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WORK TITLE: The Sea in the Greek Imagination
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https://ase.tufts.edu/classics/people/facultyBeaulieu.htm * https://ase.tufts.edu/classics/documents/cvBeaulieu.pdf * http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/15411.html
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1979.
EDUCATION:Université de Montréal, Centre d’Études Classiques, B.A., 2001, M.A., 2003; the University of Texas at Austin, Ph.D., 2008.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Classicist, scholar, educator, and writer. Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, lecturer in classics, 2008-2009; University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada, assistant professor of classics, 2009-2010; Tufts University, Medford, MA, assistant to associate professor of classics, 2010–, affiliated faculty in the Department of Religion, 2011–. Also associate editor of the Perseus Digital Library, 2013-present, and codirector of the Perseids Project.
WRITINGS
Contributor to books. Contributor of articles and book reviews to periodicals, including Hermes, Literary and Linguistic Computing, Kernos, Les Études Classiques, and Tradition and Innovation in Hellenistic Poetry. Also volume editor of A Cultural History of the Sea (Antiquity), Bloomsbury.
SIDELIGHTS
Marie-Claire Beaulieu is a classics scholar whose interests focus on Greek religion, Greek epigraph and digital humanities, and Medieval Latin. Beaulieu writes about Greek cults and myths, especially about myths of the sea. She also has a special interest in animals in Greek mythology. In the digital humanities, Beaulieu is involved in making the creation and dissemination of knowledge about the ancient world more accessible. For example, she is codirector of the Perseids Project, a collaborative online environment that enables users to edit, translate, and produce commentaries on a variety of ancient source documents, including inscriptions, medieval manuscripts, and texts transmitted through the manuscript tradition, such as Homer’s Iliad.
In her first book, The Sea in Greek Imagination, Beaulieu examines the various representations of the sea and sea crossings in Greek myth and imagery. In doing so, she posits that the sea serves as a cosmological boundary that separates the mortal world from the underworld and from the realms of the immortal. “The sea … acts as a boundary, an aquatic frontier that, when traversed, leads the traveller from one state of existence to another,” wrote Bryn Mawr Classical Review Web site contributor David M. Reis, adding: “These themes of identity and movement, or the construction of identity through stories of interactions with the sea, receive examination in Beaulieu’s creative and insightful study.”
The Sea in Greek Imagination features six chapters. Each chapter features a case study revealing how beyond being a physical boundary the sea in Greek myth represents a buffer between the the real world of human beings and the imaginary worlds of the dead and the gods. Beaulieu’s goal is to provide a more comprehensive look at the sea as part of the Greek mindset, both in terms of its role in the real world and in the Greek’s imagined landscape. Each of the case studies examines the relationship between the tangible sea and its various significance in Greek stories and art.
Beaulieu begins with a chapter that discusses various perceptions of the sea from ancient times through the time of the Roman Empire. Next, she turns her attention to the Greek myths of Perseus, Theseus, and Jason. These coming-of-age stories, according to Beaulieu, are meant to show both how elite men should act but also serve as a metaphor for resolving various social and political tensions of the day. The third chapter revolves around the mythos of women. In this mythos the sea serves as an undefined area that represents women do not fit into the social order and are caught in a space between life and death.
Next, Beaulieu turns her attention to how Greek writers and storytellers represented dolphins in their tales. Dolphins are typically given traits similar to humans and serve as a type of mediator between humans and gods, as well as between the living and the dead. Chapter five examines the sea as representative of a type of boundary crossing and personal transformation. Many of the stories feature women leaping into the sea to save themselves from unwanted male advances. By throwing themselves into the sea, the women ensure that they will remain virgin, perhaps even reaching a divine status in the process.
The final chapter of The Sea in Greek Imagination revolves around the story of Dionysus, the Greek god of fertility and wine, and his relationship with the sea. The chapter includes an examination of the Homeric Hymn to Dionysus, which provides a proof that Dionysus is a god and the son of Zeus and Semele. Beaulieu also examines later literary interpreters of the myth. Beaulieu “shows that the Greeks saw the sea as representing many different, often contradictory, ideas,” wrote S.E. Goins in a review for Choice. Calling The Sea in Greek Imagination “a wonderful contribution the Classical Studies,” a Biblical Review Web site contributor went on to note. The book “is quite understandable [to] the average non-specialist.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Choice, June, 2016, S.E. Goins, review of The Sea in Greek Imagination, p. 1463.
