Transformationen der Antike

This volume brings together contributions that examine transformations of antiquity from the Middle Ages to the present, across disciplines and media. Using specific examples, they show what “figures” can be identified in the reception, transfer, and updating of ancient knowledge in Spanish-German cultural exchange. Closing a gap in the research literature, the book covers a broad thematic spectrum.

Beyond Reception applies a new concept for analyzing cultural change, known as ‘transformation', the study of Renaissance humanism. Traditional scholarship takes the Renaissance humanists at their word, that they were simply viewing the ancient world as it actually was and recreating its key features within their own culture. Initially modern studies in the classical tradition accepted this claim and saw this process as largely passive. 'Transformation theory' emphasizes the active role played by the receiving culture both in constructing a vision of the past and in transforming that vision into something that was a meaningful part of the later culture. A chapter than explains the terminology and workings of 'transformation theory' is followed by essays by nine established experts that suggest how the key disciplines of grammar, rhetoric, history, poetry, and philosophy in the Renaissance represent transformations of what went on in these fields in ancient Greece and Rome. The picture that emerges suggests that Renaissance humanism as it was actually practiced both received and transformed the classical past, at the same time as it constructed a vision of that past that still resonates today.

How is it that we feel with fictional characters and so approve or disapprove of their actions? For many British Enlightenment thinkers writing at a time when sympathy was the pivot of ethics as well as poetics, this question was crucial. Asserting that the notion of the sympathetic imagination prominent in Romantic criticism and poetry originates in Moral Sentimentalism, this study traces the emergence of what became a key concept of intersubjectivity. It shows how, contrary to earlier traditions, Francis Hutcheson and his disciples successively established the imagination rather than reason as the pivotal faculty through which sympathy is rendered morally effective. Writing at the interface of ethics and poetics, Adam Smith, Lord Kames and others explored the sympathetic imagination as a means of both explaining emotional reader response and discovering moral distinctions. As a result, the sentimental novel became the sight of ethical controversy. Arguing against the dominant view of research which claims that the novel of sensibility is mostly uncritically sentimental, the book demonstrates that it is precisely in this genre that the sympathetic imagination is sceptically assessed in terms of its literary and moral potential.

Countless texts from world literature teach us that at the heart of every intimate encounter there is an inexpressible moment that transcends language. The nature of this inexpressibility and how, despite all obstacles, it can be put in words, varies historically and culturally. Using transformation theory and Luhmann’s concept of intimacy, this volume examines specific kinds of inexpressibility.

This study in reception history systematically examines references to Aristotle in Johann Gustav Droysen’s (1808–1884) historical works. It takes its place among a group of studies on the intellectual historical basis for Droysen’s theory of history. By situating Droysen in the context of the 19^th century Aristotelian renaissance, it also contributes to further research on this theme.

The etymological speculations of Olof Rudbeck the Younger (1660–1740) lead to a synthesis of Gothicist and Orthodox understandings of language. This volume investigates the precise nature of the kinship between languages that he postulated. Rudbeck’s unique methodology allowed him to accomplish a linguistic transformation not only of Biblical antiquity, but also of the Swedish language.

Translating the comedies of Aristophanes is difficult, not least because of the obscene banter so characteristic of the genre. Drawing from translation theory and practice, this study examines attempts by a total of eleven German translators and editors to engage with the problematics of obscenity in the comedy Lysistrata. It also includes a systematic overview of their translation strategies.

The perception of demons in late antiquity was determined by the cultural and religious contexts. Therefore the authors of this volume take into consideration a wide variety of texts stemming from different religious milieus ranging from spells, apocalypses, martyrdom literature to hagiography and focus specifically on the literary aspects of the transformation of the demonic in this period of transition.

