Bryn Mawr Authors

Studies of seals and sealing practices have traditionally investigated aspects of social, political, economic, and ideological systems in ancient societies throughout the Old World. Previously, scholarship has focused on description and documentation, chronology and dynastic histories, administrative function, iconography, and style. More recent studies have emphasized context, production and use, and increasingly, identity, gender, and the social lives of seals, their users, and the artisans who produced them. Using several methodological and theoretical perspectives, this volume presents up-to-date research on seals that is comparative in scope and focus. The cross-cultural and interdisciplinary approach advances our understanding of the significance of an important class of material culture of the ancient world. The volume will serve as an essential resource for scholars, students, and others interested in glyptic studies, seal production and use, and sealing practices in the Ancient Near East, Egypt, Ancient South Asia and the Aegean during the 4th-2nd Millennia BCE.

Winner of the GOLD Nonfiction Book Award presented by the Nonfiction Authors Association!

Speaking Out on Governance presents a range of viewpoints concerning the role of today's corporation and its board of directors. The author engages in candid discussion with subject matter experts including boardmembers, corporate attorneys, academics, institutional investors, regulators, and activists. These interviews of leading authorities in the corporate governance arena provide the reader with unique insight into the vitally important but often misunderstood role played by the board.

Deborah Hicks Midanek discusses perspectives regarding what directors of businesses actually do and should do; the true motivations and concerns of the various parties seeking to influence corporate behavior; legal issues surrounding the board; and the key similarities and differences of opinion that may help improve effectiveness of all parties and increase board and director effectiveness. This book is essential reading for corporate directors and would-be directors, senior managers, attorneys, consultants and anyone interested in what drives organizational behavior.

This book presents a bold, multifaceted interpretation of early English imperial actions by examining the ways in which English empire-builders and travelers interacted with Indigenous and African peoples during the long process of colonization in the Americas.

Ignacio Gallup-Díaz argues that early English imperial actors were primarily motivated by practical concerns rather than abstract ideologies-from reacting to, learning from, and avoiding the ongoing Spanish and Portuguese imperial projects to the dynamic collision of English imaginings of empire with the practical realities of governing non-European peoples. The text includes an appendix of primary sources that allows students and instructors to engage with English imperial thinking directly. Readers are encouraged to critically examine English accounts of this period in an attempt to see the Indigenous and African peoples who are embedded in them.

 

European Expansion and Representations of Indigenous and African Peoples provides an invaluable new framework for undergraduate students and instructors of early American history, Atlantic history, and the history of race and imperialism more broadly.

An unparalleled exploration of magic in the Greco-Roman world

What did magic mean to the people of ancient Greece and Rome? How did Greeks and Romans not only imagine what magic could do, but also use it to try to influence the world around them? In Drawing Down the Moon, Radcliffe Edmonds, one of the foremost experts on magic, religion, and the occult in the ancient world, provides the most comprehensive account of the varieties of phenomena labeled as magic in classical antiquity. Exploring why certain practices, images, and ideas were labeled as "magic" and set apart from "normal" kinds of practices, Edmonds gives insight into the shifting ideas of religion and the divine in the ancient past and in the later Western tradition.

Using fresh approaches to the history of religions and the social contexts in which magic was exercised, Edmonds delves into the archaeological record and classical literary traditions to examine images of witches, ghosts, and demons as well as the fantastic powers of metamorphosis, erotic attraction, and reversals of nature, such as the famous trick of drawing down the moon. From prayer and divination to astrology and alchemy, Edmonds journeys through all manner of ancient magical rituals and paraphernalia--ancient tablets, spell books, bindings and curses, love charms and healing potions, and amulets and talismans. He considers the ways in which the Greco-Roman discourse of magic was formed amid the cultures of the ancient Mediterranean, including Egypt and the Near East.

An investigation of the mystical and marvelous, Drawing Down the Moon offers an unparalleled record of the origins, nature, and functions of ancient magic.