E-grāmata: In Blood and Ashes: Curse Tablets and Binding Spells in Ancient Greece

Lamont is an extremely smart and original scholar, who marshals a considerable array of historical, epigraphical, and archaeological sources, and who is not afraid to wrestle with big questions or take on established dogmas in the field of ancient magic. Her eagerly anticipated In Blood and Ashes provides, for the first time, a continuous history of curse-tablets from archaic to late Hellenistic times, beginning in Sicily and Italy then moving eastward to Attica, the Aegean, and beyond-contrary to modern expectations that such ritual technologies generally moved from East to West. * Christopher A. Faraone, University of Chicago * This engaging and wide ranging book represents the first historical study of curse practices in the ancient Greek world. Lamont thoroughly examines and contextualizes individual curse tablets, provides new insight into their origins, early dissemination, and diverse local characteristics, and demonstrates the importance of these texts for our understanding of Greek religion, literacy and orality, legal institutions, and social history. This impressive and innovative book will be of interest to scholars of classical literature, history, archaeology, and religious studies. * Ivana Petrovic, University of Virginia * An important study for collections supporting classical culture and the history of religion. * Choice * Lamont's material-rich, thoroughly elaborated study advances research on ancient magic, especially on the curse tablets, a good deal of progress. * Martin Dreher, Bryn Mawr Classical Review * This monograph provides an extremely detailed and interesting analysis of curses from 750 to 250 bce, is the first work to explicitly focus on the 'development and dissemination of cursing', and fills several gaps in previous scholarship. Throughout, there is good use of illustrations, which are often difficult to come by in many books on curse tablets. It is particularly valuable to have images of the tablets alongside drawings. The inclusion of hitherto unpublished translations of tablets is extremely important to the continued development of the discipline. The translations are well done and considered * The Classical Review * Apart from the significance of this book for the particular topic of curse tablets, this is a great methodological contribution to how to study the history of the peculiar unit of analysis that we call the 'Greek world' and its changing history. * Greece & Rome *