For a long time studies on northern antiquarianism have focused on individual nations. This volume introduces this phenomenon in a transnational perspective. In the course of the 17th and 18th centuries, the Baltic Sea was at the centre of a culture of debate, whose networks encompassed numerous European centres of learning. When the countries around the Baltic began to explore their own antiquities in this period, the prevailing climate of competition between Sweden, Denmark, Russia and the German countries soon permeated the construction and presentation of their own pasts. Exploring the ancient literatures and monuments of Iceland, Sweden or Denmark, studying runic writings or the Sami tradition, the northern scholars were establishing an individual architecture of history, and so extending the horizon of their emerging nations both geographically and historically. The contributions in this volume provide case studies illustrating the role that scholarship, art and literature played in establishing and maintaining national claims around the Baltic Sea. The variety of methods combined for this purpose makes this book of interest to intellectual historians as well as historians of art and early modern science.

The ancient world is classically the epoch of sea power, and later epochs often refer to it when interpreting contemporary naval history. However, the history of this tradition has not been studied in detail before. The essays in this volume examine selected case examples to highlight the diversity of scholarly engagement with ancient thalassocracy and how interpretations have changed over time.

There is little doubt that sympathy plays a pivotal role in aesthetic as well as moral experience, yet also little agreement on how to describe this connection and its long history. This volume investigates the changes in the concept of sympathy as well as its rhetorical, poetical and ethical functions from antiquity to the threshold of Romanticism. The focus is on sympathy's development from a cosmological principle expressing the coherence, correspondence, and unity of all things into a theoretical key concept of intersubjectivity informing moral philosophy, criticism and literature. Thus, Sympathy in Transformation offers important insights into the many ways in which, when sympathy migrates into diverse discourses in Early Modernity, its ancient origins dwindle out of sight, while some of its central elements re-emerge in a surprising manner.

‘Rewriting’ is one of the most crucial but at the same time one of the most elusive concepts of literary scholarship. In order to contribute to a further reassessment of such a notion, this volume investigates a wide range of medieval and early modern literary transformations, especially focusing on texts (and contexts) of Italian and French Renaissance literature. The first section of the book, "Rewriting", gathers essays which examine medieval and early modern rewritings while also pointing out the theoretical implications raised by such texts. The second part, "Rewritings in Early Modern Literature", collects contributions which account for different practices of rewriting in the Italian and French Renaissance, for instance by analysing dynamics of repetition and duplication, verbatim reproduction and free reworking, textual production and authorial self-fashioning, alterity and identity, replication and multiplication. The volume strives at shedding light on the complexity of the relationship between early modern and ancient literature, perfectly summed up in the motto written by Pietro Aretino in a letter to his friend the painter Giulio Romano in 1542: "Essere modernamente antichi e anticamente moderni".

The volume explores two essential terms to describe historical and cultural change: "transformation" and "allelopoiesis," using seven specific examples that range from ancient Babylon to today’s Hollywood. The essays analyze the applicability and interdisciplinary relevance of work from the Collaborative Research Center (SFB) "Transformations of Antiquity."

Despite its enormous extent and impact, the Swedish scholarship produced in the context of Olof Rudbeck's monumental 'Atlantica' (4 vols, 1679-1702) has hitherto escaped attention outside Scandinavia. The present volume explores the numerous disciplines that comprised this, one of the last, but grandest appropriations of the classical heritage in early modern times. In the decades around 1700, dozens of scholars all around the Baltic Sea embarked on studies of classical and Norse mythology, material remains and antiquities, of languages, botany and zoology as well as biblical scholarship, in order to reveal the primordial status of ancient Sweden. Fusing together numerous disciplines within Rudbeck's elaborate and all-encompassing epistemological framework, they gave to a nation that had advanced to the rank of a European superpower a narrative of a glorious past that matched its contemporary pretentions. Presenting case studies stretching from the 17th to the 19th century and across a wide number of fields, this volume traces the extent and longue durée of one of the most fascinating and underestimated episodes in European intellectual history.

One of the Leitmotifs of Classical sculpture is its orientation to works from earlier periods. When dealing with idealistic sculptures from the Roman imperial period, often the question arises whether their creators were copying a famous earlier work or creating a classical original. Research has repeatedly tried to answer this question by referring to sculptures not dating to antiquity.

This study deals with Italian and French travesties of the Aeneis published in the 17th century. These works imitate Virgil's authoritative work through contrast. Travesty as a special kind of disjunctive transformation of antiquity thereby reveals the conflict between provocative transgression and the persistence of traditional poetics in the Early Modern Age.

