The Oxford Dictionary of Late Antiquity

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Oxford Dictionary of Late Antiquity ( ODLA ) is a two-volume antique scientific Glossary, devoted to the history of Late Antiquity busy. The work was published on March 22, 2018 after almost two decades of preparation. It is currently the only comprehensive reference work that explicitly deals with Late Antiquity and thus fills the gap between the Oxford Classical Dictionary (which only partially covers Late Antiquity), the Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium and the Oxford Dictionary of the Middle Ages .

The period covered extends in the sense of a "long late antiquity" from the middle of the 3rd century (the time of the imperial crisis of the 3rd century ) to the middle of the 8th century, the climax of the Arab expansion . The historical development in Europe (from the migration of peoples to the formation of the early medieval Germanic-Romanic successor kingdoms), the Mediterranean area , the Middle East (with special consideration of the New Persian Sassanid Empire ), to the South Arabian region and Central Asia is taken into account . In this context, a very broad thematic spectrum is covered in an interdisciplinary manner: from political history to social, economic, military, cultural and religious history. In addition to personal and material articles, the ODLA also offers overview articles .

Oliver Nicholson is the main editor , while several other researchers acted as thematic advisers and thematic editors. More than 400 authors have created over 5,000 entries. These are written by recognized experts and are based on the current state of research (taking into account international, primarily Anglo-American research). Since the specialist literature on late antiquity has now reached a barely manageable size, the ODLA offers a bundling of the current state of research. The length of the articles in the ODLA (as in the encyclopedias mentioned above) varies widely and ranges from extremely brief articles to overview articles comprising several thousand words.

The articles of the ODLA can also be called up online via the Oxford Reference database (but subject to a charge).

expenditure

Web links

Remarks

  1. ODLA , Volume 1, p. IX.
  2. ^ The lexicon part in GW Bowersock u. a. (Ed.): Late Antiquity. A Guide to the Postclassical World. Cambridge, Mass./London 1999, is relatively limited and includes only a small selection of lemmas.
  3. ODLA , Volume 1, p. XIII; see also the list of authors online .
  4. ^ Oxford Reference