ANCIENT JEW REVIEW

I think this needs to be a multilayered conversation. On the one hand, religion is both used by elites for regulatory function, bureaucratic specialization, and legal structuring, and by non-elites to inspire collective action or to provide social cohesion.

First, the initial three chapters, which cover the Roman Republic, read like a new history of Rome, one that shows how ingrained collective labor action really was in Roman society.

Prof. Sarah Bond is perpetually unsurprised at abuses of power, yet she is also perpetually ethically aggrieved by them. Her new book, Strike! is grounded in an ethical interest in the historical abuses of power on two levels: the abuse of power in the ancient Mediterranean world, and the witting or unwitting power of historians to write out of the record of the ancient Mediterranean the possibility of resistance, organizing, and the agency of laborers.

Earthquakes and Gardens is a deeply idiosyncratic book. It is experimental in a number of ways, and experiments do not always succeed—certainly not for every reader.

Burrus urges us to curate earthquakes, but I also wonder if she asks us to consider whether we might be more earthquake than curator. How much of our control is an illusion? How different are we from the rest of the world?

Burrus wildly and intentionally reads Jerome and Hilarion forward alongside contemporary art, histories of cartography, and modern sciences of geology and seismology. She cites artifacts and photographs from affiliated but not scholarly-verified sites in Cyprus.

Using the idea of recursive connection to a locus—a place—that is also a time, a feeling, a sensation—Burrus invites us to see other connections beyond ancient hagiography and into other quasi-historical imaginariums.