This introductory chapter reflects on the importance of monuments, topography and symbolic space in the production of Augustan ideology, both reviewing the manifold ways in which the princeps sought to impose himself on the urban and Italian landscape, and seeking to contextualise these within wider patterns in the literary and cultural construction of space in the first century BC. After a brief review of the ‘spatial turn’ in Classical Studies, it goes on to identify six broad categories within which the construction and representation of space in ancient literary texts has typically been considered in recent scholarship: the relation between written and physical cities; the relation between space and hegemonic power; the contrasting paradigms of hodological and cartographic space; the relation between centre and periphery; space as a site of cultural memory; and the conceptualisation of poetics in spatial terms. A final section traces some key themes that emerge from the volume’s remaining chapters and relates them to these wider trends in Classical Studies.

This chapter outlines the methodological background of this study. It argues that the main tendencies in the existing scholarship on Frankish Jerusalem are rooted in the types of sources that were hitherto primarily used and the approaches that were implemented in the examination of these sources. This chapter places the current study within a broader methodological and theoretical framework, providing an overview of recent developments in the study of medieval urban environments. It especially focuses on the conversion of medieval textual sources into quantifiable data and argues that with proper modifications, such methods can be applied to the case of Frankish Jerusalem. Finally, this chapter introduces the database that forms the basis of this study.

“Performances” describes some of the most famous fasting practices, places and institutions that welcomed hunger artists, from sealed cages to open-air shows, from Succi’s impressive public fasting at the freak atmosphere of the Royal Aquarium London to his parade across Brooklyn bridge in New York in 1890. Based on Kafka’s Hungerkunstler, to reflect on the influence of the audience in the success or failure of fasting performances, the chapter describes a general typology of performances of public fasting and their implications in the epistemology of the art. It depicts hunger artists’ fencing, riding, climbing, ballooning, in specific urban contexts and their influence on contemporary knowledge on fasting, inanition and starvation. The chapter also analyses how the varied audiences appropriated hunger artists, and created a commotion, in which different and opposing interpretations of the facts coexisted in the public sphere, for example, concerning the risk of exceeding thirty days of fasting, and the ideal method to tackle fraud and provide ‘objectivity’. It also points out the controversial views on the scientific value of public fasting performances in medical journals and in the daily press.

This essay provides an overview of Sebald’s work in relation to the literary topos of ‘travel writing’. Considering his work from Nach der Natur to the Korsika Project, it illuminates some of the sources on which he drew (including Thomas More and Thomas Mann), the contexts within which he worked, and the contribution of his work itself to contemporary modes of travel writing. The essay marks out the key waypoints in the history of the form, including its implication in the history of imperial expansion as well as its connection with the ‘grand tour’, while also sketching out some more recent interpretations as they have been conceived by writers like Bruce Chatwin. Within Sebald’s work, it suggests that the idea of the contemporary travel writer as an ‘outmoded’ figure is key to an ‘atmospherics of lateness’, and even that the coinage ‘Sebaldian’ inheres in a distinctive interweaving of the creative and the critical staged within the context of travel. Lastly, the essay outlines some specific issues relating to Sebald’s presence in Britain, taking into consideration the particularities of East Anglia as well as his reception by contemporary British ‘psychogeographers’.

My objective in this chapter is to investigate these questions through the examination of the relationship between society and the city in nineteenth-century Tehran. This relationship focuses on the spatiality of ordinary people’s daily lives. Social theories of space have become a common domain for geographers, sociologists, anthropologists, and ethnographers as a means to investigate socio-spatial processes. In this chapter, I unfold this theoretical framework and explain the impact of the spatial approach on social and historical examinations of cities before presenting the main empirical analysis of daily life and social spaces in nineteenth-century Tehran. My objective is to socialize the spatial analysis and, more importantly, to spatialize the social analysis. This chapter focuses on the relationship between urban society and Tehran in the nineteenth century. It examines people’s everyday lives in the city and their religious and non-religious spatial practices. It investigates various social spaces of day-to-day interactions in the city. I start by presenting a social analysis of Iranian urban society in the nineteenth century. Afterwards, I examine social spaces in two main categories: spaces based on religious gatherings and spaces based on nonreligious practices. This chapter ends with the examination of women’s social life and spaces in the city.

The Introduction seeks to define cosmography. The first half of the Introduction takes Pindar's 3rd Olympian as a point of entry to illustrate cosmography with a concrete example. Building on that specific discussion and unpacking it, the second half of the Introduction moves on to more general considerations of a methodological and terminological order, so as to delineate the notion more explicitly, and the possibilities of its application, far beyond Pindar. All following chapters expand and build on these general considerations of the Introduction. The first chapter thus aims to explore the challenges and illustrate the significance of studying cosmography through cult and place. Through a complementary focus on the visual media of epiphany in language and art, the second chapter expands the investigation of the first chapter on the cosmography of cult and place. The third chapter aims to further explore the challenges and illustrate the significance of studying cosmography through an archive of genres and chronological periods. The fourth chapter looks more closely at the conflicts of knowledge and authority that punctuate the transformations of cosmography in the Classical period. The distinctive creativity of Hellenistic cosmography, finally, is the main object of the fifth chapter.