We are delighted to announce that our edited volume, Mountain Dialogues from Antiquity to Modernity, is now available in paperback! We are really honoured by this, as well as by the reviews the book has received thus far (see for example Terry Gifford’s generous take in The Classical Review). The volume contains contributions from scholars across … Read more
Here’s a link to a recording of a paper from earlier this month on ‘Geography and identity in the mountains of the Mediterranean’ Details below! IHR Seminar Series: London Group of Historical Geographers Speaker: Jason König (University of St. Andrews), 11 January 2022 This paper opens with some reflections on the challenges and opportunities involved in bringing … Read more
Jason discusses some examples of early Christian representations of mountain peoples, and their relationship with their ancient and modern equivalents. I have spent quite a lot of time recently looking at the early Christian saints’ lives of the fourth century CE and after, and thinking about how they fit in with the history of mountains … Read more
In our first guest post, Douglas Whalin explores the sixth-century Christian author Kosmas Indicopleustes and his cosmological model of the world as, literally, a mountain. Douglas is a social historian of Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (approx. 4th to 9th centuries CE). He has a chapter forthcoming in our Mountain Dialogues volume on … Read more
We are very pleased to announce plans for our edited volume Mountain Dialogues from Antiquity to Modernity, now complete in full draft and due to be on the shelves in 2021. Draft chapters were trialled at a workshop in December 2018. Many of the chapters look at classical traditions of writing about mountains and the way … Read more
Jason explores the long history of representing the mountains around Thermopylae in both ancient and modern texts. I have just been reading William’s Golding’s essay ‘The Hot Gates’, published in 1965 (that title translates the Greek name Thermopylae). It has made me want to go back and look a lot more closely at some of … Read more
Augustus Hare liked looking at Mt Soracte. Hare was born in 1834. He made a career out of writing biographies, an autobiography, and a string of guide books. He was renowned as a raconteur of ghost stories. His works were very popular (his biography of his godmother, who adopted him and brought him up, ran … Read more
As mentioned in a recent blog post, one of the big events of the summer for our mountains project was the ‘Celtic Conference in Classics’, taking place at St Andrews in July, and for which we hosted a panel on ‘approaching landscape in the classical tradition’. As anticipated, the three-day panel proved to be an … Read more
At the time of writing, it is now less than a week until the 11th Celtic Conference in Classics opens in St Andrews. The ‘CCC’ – which has been running at a different institution each year since 1998 – will feature fourteen distinct panels on different topics within classical scholarship. We are extremely excited to … Read more
Jason highlights the connection between ancient traditions of military mountain activity and twentieth-century mountaineering. Greek and Roman history writing is packed with descriptions of military activity in the mountains: it’s probably the category of mountain description that survives in the biggest volume from the ancient Mediterranean world, especially from the Roman empire. In classical Greece … Read more