Pseudoantike Skulptur I is based on a colloquium presented in October 2014 by the Collaborative Research Center 644 at Humboldt University. The colloquium was an opportunity to compile and test the reliability of criteria to distinguish between ancient and pseudo-ancient sculptures and fragments. Examples under scrutiny included portraits, ideal sculptures, and reliefs.

The portrayal of princes plays a central role in the historical literature of the European Renaissance. The sixteen contributions collected in this volume examine such portrayals in a broad variety of historiographical, biographical, and poetic texts. It emerges clearly that historical portrayals were not essentially bound by generic constraints but instead took the form of res gestae or historiae, discrete or collective biographies, panegyric, mirrors for princes, epic poetry, orations, even commonplace books – whatever the occasion called for. Beyond questions of genre, the chapters focus on narrative strategies and the transformation of ancient, medieval, and contemporary authors, as well as on the influence of political, cultural, intellectual, and social contexts. Four broad thematic foci inform the structure of this book: the virtues ascribed to the prince, the cultural and political pretensions inscribed in literary portraits, the historical and literary models on which these portraits were based, and the method that underlay them. The volume is rounded out by a critical summary that considers the portrayal of princes in humanist historiogrpahy from the point of view of transformation theory.

"Medieval thinkers were convinced that they themselves were still citizens of the empire, which had been founded by Augustus." This book is devoted to substantiate this claim of William Heckscher. It does so by tracing Antiquity’s afterlife in various genres on the Iberian Peninsula. The book is a manifest for a special transformation and, moreover, continuation of antiquity in the so-called Middle Ages in Spain, going against the commonly held view that only the European Renaissance did justice to and came to the rescue of Antiquity. It describes how the Visigoths preserved classical Antiquity in the 6th and 7th century, how Roman influence manifests itself on the Pórtico de la Gloria of Santiago de Compostela, how the Iberian Peninsula was reluctant to adopt the European Gothic Art around 1200 and how the Catholic Kings went back to forms and ideas of late Antiquity around 1500. In doing so this book offers an alternative to the influential and, so far, widely accepted concept of the reception of Antiquity, which is Erwin Panofky’s Principle of disjunction.

The translations of ancient lyric poetry carried out by J. H. Voß in his youth emerged in interplay with his own early poetic production, but were already partially indebted to the normative ideal of Antiquity on which Voß’s influential translations of Homer would be based. This study examines the genesis of Voß’s translation ouevre and shines light on its connections to historical, late-eighteenth-century literary constellations.

This volume traces the history of German translations of Thucydides from the 18^th to the 20^th century and examines the strategies used by translators to reproduce in German Thucydides’ extraordinarily complex and irregular style. It focuses especially on the relationship between translation practice and translation theory, showing their close interrelationship.

Around 1800, the concept of "antiquity" began to take on plural meanings, and as a result, Classical antiquity was juxtaposed against Nordic and Oriental antiquity. For the first time, this study examines the effects of this new differentiation in three areas of 19^th-century drama: genre theory (Hegel and Herder), stage equipment (von Brühl and Schinkel), and drama (Alexander romances and Hebbel’s tragedies).

Conversion as a change of religion and consciousness has been understood in different ways throughout history. The present volume focuses on the close connection between conversion and identity as described in conversion narratives. It discusses how the the constitution of a new identity is reflected in various texts of self-description from the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period.

The role of chance in historiography is a major question for the analysis of cultural transformations. Its main subject are the transformations of contingentia itself, which has undergone substantial changes in its mythical forms (as Tyche or Fortuna) as well in its historical expressions in philosophy, theology, politics, sciences, literature and art.

In its analysis of German Roman tragedy, the study examines a genre now largely forgotten but once extremely popular in the German-speaking world from 1800 to 1900. Considering its functional transformations through time, Roman tragedy can be viewed not only as a theatrically effective mass spectacle but also with regard to its scholarly interplay with humanistic learning and its use as a medium for political reflection.

