Procopius of Caesarea: Literary and Historical Interpretations ― Literary and Historical Approaches

This book promotes new methodologies in the study of the sixth-century historian Procopius of Caesarea (the major historian of Justinian's reign) by presenting a series of essays and it aims to encourage dialogue and collaboration between international scholars who work on Procopius and Late Antiquity from literary, historical and combined perspectives. There has been a renaissance of scholarship on Procopius internationally in the last decade, so it is an opportune moment to take stock and to showcase recent work in its diversity and vibrancy. This volume highlights the advances in Procopius related scholarship to challenge existing views and aid researchers, from advanced undergraduates to established scholars. It makes current scholarship accessible in English and offers new methods of analysis with an emphasis on the literary and historical sides of Procopius. The approaches employed by the contributors successfully shed new light on his works by comparing them with a variety of relevant textual sources. In particular, this volume pays close attention to the text and examines what it achieves as a literary, and says as a historical, product. The papers also focus on comparative approaches, as they set Procopius' corpus beside texts from various genres - legal, historical, and philosophical - in order to throw new light on Procopius as a historian and thinker.

Elodie Turquois is an associate member of the Corpus Christi College Centre for the Study of Greek and Roman Antiquity, University of Oxford, UK. Christopher Lillington-Martin is an independent scholar, teaching classics, and a researcher at the Oxford Centre for Late Antiquity, UK