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This pioneering study examines a pivotal period in the history of Europe and the Near East. Spanning the ancient and medieval worlds, it investigates the shared ideal of sacred kingship that emerged in the late Roman and Persian empires. This shared ideal, while often generating conflict during the four centuries of the empires' coexistence (224-642), also drove exchange, especially the means and methods Roman and Persian sovereigns used to project their notions of universal rule: elaborate systems of ritual and their cultures' visual, architectural, and urban environments. Matthew Canepa explores the artistic, ritual, and ideological interactions between Rome and the Iranian world under the Sasanian dynasty, the last great Persian dynasty before Islam. He analyzes how these two hostile systems of sacred universal sovereignty not only coexisted, but fostered cross-cultural exchange and communication despite their undying rivalry. Bridging the traditional divide between classical and Iranian history, this book brings to life the dazzling courts of two global powers that deeply affected the cultures of medieval Europe, Byzantium, Islam, South Asia, and China.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. This volume aims to reappraise the wide-ranging and lasting transformation of the Roman monarchy between the Principate and Late Antiquity. The book takes as its focus the period from Diocletian to Theodosius I (284-395) and thus on a major developmental phase in the history of the Roman Empire. During this period, the stability of monarchical rule depended heavily on the emperor's mobility, on collegial or dynastic rule, and on the military resolution of internal political crises. At the same time, profound religious changes modified the premises of political interaction and symbolic communication between the emperor and his subjects, and administrative and military readjustments changed the institutional foundations of the Roman monarchy. This volume concentrates on the measures taken by Roman emperors of this period to cope with the changing framework of their rule. The collection will examine monarchy along three distinct yet intertwined fields: Administering the Empire, Performing the Monarchy, and Balancing Religious Change. Each field possesses its own historiography and methodology, and accordingly has usually been treated separately. This volume's multifaceted approach builds on recent trends to examine imperial rule in a more integrated fashion. A brief introductory article to each thematic section provides an overview of the major developments in the field, thereby providing a coherent framework for the contributions. Including new work from a wide range of European and American scholars, both established and junior, Contested Monarchy promises to provide a fresh survey of the role of the Roman monarch in a period of significant and enduring change.

Immanuel Wallerstein's highly influential, multi-volume opus, The Modern World-System, is one of this century's greatest works of social science. An innovative, panoramic reinterpretation of global history, it traces the emergence and development of the modern world from the sixteenth to the twentieth century.

Performed throughout Europe during the 1700s, Italian heroic opera, or opera seria, was the century's most significant musical art form, profoundly engaging such figures as Handel, Haydn, and Mozart. Opera and Sovereignty is the first book to address this genre as cultural history, arguing that eighteenth-century opera seria must be understood in light of the period's social and political upheavals. Taking an anthropological approach to European music that's as bold as it is unusual, Martha Feldman traces Italian opera's shift from a mythical assertion of sovereignty, with its festive forms and rituals, to a dramatic vehicle that increasingly questioned absolute ideals. She situates these transformations against the backdrop of eighteenth-century Italian culture to show how opera seria both reflected and affected the struggles of rulers to maintain sovereignty in the face of a growing public sphere. In so doing, Feldman explains why the form had such great international success and how audience experiences of the period differed from ours today. Ambitiously interdisciplinary, Opera and Sovereignty will appeal not only to scholars of music and anthropology, but also to those interested in theater, dance, and the history of the Enlightenment.

Immanuel Wallerstein's highly influential, multi-volume opus,The Modern World-System,is one of this century's greatest works of social science. An innovative, panoramic reinterpretation of global history, it traces the emergence and development of the modern world from the sixteenth to the twentieth century.