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The Temporality of Festivals - (Chronoi) by Anke Walter (Paperback)
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About this item
Highlights
- How can time become festive?
- About the Author: Anke Walter, Newcastle University, Newcastle, UK.
- 100 Pages
- History, Ancient
- Series Name: Chronoi
Description
About the Book
In this volume, scholars from different fields examine the temporality of festivals of the past. They show that we can use astronomical documents, calendars, and literary texts to recover how people in the past structured and experienced festive timBook Synopsis
How can time become festive? How do festivals manage to make time 'special', to mark out a certain day or days, to distinguish them from 'normal', everyday time, and to fill them with meaning? And how can we reconstruct what festive time looked like in the past and what people thought about it?
While a lot of research has been done on festivals from the point of view of several scholarly disciplines, the specific temporality of festivals has not yet attracted sufficient attention. In this volume, scholars from different fields provide answers to the questions raised above, based on a fresh analysis of astronomical documents, calendars, and literary texts. Cultures as diverse as ancient Babylon, Greece and Rome, and medieval China all share a sense of calendrically recurring festive time as something special that needs to be carefully mapped out and preserved, often with great sophistication, and that gives us precious insights into the broader religious, political, and social dimensions of time within past cultures.
About the Author
Anke Walter, Newcastle University, Newcastle, UK.
