Mountain Dialogues from Antiquity to Modernity - (Ancient Environments) (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Throughout the longue dureé of Western culture, how have people represented mountains as landscapes of the imagination and as places of real experience? In what ways has human understanding of mountains changed - or stayed the same?

Mountain Dialogues from Antiquity to Modernity opens up a new conversation between ancient and modern engagements with mountains. It highlights the ongoing relevance of ancient understandings of mountain environments to the postclassical and present-day world, while also suggesting ways in which modern approaches to landscape can generate new questions about premodern responses. It brings together experts from across many different disciplines and periods, offering case studies on topics ranging from classical Greek drama to Renaissance art, and from early modern natural philosophy to nineteenth-century travel writing. Throughout, essays engage with key themes of temporality, knowledge, identity, and experience in the mountain landscape.

As a whole, the volume suggests that modern responses to mountains participate in rhetorical and experiential patterns that stretch right back to the ancient Mediterranean. It also makes the case for collaborative, cross-period research as a route both for understanding human relations with the natural world in the past, and informing them in the present.

Review Quotes

"Given the tremendous variety of the topics covered in this collection, even non-specialists can expect to find something of potential interest, from classical myths to late antique or medieval religious figures, from early modern English legends to 18th- and 19th-century travelers' accounts, to the US politician Thomas Jefferson's renowned mountain retreat Monticello." --Mountain Research and Development

"[Hollis and König] not only expand and complicate the modern conceptualisation of the cultural meaning of mountains, but their dialogic approach significantly revises many current historical and literary assumptions." --The Classical Review

"A reassessment of existing presuppositions as to the value and importance of mountains at different points in time from antiquity onwards, as well as an instructive example of how to edit a volume that stays focused despite a large chronological scope." --Greece & Rome

"The appreciation of mountains in the premodern era, traditionally dismissed by scholars, is given a fresh longue-durée perspective in Mountain Dialogues from Antiquity to Modernity that moreover shows how in later periods mountains were viewed through the lens of the classical past." --Christina Williamson, Assistant Professor in Ancient History, University of Groningen, The Netherlands

About the Author

Dawn Hollis is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of St Andrews, UK, working with Jason König on a Leverhulme Trust research project entitled 'Mountains in Ancient Literature and their Postclassical Reception'. Her work on the history of mountains has appeared in Alpinist and Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment.

Jason König is Professor of Greek at the University of St Andrews, UK. He has published widely on the Greek literature of the Roman empire. He is currently working on a book on mountains in the literature and culture of the ancient Mediterranean.