We are pleased to announce that CMRS-CEGS Director Zrinka Stahuljak’s book Fixers: Agency, Translation, and the Early Global History of Literature (University of Chicago Press) has been recognized as a book of the year by History Today magazine.
Read the brief book review below by Mirela Ivanova, lecturer in Medieval History at the University of Sheffield. The full article was originally published in History Today Volume 74 on December 12, 2024.
‘A persuasive account of how the polis came to be’
Mirela Ivanova is Lecturer in Medieval History at the University of Sheffield and author of Inventing Slavonic: Cultures of Writing between Rome and Constantinople (Oxford University Press)
My book of the year is John Ma’s Polis: A New History of the Ancient Greek City-State from the Early Iron Age to the End of Antiquity (Princeton), a meticulously researched history of the peculiar political phenomenon of the autonomous city state, ruled by an elite class of peers who shared resources to achieve common goals. Ma’s magnum opus offers a persuasive account of how the polis came to be, and the book does well to dwell on its liberatory political possibilities without losing sight of the fact the polis was also ‘a patriarchy, an enslavement society, a nativist organization, and a polity haunted by the model of an urban aristocracy’. An extraordinary achievement.
I also enjoyed Zrinka Stahuljak’s Fixers: Agency, Translation, and the Early Global History of Literature (University of Chicago Press), which asks us to rethink medieval translators and all the social and political roles they served beyond simply rendering meaning from one language into another.
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Polis: A New History of the Ancient Greek City-State from the Early Iron Age to the End of Antiquity
John Ma
Princeton University Press, 736pp, £42
Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link) -
Fixers: Agency, Translation, and the Early Global History of Literature
Zrinka Stahuljak
The University of Chicago Press, 357pp, £28
Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)