{"title":"Books by Dr Iain Ferris","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"9781445684215","title":"The Dignity of Labour","description":"\u003cp\u003eThis is the first book to present an analysis of images of working people in Roman society and to interpret their meaning and significance.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWhat did work mean to the Romans? Numerous incidental illustrations of agricultural workers occur in Roman artworks, particularly mosaic pavements.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eMore significantly, the names and trades of many individual working people, artisans, and professionals are known from inscriptions and funerary monuments in Rome and from across the empire. Indeed, the names and trades of over twelve hundred men and over two hundred women are known from inscriptions in Rome alone.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe most extraordinary individual funerary monuments for working people are the Tomb of Eurysaces the Baker that still stands at Porta Maggiore in Rome and the Tomb of the Haterii in the Vatican Museums, the latter a monument to a family that had made their fortune in the construction industry in the city. Less grand but equally informative are the dozens of other funerary monuments to people such as Bassilla, the mime or actress from Aquileia, Longidienus the shipbuilder from Ravenna, and Vitalis, the pork butcher from Rome.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis study encompasses consideration of both written and archaeological sources, but particularly of visual evidence in the form of sculptures, funerary monuments of various kinds, mosaics, and wall paintings.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56300011618677,"sku":"9781445684215","price":20.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781445684215_e3717386-9222-4bf5-8f87-b7ae9dca2739.jpg?v=1786020477"},{"product_id":"9781803277813","title":"A Map of the Body, a Map of the Mind: Visualising Geographical Knowledge in the Roman World","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eA Map of the Body, a Map of the Mind\u003c\/em\u003e is a study about the relationship between geography and power in the ancient Roman world, and most particularly about the visualisation of geographical knowledge in myriad forms of geography products, including geographical treatises, histories, poems, personifications, landscape representations, images of barbarian peoples, maps, itineraries, and imported foodstuffs. As Rome broke its political bounds and headed towards empire the whole city became the centre and the Roman world-view changed with it. The Roman state then needed to present to the Roman people an easily-digestible narrative about its imperial ambition and imperial possessions, in a way that went beyond the fact that servitude, enslavement, and misery for many underpinned this expansion. There needed to be a publicly-guided discourse centred around the smoothing out of difference, rather than its obliteration or elimination, and the presentation of many different lifeworlds in a familiar way using geographical information. This marked a way of directing how change could be managed and of reimagining how the world might be and might work at the intersection between selection, knowledge, and insight. Reflection and communication sought to create a communal sense of belonging. If not actually doors, these geographical images were at least windows onto self-identity and otherness, letting light in on a sombre struggle against accidie.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56306831393141,"sku":"9781803277813","price":45.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781803277813_0de77628-7ff2-4621-905e-62044d2322a3.jpg?v=1786026957"},{"product_id":"9781789699050","title":"Visions of the Roman North: Art and Identity in Northern Roman Britain","description":"\u003ci\u003eVisions of the Roman North: Art and Identity in Northern Roman Britain\u003c\/i\u003e is the first book to present an analysis of art from the northern frontier zones of Roman Britain and to interpret the meaning and significance of this art in terms of the formation of a regional identity at this time. It argues that a distinct and vibrant visual culture flourished in the north during the Roman period, primarily due to its status as a heavily militarized frontier zone. Artworks from forts and the frontier-works of Hadrian’s Wall and the Antonine Wall, along with funerary monuments from military and civilian cemeteries, are analysed and discussed. The book also explores religious sculpture depicting classical deities, Romano-British gods and goddesses and eastern deities such as Mithras in terms of the use of imagery in various belief systems and in terms of the establishment of individual and group identities.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56306975113589,"sku":"9781789699050","price":35.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}]},{"product_id":"9781805831150","title":"The Domesticity of Their Darkness","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Domesticity of Their Darkness\u003c\/em\u003e is about the appearance of images of the enslaved in Roman art and the analysis of this archive. The word snapshots has been used quite deliberately, and very specifically, in the subtitle of this study because of the impossibility of there ever being the material evidence and opportunity to write a full, linear, chronological narrative about images of the enslaved in Roman times. The ancient enslaved are now to us like shadows out of time: yet, most importantly, they seem to have existed between the images discussed in this study. In these works it was never their aesthetic value that counted: they were to be read and understood, so that their meaning came across. In the Roman world everything was art, including the history of enslavement and of the enslaved. The floating roots of so many of these enslaved individuals cannot be located in a world where for the Roman elite name, roots, and family lineage created an ideological geography of belonging, of being inside, reaching into the future as well as back to the past. For the enslaved the tranquillity of simply inhabiting space could never be enough. Images of the enslaved in Roman domestic interiors often appear now as being somehow quite weird, in terms of the strange within the familiar and the familiar as strange. The domestic world portrayed, its domesticity, does not coincide with itself. There is a wrongness here, a delusive envelope, yet all is depicted as being right. The book represents an attempt to foreground the background.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56420023402869,"sku":"9781805831150","price":55.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781805831150_372f24e4-941e-4936-b189-10c59ebd8d16.jpg?v=1786028423"},{"product_id":"vinovia","title":"Vinovia","description":"Binchester Roman fort, Roman Vinovia, lies on a hilltop spur about two kilometres north of the modern town of Bishop Auckland in County Durham. This book draws on the results of large-scale excavations in the 1970s and 80s to describe the sequence of construction of the fort from 1st century timber beginnings, to the final phase of stone building in the 4th. Iain Ferris also looks at the evidence for daily life at the fort, its military significance, and asks what it can tell us about the end of Roman Britain in the north.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57705605071221,"sku":"9781445601281","price":18.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781445601281.jpg?v=1793377293"}],"url":"https:\/\/backstory.london\/collections\/author-dr-iain-ferris.oembed","provider":"Backstory","version":"1.0","type":"link"}