Mediterranean Paradigms and Classical Antiquity

Biblical Theology Bulletin, Spring, 2008 by Richard L. Rohrbaugh

Mediterranean Paradigms and Classical Antiquity. Edited by Irad Malkin. New York, NY: Routledge, 2005. Pp. vi + 149. Cloth, $125.00.

Over the last forty years a modest paradigm shift has taken place in the historical study of the Mediterranean region. The central issue, among both historians and ethnographers, has been finding "common denominators in the Mediterranean past which may serve to justify the systematic comparison of social, economic, and even cultural history across a wide arc of time that reaches from the Bronze Age to the edge of modernity" (10).

The earlier consensus followed the work of Fernand Braudel (The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II [London: Collins, 1972]), in which the history of social patterns and structures replaced the more typical history of nations, wars, political developments and other events. Braudel's concept of the longue duree became the framework for describing varying rates of change in the patterns and structures of the Mediterranean social world. Some structural changes are rapid while others move at an almost glacial pace. What emerged was a picture of the Mediterranean region as one in which simple technology, the high cost of transportation, and the limited range of social and economic exchange led to deeply rooted, stable and bounded social structures.

However, with the landmark publication of Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), a new model of the Mediterranean region began to take shape. Instead of a collection of small, static and bounded units, Horden and Purcell de scribed lines of "connectedness" through space and time that linked the broader Mediterranean into an organic whole. A new view of an interconnected Mediterranean region, including the sea, its coastlands, plains and mountains, began slowly to emerge. The chapters in this collection (a special issue of the Mediterranean Historical Review) are in large measure an attempt to explore various dimensions of this new view of an "interconnected" Mediterranean region.

To begin, the Introduction by Irad Malkin provides a brief overview of Mediterranean historical studies to the present moment. Then Nicholas Purcell ("The Boundless Sea of Unlikeness") argues that all the individual items alleged to be peculiarly Mediterranean can in fact be found widely across the globe. What is distinctively Mediterranean, he claims, is the "sheer intensity and complexity of the ingredients in the paradigm" (13).

The contribution oflan Morris ("Mediterraneanization") asserts that the shift to an "interconnectedness" model is actually a response to modern globalization and, while useful, requires much greater precision in analytical categories than now exists. His study of winners and losers in western Sicily emphasizes the process of Mediterraneanization rather than a timeless Mediterraneanism.

Next, Irad Malkin rejects traditional center-periphery models and explores the interconnectedness of the expanding network of ancient Greek cities all the way from the Black Sea to southern Spain. Lin Foxhall ("Cultures, Landscapes, and Identities in the Mediterranean World") offers an intriguing study of land division in early Greece, suggesting that Greek "colonization" does not, as is usually assumed, reflect a shortage of land. Rather, it emerged out of the "patchwork landscape of family and community relationships" (88) that resulted from the limits of a nominal "day's ploughing."

Brent Shaw's chapter, "A Peculiar Island: Maghrib and Mediterranean," argues that the Maghrib, the land on the north coast of Africa between western Libya and Morocco, offers a special case in Mediterranean studies. Isolated by the desert to the south and the sea to the north, this cultural island developed its own peculiar set of interactions with the rest of the Mediterranean region. And finally, Greg Woolf examines the usefulness of the interconnected Mediterranean paradigm for the study of religion and religious change over time. His conclusion is that few religious forms or practices are distinctively Mediterranean and that geography is not really a significant variable in the study of religion.

For better or worse, many of the topics explored in this volume will not bear directly on the work of biblical scholars. Its descriptions of the social or cultural landscape are primarily aimed at exploring the implications of the wider interconnectedness paradigm and offer little detail in the study of particular social or cultural patterns. It may be enough, however, to know that the Mediterranean region remains the subject of intense historical and cultural interest and that its peculiar constellation of social and cultural patterns is as fruitful an area of exploration as ever.

Richard L. Rohrbaugh

Lewis & Clark College

Portland, OR 97219