide and tale of pilgrimage on the Grand Chemin of the Saint James Way. The walk of this one thousand mile trail from Paris to Santiago is a journey through medieval Europe and two thousand years of the history of western civilization. Being designated as an UNESCO historic treasure has helped to attract the hundreds of thousands of pilgrims who each year pass over the ancient roads and bridges enroute to pray at the tomb of Saint James in Santiago, Spain. Pilgrims who walk, cycle or ride a donkey have one thing in common. They are never the same after finishing.

The 23 chapters in this volume explore the material culture of sanctity in Latin Europe and the Mediterranean between c. 1000 and c. 1220, with a focus on the ways in which saints and relics were enshrined, celebrated, and displayed. Reliquary cults were particularly important during the Romanesque period, both as a means of affirming or promoting identity and as a conduit for the divine. This book covers the geography of sainthood, the development of spaces for reliquary display, the distribution of saints across cities, the use of reliquaries to draw attention to the attributes, and the virtues or miracle-working character of particular saints. Individual essays range from case studies on Verona, Hildesheim, Trondheim and Limoges, the mausoleum of Lazarus at Autun, and the patronage of Mathilda of Canossa, to reflections on local pilgrimage, the deployment of saints as physical protectors, the use of imagery where possession of a saint was disputed, island sanctuaries, and the role of Templars and Hospitallers in the promotion of relics from the Holy Land. This book will serve historians and archaeologists studying the Romanesque period, and those interested in material culture and religious practice in Latin Europe and the Mediterranean c.1000–c.1220.