This volume is a collection of studies on the translation of Greek and Latin authors (Sappho, Alcaeus, Thucydides, Herodotus, Cicero, Ovid, Petronius, Apuleius), which examines the processes and conditions of translation as determined by reception history and genre, among others. The work is supplemented with an essay on the possibilities for developing a methodological basis for translation analysis and criticism.

Perfect Harmony and Melting Strains assembles interdisciplinary essays investigating concepts of harmony during a transitional period, in which the Pythagorean notion of a harmoniously ordered cosmos competed with and was transformed by new theories about sound - and new ways of conceptualizing the world. From the perspectives of philosophy, literary scholarship, and musicology, the contributions consider music's ambivalent position between mathematical abstraction and sensibility, between the metaphysics of harmony and the physics of sound. Essays examine the late medieval and early modern history of ideas concerning the nature of music and cosmic harmony, and trace their transformations in early modern musico-literary discourses. Within this framework, essays further offer original readings of important philosophical, literary, and musicological works. This interdisciplinary volume brings into focus the transformation of a predominant Renaissance worldview and of music's scientific, theological, literary, as well as cultural conceptions and functions in the early modern period, and will be of interest to scholars of the classics, philosophy, musicology, as well as literary and cultural studies.

Vitruvius' De architectura, the only extant work from Antiquity dedicated to Architecture, has had a rich and diverse reception history. The present volume aims to highlight the different aspects of this history, showing how Vitruvius' work was systematically and continuously misunderstood to justify innovation. Its comprehensive and in-depth analyses make this book a reference work in the field of Vitruvian scholarship.

J. H. Voss is primarily remembered as a translator and his landmark translation of Homer. Yet scholarly opinion of Voss has always been divided. Critics marveled at his linguistics virtuosity, but they reproached him for his pedantry. This volume brings together essays on the creation of his translations and their effects, and the problem of imitating ancient verse, offering a fuller picture of Voss.

The 12 interdisciplinary essays in this volume investigate the role of the imagination in the rise of modernity during the process of antiquity’s transformation. Two essential connections between imagination and transformation form the basis of inquiry. While it is possible to read today’s understanding of imagination as the outcome of a transformation of antiquity, imagination also represents a key force in fueling the transformation process.

Aristophanes’ comedies were translated into German late, not least on account of their obscene humor and allusions to contemporary politics. Droysen’s 1835-38 translations were among the first complete German editions to be published. This study examines Droysen’s position vis-a-vis the classicizing tradition of translating and towards the reception of Aristophanes by German "Vormärz" authors as they rediscovered the plays’ political content.

After the Seven Years’ War, plaster casts and copies of ancient sculptures were produced and sold in Germany on a scale never seen before. This study offers insight into the acquisition and production of and trade in plaster casts and copies of antique sculptures during this period.

Antiquity serves as a reference point for diverse forms of self-understanding in Western cultural and intellectual history. This raises questions concerning the degree to which the spatial, epistemic, and material dimensions of “antiquity” are relevant to processes of appropriation. This compendium explores the productivity of such limits by means of examples taken from different eras and disciplines.

How is the history of antiquity told, and what is the role of narrativity in transforming the image of antiquity? This volume addresses the highly charged intersection between experience, narrative, and history that may be apprehended when we consider the great diversity of narrative practices in literature, the visual arts, and historiography. In this study, narrativity is conceptualized as a particular way of inventing meaning by creating coherency through retrospective reorganization. Particularly in relation to antiquity, narratives may be used to establish historical continuity by filling in caesuras and by creating transitions and connections. Individual chapters explore transformations in the imagery, content, stories, and narrative modes of antiquity as they were appropriated in medieval and early modern chronicles, images, and epics. They investigate the forms, modes, and functions of such appropriation and examine the conditions that help explain the particular narrative transformations occurring in the different genres and media that are examined.

Antiquities modified through restoration have shaped the study of ancient sculpture from the very beginning: Statues that were added to, completed, or otherwise modified between 1500 and 1900 represent a considerable portion of the surviving material basis. In a discussion of selected examples this volume seeks to shed light on the circumstances surrounding such restorative modification.

