ABSTRACT
The Routledge Handbook of Identity and the Environment in the Classical and Medieval Worlds explores how environment was thought to shape ethnicity and identity, discussing developments in early natural philosophy and historical ethnographies. Defining ‘environment’ broadly to include not only physical but also cultural environments, natural and constructed, the volume considers the multifarious ways in which environment was understood to shape the culture and physical characteristics of peoples, as well as how the ancients manipulated their environments to achieve a desired identity. This diverse collection includes studies not only of the Greco-Roman world, but also ancient China and the European, Jewish and Arab inheritors and transmitters of classical thought.
In recent years, work in this subject has been confined mostly to the discussion of texts that reflect an approach to the barbarian as ‘other’. The Routledge Handbook of Identity and the Environment in the Classical and Medieval Worlds takes the discussion of ethnicity on a fresh course, contextualising the concept of the barbarian within rational discourses such as cartography, medicine, and mathematical sciences, an approach that allows us to more clearly discern the varied and nuanced approaches to ethnic identity which abounded in antiquity. The innovative and thought-provoking material in this volume realises new directions in the study of identity in the Classical and Medieval worlds.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part |124 pages
Ethnic identity and the body
chapter |20 pages
Airs, Waters, Metals, Earth
chapter |21 pages
The Fixed and the Fluent
chapter |17 pages
The Greek Theory of Climate in Medieval Jewish Thought
part |165 pages
Determined and determining ethnicity
chapter |20 pages
The World in a Pill
chapter |20 pages
Overcoming Environmental Determinism
chapter |15 pages
The Lost Origins of the Daylamites
part |137 pages
Mapping ethnicity