ONLINE
Biblical Review, https://thebiblicalreview.wordpress.com/ ( June 10, 2016), review of The Sea in the Greek Imagination.
Bryn Mawr Classical Review, http://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/ (July 23, 2016), David M. Reis, review of The Sea in the Greek Imagination.
Classics for All, http://classicsforall.org.uk (June 15, 2016), David Stuttard, review of The Sea in the Greek Imagination.
Department of Classics, Tufts University Web site, https://ase.tufts.edu/classics/ (April 28, 2017), author faculty profile and CV.*
People
Marie-Claire Beaulieu
Associate Professor, Classics
Affiliated Faculty, Religion
Associate Editor, Perseus Digital Library
Marie-Claire Beaulieu
Contact Info:
Tufts University
Department of Classics
327 Eaton Hall
Medford, MA 02155
Office: 617.627.2438
Fax: 617.627.2896
Email Prof. Beaulieu
Curriculum Vitae
Expertise:
Greek religion, Greek epigraphy, Medieval Latin, Digital Humanities
Research:
Marie-Claire Beaulieu's interests are concentrated in two main areas: Greek religion and Digital Humanities. In Greek religion, she has published articles and given professional talks on various aspects of Greek cults and myths, especially centering on myths of the sea. She has a particular interest in the role of animals in Greek mythology, and has investigated dolphins and ducks in detail, among others. Her new book is titled "The Sea in the Greek Imagination" (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016) in which she proposes that the sea marks the boundary between mortals, immortals, and the dead. For this reason, mythical sea-crossings are transforming journeys, as mortals challenge the boundaries imposed on them and transition to the afterlife or join the company of the gods. This book arrives at a timely moment in the Humanities, when the history of geography and cosmology is being reevaluated and reinterpreted. In the age of Google Earth, when any location on earth can be examined remotely with an unprecedented degree of precision, questions about the relationship between humans and the shape of their world become more pressing than ever.
In Digital Humanities, Marie-Claire Beaulieu is working on making the creation and dissemination of knowledge about the ancient world more accessible. She is the co-director of the Perseids Project, a collaborative online environment in which users can edit, translate, and produce commentaries on a variety of ancient source documents, including inscriptions, medieval manuscripts, and texts transmitted through the manuscript tradition such as Homer's Iliad. In her classes, students have the opportunity to publish ancient documents on the Web as term projects, thereby integrating their learning experience with an original contribution to research. Some of the current projects undertaken by students include the edition, translation, and publication of the Tisch Miscellany Collection, Greek funerary inscriptions, commentaries on source materials for Greek mythology, and an edition and translation of a 14th century compendium of English forest law held in Tisch Library at Tufts.
CV: https://ase.tufts.edu/classics/documents/cvBeaulieu.pdf
Beaulieu, Marie-Claire: The sea in the Greek imagination
S.E. Goins
53.10 (June 2016): p1463.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Beaulieu, Marie-Claire. The sea in the Greek imagination. Pennsylvania, 2015. 265p bibl index afp ISBN 9780812247657 cloth, $79.95; ISBN 9780812291964 ebook, $79.95
53-4224
BL795
CIP
In this interesting, well-researched book, Beaulieu (classics, Tufts Univ.) examines the multivalent nature of the sea in the mind of the Greeks. Looking closely at several literary texts, and also at vase paintings, the author shows that the Greeks saw the sea as representing many different, often contradictory, ideas. The sea was a place of transition from life to death, from the mundane to the mythical. In her first chapter, Beaulieu offers somewhat general observations on the nature of fresh versus salt water and on the mythical geography attached to the ocean. Chapters 2 and 3 focus on how the sea functions in heroic coming-of-age stories and legends of women set adrift on the water. The remaining three chapters--which deal with dolphin riders, "leaps of faith," and Dionysiac associations with the sea--examine several mythological and religious aspects of water, particularly in terms of its ability to unite the human and the divine. The book includes a conclusion and extensive bibliography and notes. Summing Up: ** Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.--S. E. Goins, McNeese State University
Goins, S.E.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Goins, S.E. "Beaulieu, Marie-Claire: The sea in the Greek imagination." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, June 2016, p. 1463. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA454942635&it=r&asid=7897a18f399e6fface64856a1f283a34. Accessed 26 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A454942635
Posted on June 10, 2016 Reviews
“The Sea in the Greek Imagination” by Marie-Claire Beaulieu
The Sea in the Greek ImaginationMarie-Claire Beaulieu. The Sea in the Greek Imagination. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015, pp. 280, $79.95.