It is widely known that antiquity served as a model for European neoclassicism, especially for literature and art in the Age of Goethe. For the first time, however, using "classical" Weimar as an example, the present volume demonstrates the enormous influence exerted by rapidly disseminating knowledge about archeology in the wake of Winckelmann's death on the formation and development of the image of the ancient world for German classicism and romanticism.

This book considers the story of Nero and Octavia, as told in the pseudo-Senecan Octavia and the works of ancient historiographers, and its reception in (early) modern opera and some related examples of other performative genres. In total the study assembles more than 30 performative texts (including 22 librettos), ranging chronologically from L'incoronazione di Poppea in 1642/43 until the early 20th century, and provides detailed information on all of them. In a close examination of the libretto (and dramatic) texts, the study shows the impact and development of this fascinating story from the beginnings of historical opera onwards. The volume demonstrates the various transformations of the characters of Nero and his wives and of the depiction of their relationship over the centuries, and it looks at the tension between “historical” elements and genre conventions. The book is therefore of relevance to literary scholars as well as to readers interested in the evolution of Nero’s image in present-day media.

Ralph Cudworth’s (1617-1688) True Intellectual System of the Universe is considered the high point of philosophical production by the Cambridge Platonists. In this work, Cudworth compresses all of his era’s core problems in natural philosophy and theology and attempts to find a comprehensive solution to broadly explain how God acts in nature. For the first time, the present work presents the complete story of how Cudworth developed his Neoplatonic system using a compatible combination of text form and content, and along the way, it also unfolds a panoramic view of ancient classical philosophy.

Drawing on the Collection of Classical Antiquities in Berlin as an example, Astrid Fendt examines the collection, restoration and presentation of Greek and Roman sculptures in the 19th century. The focus is on the relationship between restoration and science: what images of antiquity (antiquities) are shaped by or derived from the restoration? Based on a detailed catalogue, the restoration history of the classical sculptures in Berlin will be written for the first time ever with a comparative look at other relevant European collections. The result is a fundamental approach to the history of restoration and collection of antiquities.

These conference proceedings consider visual and literary images of ancient Rome created by artists and scholars from Late Antiquity until the present day. The occasion for the conference was the colossal panorama Rome 312 by Yadegar Asisi that was displayed in Leipzig (2005-2009). The papers explore the ways and means by which the idea of Rome was developed by the individual artists and authors and transferred to the cultural context of the epoch and of the personalities involved.

The History of Greek Art by Ernst Curtius, based on the notes made by Wilhelm Gurlitt and transcribed and annotated by S.-G. Gröschel, provides us for the first time with a picture of how one of the most influential 19th-century German classical scholars saw ancient art. H. Wrede’s detailed introduction to the history of archaeology lectures, to Curtius’ person and his political views, as well as to the students Wilhelm Gurlitt and Eduard Hiller confirm the importance of The History of Greek Art for the history of the ancient world and of archaeology.

Although the paradoxical reality of warfare may elude definition, since antiquity war has been a constitutive element of Western culture; seen from a historical perspective, it gives access to a broad array of tensions between various models of knowledge and different kinds of tradition. The essays in this volume approach the phenomenon of war from antiquity to Clausewitz from the perspective of a variety of disciplines. Particular attention is given to texts, images, and their interaction.

This volume originates from an international conference (Oxford University, 2007). Texts address plaster casts and related themes from antiquity to the present day, and from Egypt to America, Mexico and New Zealand. They are of interest to classical archaeologists, art historians, the history of collecting, curators, conservators, collectors and artists. Articles explore the functions, status and reception of plaster casts in artists’ workshops and in private and public collections, as well as hands-on issues, such as the making, trading, display and conservation of plaster casts. Case-studies on artists’ use of material and technique include ancient Roman copyists, Renaissance sculptors and painters, Dutch 17th-century workshops, Canova, Boccioni and others. A second theme is the role of plaster casts in the history of collecting from the Renaissance to the present day.
Several papers address the dissemination of visual ideas, models and ideals through the medium. Papers on modern and contemporary art illuminate the changing uses and semantic values of plaster casts in this period. Amongst the types of casts discussed are artists’ models and final works as well as casts after antiquities, including sculpture, architecture and gems (dactyliothecae). The volume demonstrates the richness of the field, both in terms of the material itself and modern scholarship concerned with it. Conceived as a handbook for students, academics, curators and collectors, the text will form a standard work on the role of plaster casts in the history of Western sculpture.

