A collection of Pollmann's previously-published essays on early Christian poetry, most newly-translated from German and all updated and corrected. It is a genre that has tended to be overlooked by both Classicists and Patristics scholars and this collection will rectify that.

In a systematic section, this volume introduces the design, technical, and planning fundamentals of building churches, synagogues, and mosques. In its project section, it also presents about seventy realized structures from the last three decades.

Der Band enthält dreizehn Aufsätze aus den Jahren 1990-97, die teils in deutscher und teils in englischer Sprache verfaßt sind. Der Titel zeigt die schwerpunktmäßige Thematik der Einzelstudien an: die urchristliche Literatur in der Auseinandersetzung mit Antike und Christentum. Eine erste Gruppe ist der Erforschung des historischen Jesus gewidmet, eine zweite den Problemen der Entstehung des Christentums, eine dritte der nichtchristlichen religiösen Welt des Hellenismus (besonders Magie, Heroenkult, Hermetik). Im vierten Teil erörtert Hans Dieter Betz die berühmten orphischen Goldplättchen und lenkt zu Paulus zurück. Den Abschluß bildet eine grundsätzliche Darstellung der Problematik von Antike und Christentum.

Jewish-Hellenistic authors rejected Greek myth, but they were also aware of its importance as a symbol of power and identity. This book offers a comprehensive reading of how Jews dealt with Greek mythology in the Hellenistic period. Jüdisch-hellenistische Autoren verwarfen die griechische Mythologie, aber sie waren sich auch der Wichtigkeit der Mythen als eines Symbols von Befugnis und Identität bewusst. Dieses Buch ist die erste weitgespannte Untersuchung über den Umgang jüdisch-hellenistischer Autoren mit der griechischen Mythologie.

Classical mythology frequently serves to promote the good life as defined by American advertising. This book shows how the myths of ancient Greece permeate the persuasive work of Madison Avenue, where advertising promotes a desirable world and lifestyle. In antiquity, a community's myths defined and sustained a common social order; in modern times advertising plays this role. The designers of American advertising have turned to classical myth to give shape to their vision of the American dream. Contents: Historical Background. An Overview of Myths in Ads from the 1950s to the 1990s--Dominant Figures of Myths in Advertisements--A Richer Life Through Classical Myth: Ancient Legends Enhance Modern Advertising and Modern Life--The Classical Conceit--The Company Logo.

Where did cabaret come from? What has it got to do with pre-war Berlin, decadent society and Nazis? How does it turn into media cabaret and the sisterhood of sleaze? Is cabaret a primary vehicle for exploring the range of sexual practices and alternative sexual identities? In this new book William Grange brings into one place for the first time the range of practices now associated with the form of cabaret. Beginning with its origins in speciality German theatres and the development both of the sheet music industry and disc recordings, Grange tracks the form through into its golden age in the 1920s and beyond. The book's three sections deal first with the emergence of Berlin as the 'German Chicago', where cabaret flourished in the midst of post-war political turmoil. The abolition of censorship allowed nude dancing and sexually explicit songs and routines. It also saw the introduction of kick-line dancing and black performers. In the book's second and third sections Grange takes the story forward into the post second-world-war world, describing how the form moved outwards from central Europe to move across the whole world, reaching Singapore and Australia, and as it did so settling into the range of forms in which we know it today. Some of these forms became 'media cabaret' looking towards the new media age, the postmodernism that followed on from modernism. To this age, even in its new forms, cabaret brought its old habits of making challenges to assumptions around gender identities and sexual practices. As throughout its whole history, cabaret was a form that provided particular vehicles for female performers. And whereas it once served up whore songs and nude dancing it now offers a sisterhood of sleaze.

From medieval contemplation to the early modern cosmopoetic imagination, to the invention of aesthetic experience, to nineteenth-century decadent literature, and to early-twentieth century essayistic forms of writing and film, Niklaus Largier shows that mystical practices have been reinvented across the centuries, generating a notion of possibility with unexpected critical potential. Arguing for a new understanding of mystical experience, Largier foregrounds the ways in which devotion builds on experimental practices of figuration in order to shape perception, emotions, and thoughts anew. Largier illuminates how devotional practices are invested in the creation of possibilities, and this investment has been a key element in a wide range of experimental engagements in literature and art from the seventeenth to the twentieth century, and most recently in forms of "new materialism." Read as a history of the senses and emotions, the book argues that mystical and devotional practices have long been invested in the modulating and reconfiguring of sensation, affects, and thoughts. Read as a book about practices of figuration, it questions ordinary protocols of interpretation in the humanities, and the priority given to a hermeneutic understanding of texts and cultural artifacts.