Book Recommendations

Professors of the World, Unite! You have nothing to lose but your Deans!

The blogosphere begins to penetrate Geneva, NY, as the Old Oligarch takes notice of my link. I concur in his book recommendations on blood sacrifice, with the caveat that I'm not quite ready to assign Ulansey's The Origins of the Mithraic Mysteries : Cosmology and Salvation in the Ancient World. I think he's probably right, but there's a lot still missing in our knowledge of Mithraism. I'm also not entirely convinced that the Mithraic art is quite as standardized as he needs it to be to support his star-chart argument. I'm going to reread it this June in Rome and go back to the Mithraeum under San Clemente. I didn't assign the book to my class in Early Christian Art & Architecture this year (sorry for the lack of a link, but I moved almost all my course-content onto a proprietary, password-protected system called 'Blackboard.' It's a nice teaching tool, but it means I can't show off).

I did assign a very interesting book on the development of the imagery of Christ in the early Church. Thomas Mathews The Clash of the Gods is a very good thing - he examines a long-unexamined belief on the part of art historians that the image of Christ was an adaptation of imperial imagery and determines that instead the imagery of Christ was borrowed and adapted from images of wonder-workers and Olympian gods. His introduction, in which he connects (what he calls) the "Emperor Mystique" to the early education in pre-1914 imperial Europe of Ernst Kantorowicz, Andreas Alfoeldi, and Andre Grabar, is more tendentious. Still and all, a fine book and accessible to the undergraduate reader because Princeton spent loads of money on the illustrations.