Jason Konig Jason offers some final thoughts, and looks ahead. Over the last few weeks we have been tying up some loose threads and bringing our mountains project to a close. We are enormously grateful to the Leverhulme Trust for their investment in the project over the last six years. In the process it has been a … Read more
I have wondered for a long time now how it would be to write a book on the role of Classics in the history of mountaineering and mountain writing. There are plenty of examples of mountain writers who have combined their climbing with an interest in Greek and Latin literature, from early modern authors like … 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
We’re excited to see Mountain Dialogues from Antiquity to Modernity now in press with Bloomsbury. Publication due in April 2021!
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
Not as unconnected as you might think: Jason traces some initial connections between classical literature and imagery and the mountains of Scotland. I have been trying to work out recently in some spare moments how far travellers’ accounts from Scotland from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are influenced by the classical tradition in their portrayal … Read more