"Who or what makes innovation spread? Ten case-studies from Greco-Roman Antiquity and the early modern period address human and non-human agency in innovation. Was Erasmus the 'superspreader' of the use of New Ancient Greek? How did a special type of clamp contribute to architectural innovation in Delphi? What agents helped diffuse a new festival culture in the eastern parts of the Roman empire? How did a context of status competition between scholars and poets at the Ptolemaic court help deify a lock ofhair? Examples from different societal domains illuminate different types of agency in historical innovation"--
History is characterized by change and innovation. Whose agency contributes to those dynamics? In what roles? How about non-human agency? Ten historical case studies taken from different societal domains illuminate agency in innovation in the Greco-Roman and early modern world.
Preface
Figures and Table
List of Contributors
General Introduction: Agents of Change
Silvia Castelli
1 Mosquitoes, Molecules, and Megafauna: Who and What Has Agency in Human
History
J.R. McNeill
2 Builders, Architects, and the Power of Context: Agents of Architectural
Change in Fourth-Century-bce Epidaurus and Delphi
Jean Vanden Broeck-Parant
3 Agents of Change around the Valley of the Muses
Robin van Vliet and Onno van Nijf
4 Callimachus vs. Conon: Competing Agents of Change for the Lock of
Berenice
Brett Evans
5 Anonymizing Agents of Change in Philosophical Pseudepigraphy: The Case of
Pseudo-Plato, De virtute
Albert Joosse
6 Cicero and Political Agency in Late-Republican Rome
Merlijn Breunesse and Lidewij Van Gils
7 Primus Juvencus and Other Agents of Change in the Rise of Christian Latin
Poetry
Roald Dijkstra
8 John Cassian as an Agent of Change
Nienke Vos
9 Greek-Latin Translation at the Court of Pope Nicholas V (r. 14471455): The
Agents That Changed the Humanist Translation Movement
Annet den Haan
10 Erasmus, an Unsuspected Superspreader of New Ancient Greek?
Raf Van Rooy
Index
Silvia Castelli, Ph.D. (2019), VU Amsterdam, is Assistant Professor of New Testament. She has published on ancient Jewish literature in Greek and textual criticism, including Johann Jakob Wettsteins Principles for New Testament Textual Criticism. A Fight for Scholarly Freedom, 2020.
Ineke Sluiter, Ph.D. (1990), Leiden University, is Professor of ancient Greek. She has published on ancient and medieval linguistic thought, ancient values, anchoring innovation, and cognition, including Minds on Stage. Greek Tragedy and Cognition (ed., with F.J. Budelmann), OUP 2023.
