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Victorian Engagements with the Bible and Antiquity

Victorian Engagements with the Bible and Antiquity

Victorian Engagements with the Bible and Antiquity

The Shock of the Old
Simon Goldhill, University of Cambridge
Ruth Jackson Ravenscroft, Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge
October 2023
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9781009306454
$150.00
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    The nineteenth century was a period in which ideas of history and time were challenged as never before. This is the first book to explore how the study of classical antiquity and the study of the Bible together formed an image of the past which became central to Victorian self-understanding. These specially commissioned, multi-disciplinary essays brilliantly reveal the richness of Victorian thinking about the past and how important these models of antiquity were in the expression of modernity. In an age of progress, cultural anxiety and cultural hope was fuelled by the shock of the old – new discoveries about the deep past, and new ways of thinking about humanity's place in history. The volume provides a rich and readable feast which will be fundamental to all those seeking a greater understanding of the Victorians, as well as of the reception of classics and the Bible.

    • Demonstrates the importance of the Bible and classical antiquity for nineteenth-century culture and the formation of modernity
    • Provides fresh insights into Victorian culture and Victorian self-understanding
    • Offers a rich interdisciplinary exposition of how the past helps to make the present in an age of progress

    Product details

    September 2023
    Adobe eBook Reader
    9781009306485
    0 pages
    20 colour illus.
    This ISBN is for an eBook version which is distributed on our behalf by a third party.

    Table of Contents

    • Part I. Victorian Engagements with the Bible and Antiquity: The Shock of the Old:
    • 1. Introduction: history, god, and me Simon Goldhill and Ruth Jackson Ravenscroft
    • 2. Genealogy, translation, and resistance: between the bible and the Greeks Simon Goldhill
    • 3. Herodotus, historian of the Hebrew people, without knowing it Suzanne L. Marchand
    • 4. The bible, classical antiquity, and the invention of Victorian art at the 1887 Manchester jubilee exhibition Kate Nichols
    • 5. The classical and biblical in dialogue: a conversation in Victorian sculpture Caroline Vout
    • 6. Dionysia in Bavaria: Greek Theatre, German Catholicism and the Cultural Uses of the Oberammergau Passion Play, 1830–1910 Robert D. Priest
    • 7. Popes and Caesars: St Paul, protestant bible culture, and the building of the American episcopal church in Rome G. A. Bremner
    • 8. Protestant travellers to Rome and the legacies of the apostolic church Dorothy M. Figueira and Brian H. Murray
    • 9. HMS Bacchante: religion, time travel, and the Victorian monarchy Michael Ledger-Lomas
    • 10. 'Whoso humbleth himself shall be exalted, whoso exalteth himself shall be abased': F. D. Maurice and the history of philosophy Jocelyn Paul Betts
    • 11. 'The borderland of the bible': M. R. James, the apocrypha, and Christian antiquity in the late nineteenth century Alison Knight and Scott Mandelbrote
    • 12. Words thrown out: Matthew Arnold's version of Isaiah Laura McCormick Kilbride
    • 13. Hellenism, Hebraism and heathenism in nineteenth-century England: Connop Thirlwall, George Grote and the religions of antiquity Brian Young
    • 14. Epilogue: bible, antiquity, and the shock of the old Ruth Jackson Ravenscroft
    • Acknowledgement
    • Bibliography
    • Index.
      Contributors
    • Simon Goldhill and Ruth Jackson Ravenscroft, Suzanne L. Marchand, Kate Nichols, Caroline Vout, Robert D. Priest, G. A. Bremner, Dorothy M. Figueira and Brian H. Murray, Michael Ledger-Lomas, Jocelyn Paul Betts, Alison Knight and Scott Mandelbrote, Laura McCormick Kilbride, Brian Young

    • Editors
    • Simon Goldhill , University of Cambridge

      SIMON GOLDHILL is a Professor of Greek at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of King's College, as well as the Foreign Secretary of the British Academy. He is one of the best-known classicists of his generation who has lectured all over the world, and he has appeared on TV and radio from Canada to Australia. His books have been translated into twelve languages and have won three international prizes. His most recent is The Christian Invention of Time (Cambridge, 2022).

    • Ruth Jackson Ravenscroft , Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge

      RUTH JACKSON RAVENSCROFt is an Undergraduate Tutor and Bye-Fellow in Theology, Religion, and Philosophy of Religion at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. She is a theologian and philosopher of religion whose research has focussed primarily on nineteenth-century Germany. More broadly, she has also written on issues of gender, epistemology, and the relationship between theology and politics. She is the author of The Veiled God: Friedrich Schleiermacher's Theology of Finitude (2019).