Canonisation as Innovation

Anchoring Cultural Formation in the First Millennium BCE

Series : Euhormos: Greco-Roman Studies in Anchoring Innovation, Volume: 03

Volume Editors: Damien Agut-Labordère and Miguel John Versluys

Canonisation is fundamental to the sustainability of cultures. This volume is meant as a (theoretical) exploration of the process, taking Eurasian societies from roughly the first millennium BCE (Babylonian, Assyrian, Persian, Greek, Egyptian, Jewish and Roman) as case studies. It focuses on canonisation as a form of cultural formation, asking why and how canonisation works in this particular way and explaining the importance of the first millennium BCE for these question and vice versa. As a result of this focus, notions like anchoring, cultural memory, embedding and innovation play an important role throughout the book.

This book will appeal to specialists in Babylonian, Assyrian, Persian, Greek, Egyptian, Jewish and Roman cultures but even more to those interested in the interactions between these societies as they can be investigated through processes of canonisation, anchoring, cultural memory, embedding and innovation.

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Foreword
Preface
List of Figures
Notes on Contributors

 

Part 1: Introduction

1 – Canon Creation/Destruction and Cultural Formation: Authority, Reception, Canonicity, Marginality
John K. Papadopoulos

2 –  Mémoire volontaire? Canonisation as Cultural Innovation in Antiquity
Miguel John Versluys

 

Part 2: Case Studies

3 – “The Tablets I Spoke about Are Good to Preserve until Far-off Days”: An Overview on the Creation and Evolution of Canons in Babylonia and Assyria from the Middle Babylonian Period until the End of Cuneiform Sources
Marie Young

4 – Inserting or Ruminating: How Demotic Became Canonic
Damien Agut-Labordère

5 – Creation or Confirmation of the Canon? The Measures of Lycurgus and the Selection of Athenian Tragedy in Antiquity
André Lardinois

6 – How Canonization Transformed Greek Tragedy
William Marx

7 – Fixer une mémoire observations méthodologiques, philologiques et historiques sur la clotûre du canon de la bible Hébraïque In memoriam Philip R. Davies (1945-2018)
Hervé Gonzalez

8 – Challenging the Canon of the Ten Attic Orators. From kanôn to Canon
Casper C. de Jonge

9 – L’Arétalogie d’Isis : biographie d’un texte canonique
Laurent Bricault

10 – Coming Home: Varro’s Antiquitates rerum divinarum and the Canonisation of Roman Religion
Alessandra Rolle

 

Part 3: Conclusion

11 – What Becomes of the Uncanonical?
Greg Woolf

Index