The intention of this volume is to investigate into the dimensions of the cultural practice of the copying of ancient art. Copies as the primary ‒ the original? ‒ that claims to be the secondary are the motor of a range of processes of cultural exchange in which highly varied content and messages were traded and communicated. As products and media of the transformation of antiquity, copies “bring to life” the circumstances of a seemingly simple reception of antiquity.

Transparency and Dissimulation analyses the configurations of ancient neoplatonism in early modern English texts. In looking closely at poems and prose writings by authors as diverse as Thomas Wyatt, Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, John Donne, Edward Herbert, Andrew Marvell, Thomas Traherne, Thomas Browne and, last not least, Aphra Behn, this study attempts to map the outlines of a neoplatonic aesthetics in literary practice as well as to chart its transformative potential in the shifting contexts of cultural turbulency and denominational conflict in 16th- and 17th-century England. As part of a “new”, contextually aware, aesthetics, it seeks to determine some of the functions neoplatonic structures – such as forms of recursivity or certain modes of apophatic speech – are capable of fulfilling in combination and interaction with other, heterogeneous or even ideologically incompatible elements. What emerges is a surprisingly versatile poetics of excess and enigma, with strong Plotinian and Erigenist accents. This appears to need the traditional ingredients of petrarchism or courtliness only as material for the formation of new and dynamic wholes, revealing its radical metaphysical potential above all in the way it helps to resist the easy answers – in religion, science, or the fashions of libertine love.

Antiquity saw the development of influential forms of the creation and organization of knowledge, not just in social and theoretical terms, but also with regard to the practice of research. These forms of knowledge and their transformations are the focus of this volume. The subject is not the simple recognition of the reception of ancient knowledge in later cultures, but rather the establishment and development of the complex of factors that together comprise science.

The term asceticism is used to describe various practices ranging from fasting, sexual abstinence or withdrawal from the world by living in the desert or on a column, to the mortification of the mystics and the silence of monks. All of these phenomena are linked to the relationship of the individual to himself and to society, and for this reason this volume analyses ideas of asceticism in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period in order to assess how they are related to the establishment of identity: to what extent is asceticism employed to constitute identity, to understand better one's own identity or to change it.

This volume is an inquiry into the philosophical, theological and aesthetic relevance of perfection. The main focus is on medieval and early modern arts. Contributions from English, German and Romance language and literature, as well as from theology, look at works from the Church fathers to Gottfried of Strasbourg, Dante, Petrarca and Shakespeare, as well as Andrew Marvell.

The success of the historiography of Humanism is one of the central phenomena in the history of scholarship in the Early Modern Age, but the reasons for this have never been satisfactorily explained. The authors of these conference proceedings search for answers by approaching the historical writings from different perspectives. They discuss both the semantics and the literary methods of the texts, as well as the social positions of the authors. Closely related to both themes is the question of the historical spaces dealt with in the works, in which the humanists show the way as far as the New World.

Inscriptions, coins, literary models and classical Latin are elements of ancient culture to which recourse was made in the Renaissance. To what extent did they, in the process, shape humanistic historiography? The authors discuss the question by investigating the consequences that using a particular language have on historical writings, and analyse how historiographical models were adapted to the contemporary environment. Finally, they ask how the humanists’ enthusiasm for ancient remains manifested itself in historiography.

The theory of the translation of ancient literature has to date mostly been discussed in connection with the work of translation itself, or in the context of broader questions, for example the philosophy of language. Research was generally restricted to the few texts of prominent authors such as Schleiermacher, Humboldt, Wilamowitz and Schadewaldt. This volume goes further in presenting numerous lesser-known documents, so succeeding in contextualising the canonical texts, rendering the continuity of the debate more comprehensible, and providing a sound foundation for the history of theory.

