Valuing Landscape in Classical Antiquity: Natural Environment and Cultural Imagination(393 Mnemosyne, Supplements)

‘Where am I?’. Our physical orientation in place is one of the defining characteristics of our embodied existence. However, while there is no human life, culture, or action without a specific location functioning as its setting, people go much further than this bare fact in attributing meaning and value to their physical environment. 'Landscape’ denotes this symbolic conception and use of terrain. It is a creation of human culture. In Valuing Landscape we explore different ways in which physical environments impacted on the cultural imagination of Greco-Roman Antiquity. In seventeen chapters with different disciplinary perspectives, we demonstrate the values attached to mountains, the underworld, sacred landscapes, and battlefields, and the evaluations of locale connected with migration, exile, and travel.

About the Author :
Jeremy McInerney, Ph.D. (1992, University of California, Berkeley), is Davidson Kennedy Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He is author of The Cattle of the Sun. Cows and Culture in the World of the Ancient Greeks (Princeton 2010) and recently edited A Companion to Ethnicity in the Ancient Mediterranean (Wiley-Blackwell 2014). Ineke Sluiter, Ph.D. (1990, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), is Professor of Greek at Leiden University. Apart from the Penn-Leiden volumes, her most recent book is, with Rita Copeland, Medieval Grammar and Rhetoric. Language Arts and Literary Theory, AD 300-1475 (Oxford 2009). Contributors are: Annemarie Ambühl, Julie Baleriaux, Richard Buxton, Lissa Crofton-Sleigh, Maša Ćulumović, Greta Hawes, Rianne Hermans, Danielle L. Kellogg, Jason König, Margaret M. Miles, Elizabeth Minchin, Christoph Pieper, Bettina Reitz-Joosse, Betsey A. Robinson, Christina G. Williamson, and Kathrin Winter.

Review :
"Because it collects a variety of focused studies, McInerney’s and Sluiter’s volume is able to incorporate the diversity of both landscape studies and the Classical world itself. (...) The volume includes numerous maps, photographs, and even visualizations of numerical data, all enormously helpful in supporting the arguments of the authors who employ them. Bibliographical information appends each individual contribution. An excellent editorial contribution is the variety of indices: an index of Greek terms, of Latin terms, a general index, and an index locorum. While some contributions to this volume shine more brightly than others, each essay is informative to its own topic and representative of the relevant scholarship. The volume itself is a worthy addition to the growing body of literature dedicated to landscape studies and environmental humanities within Classics." Laura Zientek, Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2017.08.30.