Mountains, ancient and modern
One initiative in the School that has been reaching the end of its first phase as SACRA launches, is a project run jointly by Jason König and Dawn Hollis on ‘Mountains in Ancient Literature and Culture and their Postclassical Reception’ (generously funded by the Leverhulme Trust).
The project has had two interrelated strands. The first has aimed to shed new light on the history and representation of mountains in ancient Mediterranean culture and literature. Publications include Jason’s 2022 book The Folds of Olympus: Mountains in Ancient Literature and Culture, published by Princeton University Press, which was shortlisted for the London Hellenic Prize 2022.
Side by side with that a second strand has aimed to break new ground in our understanding of the relationship between ancient responses to mountain landscapes and their postclassical equivalents, especially in a volume edited jointly by Dawn and Jason, Mountain Dialogues from Antiquity to Modernity, published by Bloomsbury in 2021. Other publications include several articles and chapters on 18th– and 19th-century travel writing from Greece and the wider Mediterranean.
One of the goals for both of those strands has been to challenge the standard narratives that have dominated writing on the history of mountains and mountaineering for the last 150 years or more, not least the assumption that interest in mountains is a more or less exclusively modern phenomenon that emerged in the eighteenth century, without any connection to premodern ways of thinking about landscape. One of the exciting things about the project has been the opportunity to build up a network of collaborators working across many different periods and disciplines within the ‘mountain humanities’.
If you would like to find out more, please visit the project website.
