Classical Encounters in England's North East by Edith Hall

Classical Encounters in England's North East by Edith Hall

This is the first book to explore the history of ancient Greek and Roman influences and reception in England’s North East, topics which have often transcended social boundaries dictated by working identity, class, religion, gender, and ethnicity.

Together, the chapters cover a broad range of themes and topics from architecture, theatre, working-class education, poetry, post-war novels and Hadrian's Wall. Each section, taken as a whole, views the specific topic from complementary social angles encompassing discrete social classes and constituencies but always remaining aware of the experience of non-elites. United in a classical reception studies approach, contributors draw on a variety of materials such as archives, institutional records, oral histories, magazines, antiquarian journals, newspapers, video and audio recordings, television, photographs, engravings, paintings, drawings, school textbooks, guidebooks, the fabric of buildings, poetry, and fiction to show how modern identities are informed by the Greek and Roman past.

This pioneering and richly illustrated study of classical reception from a local-historical perspective is of interest to students and scholars working in Classics and the social, cultural, intellectual, and local history of England.

Edith Hall is Professor of Classics at the University of Durham. She has published 37 books on ancient Greece and Rome and their continuing presences in the modern world, acts as consultant to professional theatre companies and regularly broadcasts on the BBC. With Arlene Holmes-Henderson she leads a campaign to support teaching of classics and philosophy in state schools and prisons.

Rory McInnes-Gibbons works on the Leverhulme-funded Durham University research project Aristotle Beyond the Academy (2024–2026) and previously co-coordinated the community outreach project, Classics and Class in the North East. He works across classical reception with a focus on the Roman Near East having graduated from a PhD on Palmyra at Durham in 2023.

Edmund Thomas is Professor of Ancient Visual and Material Culture at Durham University. He has published widely on Roman architecture and its afterlife from the Middle Ages to the Baroque period. His chapter in this volume is part of a forthcoming longer study on the history of the keystone from Greek and Roman antiquity to the modern era.