The translation of ancient literature became the focus of a lively discussion in Germany around 1800. After Herder and Voss the question once more arose of just how faithfully the ancient world could and should be presented in the German language. Schleiermacher and Humboldt decided to emphasise the cultural strangeness and linguistic individuality of the texts, while subsequently various means of assimilation were developed. This volume describes the history of this theoretical discussion up to the present day.

The interdisciplinary debate about the genesis of the autonomous subject has tended hitherto to ignore the pre-modern period. The present collection of essays addresses this deficit. The closely interconnecting individual chapters trace and, in part, revise the history of concepts of the subject and self in classical and post-classical texts. Whereas previous work in this area has concentrated almost exclusively on philosophical texts, this collection also examines other genres, especially poetry.

Translation presents a multi-layered process which transforms both the language and culture of the translator and the perception of the language and culture of what is translated. The discussion about the extent to which the individual form and culturally alien content of literary texts allows them to be translated took on a new quality in Germany around 1800 - particularly in connection with ancient literature; many of the questions raised at that time still influence the discourse of translation theory today. The volume presents a collection of papers examining translation as exemplars of hermeneutic problems, of mediation, of the search for equivalent form and of creative processes.

The constitution, transmission and preservation of all knowledge about antiquity have always been highly mediated acts. As an epoch long past, antiquity can only be constituted through the mediation of relicts, texts, traditions and other evidence. This volume focuses on this aspect of mediacy, which is both a necessary and a decisive constituent of our knowledge of antiquity, and enquires searchingly into the aesthetic dimensions of mediation and how these are incorporated into the form of our knowledge about antiquity.

For the latinist Manfred Fuhrmann (1925-2005) translation was an integral part of making Antiquity accessible. On the basis of examples of his reflections and translations (above all Cicero) Nina Mindt discusses the theory and practice of translation. In which manner should ancient texts be translated and transformed for the modern reader? Central subject are a review of the history of the theory of translation and a consideration of Fuhrmann's position in the discourse of translation from the second half of the 20th century.

In the rich reception history of Dionysius Areopagita (approx. 500 AD), the writing On the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy is the only text that has not been given philosophical attention. The present study examines this text as a work in which central concepts of the neo-Platonic tradition in the Christian transformation are further developed in a creative way. The philosophical-historical value of this study lies in its systematic connection of aspects in the areas of political philosophy, ethics, philosophy of religion, aesthetics, anthropology, epistemology, philosophy of language, and metaphysics.

The occupation with objects from antiquity and the development of methods for this led both to the creation of a modern discipline of Classical Studies and to decisive impetuses for a re-orientation of other subjects such as theology and historical linguistics. In the present volume, leading scholars of antiquity visit the history of their disciplines from the perspective of present-day research by examining their historical, institutional and theoretical roots in 19^th century Berlin – one of the main centres of this development.

The volume enquires into the relationship between philosophy and aesthetics in Late Antiquity. Is the sensuous beauty of art a medium for the highest thinkable truth? And if this can be called ‘aesthetics’, how has it changed over the centuries and what is its significance for the theory of art today? The contributors – experts in systematic philosophy and literary studies from a variety of disciplines – work on this transdisciplinary topic using concrete examples from the Middle Ages to Post-modernism and examine the scope and transformations of this fundamental insight up to the present day.

Translations play a decisive role as the basis and trigger for more complex transformations – both in the construction of science and for literature. In the fine arts and archaeology, it is a question of enquiring into forms of ‘translation’ which bear resemblances to the functioning of textual translations although they are not based on the transmission of text.

The Dresden Plaster Cast Collection is considered one of the world’s largest and most significant. This study examines its development within the context of European plaster cast collections from a genuine art collection to an encyclopedic museum. It places special emphasis on the pioneering work carried out by Georg Treu, who used the plaster casts for archaeological experiments, with his findings still shaping how we view antiquity today.

This study is the first to provide a systematic analysis of the dispute between the humanists Lorenzo Valla (1406–1457) and Poggio Bracciolini (1380–1459) in the mid-fifteenth century. It shows how the two agonists based their Latin writings on divergent understandings of imitation and which immediate consequences this produced in relation to the socioliterary conventions of the humanist movement.