Carl Newell Jackson Lectures

The foremost historian of Greek religion providers the first comprehensive, comparative study of a little-known aspect of ancient religious beliefs and practices.

Peter Brown presents a masterly history of Roman society in the second, third, and fourth centuries. Brown interprets the changes in social patterns and religious thought, breaking away from conventional modern images of the period.

From Augustus to Constantine, the Roman Empire in the Near East expanded step by step, southward to the Red Sea and eastward across the Euphrates to the Tigris. In a remarkable work of interpretive history, Fergus Millar shows us this world as it was forged into the Roman provinces of Judea, Arabia, Mesopotamia, and Syria. His book conveys the magnificent sweep of history as well as the rich diversity of peoples, religions, and languages that intermingle in the Roman Near East.

Fusing high scholarship with high drama, Anthony Grafton and Joanna Weinberg uncover a secret and extraordinary aspect of a legendary Renaissance scholar’s already celebrated achievement. The French Protestant Isaac Casaubon (1559–1614) is known to us through his pedantic namesake in George Eliot’s Middlemarch. But in this book, the real Casaubon emerges as a genuine literary hero, an intrepid explorer in the world of books. With a flair for storytelling reminiscent of Umberto Eco, Grafton and Weinberg follow Casaubon as he unearths the lost continent of Hebrew learning—and adds this ancient lore to the well-known Renaissance revival of Latin and Greek.