An examination of the unique, baroque-era, German Jesuit scholar, Egyptologist, polymath, and prolific author and his studies. A contemporary of Descartes and Newton, Athanasius Kircher, S. J. (1601/2–80), was one of Europe’s most inventive and versatile scholars in the baroque era. He published more than thirty works in fields as diverse as astronomy, magnetism, cryptology, numerology, geology, and music. But Kircher is most famous—or infamous—for his quixotic attempt to decipher the Egyptian hieroglyphs and reconstruct the ancient traditions they encoded. In 1655, after more than two decades of toil, Kircher published his solution to the hieroglyphs, Oedipus Aegyptiacus, a work that has been called “one of the most learned monstrosities of all times.” Here Daniel Stolzenberg presents a new interpretation of Kircher’s hieroglyphic studies, placing them in the context of seventeenth-century scholarship on paganism and Oriental languages. Situating Kircher in the social world of baroque Rome, with its scholars, artists, patrons, and censors, Stolzenberg shows how Kircher’s study of ancient paganism depended on the circulation of texts, artifacts, and people between Christian and Islamic civilizations. Along with other participants in the rise of Oriental studies, Kircher aimed to revolutionize the study of the past by mastering Near Eastern languages and recovering ancient manuscripts hidden away in the legendary libraries of Cairo and Damascus. The spectacular flaws of his scholarship have fostered an image of Kircher as an eccentric anachronism, a throwback to the Renaissance hermetic tradition. Stolzenberg argues against this view, showing how Kircher embodied essential tensions of a pivotal phase in European intellectual history, when pre-Enlightenment scholars pioneered modern empirical methods of studying the past while still working within traditional frameworks, such as biblical history and beliefs about magic and esoteric wisdom. Praise for Egyptian Oedipus “Stolzenberg not only provides the first serious study of Athanasius Kircher’s investigations into the history and culture of ancient Egypt, but he also furnishes a perceptive critical evaluation of Kircher’s scholarship and persona, warts and all. Stolzenberg goes beyond Kircher’s programmatic statements to unveil his actual scholarly practices. In doing so, Stolzenberg has produced an exemplary case study of a polymath at work and has provided us with a more nuanced understanding of Kircher’s influence.” —Mordechai Feingold, California Institute of Technology “If you don’t already know about Athanasius Kircher, you should take a long trip through his extraordinary and weird fields of research: a Jesuit priest who tinkered with everything from early cinematic projectors to talking statues, and wrote about impossibly tall skyscrapers inspired by the Tower of Babel and developed his own unique twist on a volcanic theory of a Hollow Earth. . . . Stolzenberg’s book is an excellent biography of the man and his ideas.” —Gizmodo, Notable Books of 2013

First Published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Fascination with ancient Egypt is a recurring theme in Western culture, and here Brian Curran uncovers its deep roots in the Italian Renaissance, which embraced not only classical art and literature but also a variety of other cultures that modern readers don't tend to associate with early modern Italy. Patrons, artists, and spectators of the period were particularly drawn, Curran shows, to Egyptian antiquity and its artifacts, many of which found their way to Italy in Roman times and exerted an influence every bit as powerful as that of their more familiar Greek and Roman counterparts. Curran vividly recreates this first wave of European Egyptomania with insightful interpretations of the period's artistic and literary works. In doing so, he paints a colorful picture of a time in which early moderns made the first efforts to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs, and popes and princes erected pyramids and other Egyptianate marvels to commemorate their own authority. Demonstrating that the emergence of ancient Egypt as a distinct category of historical knowledge was one of Renaissance humanism's great accomplishments, Curran's peerless study will be required reading for Renaissance scholars and anyone interested in the treasures and legacy of ancient Egypt.

Four plays based on the Oedipus legend by four leading dramatists of the Arab World.

In this book, Roger Travis brings together poetics and psychology to study the tragic chorus in Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus. Beginning from Quintilian's definition of allegory as extended metaphor, Travis argues that in Oedipus at Colonus the chorus of old men forms an allegorical relationship with the aged Oedipus, which depends in turn upon the chorus's own likeness to the Athenian audience. The play relates Oedipus allegorically to the audience through the tragic chorus and transforms Oedipus' relation to the body of his mother Jocasta into a new relation to the land of Attica. Corresponding readings of Aeschylus' Suppliants and Euripides' Bacchea further explore the chorus's role in expressing the relation of the individual to the maternal body. Employing a flexible combination of Lacanian and object-relations psychoanalytic theory, Travis investigates the tragic text's conception of the problems of human existence. The introduction provides a useful survey of the advantages and disadvantages of various psychological approaches to tragedy, making this an important volume for students and scholars alike.

An immense reservoir of art history, Cairo's Museum of Egyptian Antiquities contains fabulous collections of relics from the Mediterranean's most mysterious and ancient civilization, the true cradle of western culture. From the creation of the first state on the banks of the Nile to its submission to the Roman empire, the millennial story of ancient Egypt is recounted here through the artistic masterpieces, the everyday objects, the spectacular jewels, and the magnificent remains from the tombs of the pharaohs, all remarkably assembled within the walls of a single institution. Structured as a guide, but fully illustrated with superb color photographs, this book suggests a simple but comprehensive itinerary through the museum, subdividing the tour into chapters devoted to the most important episodes in Egyptian history. Collected during the course of over a century of archaeological excavations, jewelry, tools, toys, models, religious objects, mummies, and monumental sculptures offer vivid glimpses of a formidable civilization. The rich funerary cache of Tutankhamun, the treasures of Tanis, and the jewels of Queen Ahhotep reflect the glory of the Egyptian monarchy, but there are insights too into the day-to-day lives of the more humble sections of society. Previously unpublished photographs and plans alongside texts prepared by the museum curators themselves help readers to penetrate the corridors and halls of the great museum in search of a heritage unique in its richness and variety, following in the footsteps of the great figures in Egyptian history: from the pharaohs, suspended between heaven and earth, to the archaeologists who, with their patient excavations, have helped to shed new light on the land of the pyramids.

Did Oedipus really kill his father and marry his mother? Or is he nothing but a scapegoat, set up to take the blame for a crisis afflicting Thebes? For René Girard, the mythic accusations of patricide and incest are symptomatic of a plague-stricken community's hunt for a culprit to punish, and Girard succeeds in making us see an age-old myth in a wholly new light. The hard-to-find writings assembled here include three major early essays, never before available in English, which afford a behind-the-scenes glimpse at the emergence of Girard's scapegoat theory from his pioneering analysis of rivalry and desire. Girard unbinds the Oedipal triangle from its Freudian moorings, replacing desire for the mother with desire for anyone--or anything--a rival desires. In a wide-ranging and provocative introduction, Mark R. Anspach presents fresh evidence for Girard's hypotheses from classical studies, literature, anthropology, and the life of Freud himself.