*I’d like to express my gratitude to University of Pennsylvania Press for providing me with a review copy in exchange for my honest opinion.
The sea plays an integral role in Greek mythology and history. Marie-Claire Beaulieu (Assistant Professor in Classics) attempts to understand the sea as a boundary that “mediates between the worlds of the living, the dead, and the gods” (3). Rather than attempting to establish a universal pattern in Greek myths, Beaulieu focuses on how various Greek writings interact with and appropriate aspects of this basic definition. In doing so, she cogently illustrates the variety of ways of which the sea played a role in the Greek imagination.
So, each chapter focuses on a different aspects regarding the sea as a boundary in Greek imagination: visible/mortal and invisible/immortal; Heroic, male rites of passage; marriageable age, female rites of passage; extensions of the mediating role of the sea through dolphins; leaps into the sea as entrance into the afterlife; and locus for Dionysiac worship. Simply put, the sea represents transitions and movements through life in the Greek imagination. Though not a universal pattern, Beaulieu’s proposal which ties the sea together makes the sea as a concept much more digestible for readers of classic texts. For both understanding Greek conceptions of the sea and for comparison with adjacent cultural pattern in Mesopotamia, her work is a valuable contribution. Additionally, the simplicity of the book is wonderful because she writes clearly in a story-like tone. This is, of course, no surprise because Beaulieu is involved in digital humanities and making the ancient world more accessible.
While she demonstrates great knowledge and understanding of Greek literature, her arguments could be bolstered through independent analysis of archaeological, numismatic, and ceramic records. Although these are sometimes incorporated into her arguments, one should not assume a priori that they reflect textual records. Thus, independent consideration of these various elements may have strengthened, or perhaps nuanced, her conclusions regarding the sea as a mediator.
In conclusion, Beaulieu’s work is a wonderful contribution the Classical Studies. The price ($79.95) is unfortunate because it will make her work more difficult to disseminate and less accessible. This is not her fault, though. While there may be other works among the “sea” of research (please forgive the pun), her work is essential inasmuch as it is quite understandable the average non-specialist. While it may not be the most helpful book for specialists, it is a valuable book for smaller libraries seeking comprehensive, yet digestible, works on Greek mythology.
Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2016.07.23
Marie-Claire Beaulieu, The Sea in the Greek Imagination. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. Pp. ix, 267. ISBN 9780812247657. $79.95.
Reviewed by David M Reis, University of Oregon (dreis@uoregon.edu)
Preview
The day after Britain’s historic decision to leave the European Union, David Cameron promptly announced his resignation. “I will do everything I can as prime minister to steady the ship over the coming weeks and months,” he declared, “but I do not think it would be right for me to try to be the captain that steers our country to its next destination.” For his part, Boris Johnson, Cameron’s political adversary, stressed that the vote would provide the United Kingdom with greater autonomy and security: “we can control our borders in a way that is not discriminatory but fair and balanced and take the wind out of the sails of the extremists and those who would play politics with immigration.” And in response to those concerned that Brexit would threaten Britain’s European identity, Johnson reassured his audience that sea crossings would continue, ensuring the islanders that they had a “wonderful future as Europeans, travelling to the continent, understanding the languages and the cultures that make up our common European civilisation, continuing to interact with the peoples of other countries in a way that is open and friendly and outward looking.”
The nautical imagery evoked in these comments is particularly apt for an island state currently reflecting on its place in European society. For inhabitants of these spaces, the sea can both connect and divide. As Johnson intimates, the waters may be seen as a passageway that links Great Britain with continental Europe, enabling the two to maintain a sense of shared identity. Yet as Cameron’s speech notes, the sea also acts as a boundary, an aquatic frontier that, when traversed, leads the traveller from one state of existence to another. These themes of identity and movement, or the construction of identity through stories of interactions with the sea, receive examination in Beaulieu’s creative and insightful study. Her central argument is that the sea represents a mediating space that “separates the visible and invisible worlds and marks the difference between men, gods, and the dead” (16). As such, it plays a prominent role in Greek literature, featuring in a range of stories, from tales of social integration and isolation to mythic explorations of cosmic travelers, otherworldly terrain, and apotheosis.
Beaulieu positions her book in a long line of studies that have explored the Greeks’ perceptions of the sea through myth, ritual, art, and poetry. While this work has yielded important insights on specific topics, it has not, according to Beaulieu, offered a more comprehensive treatment of the sea as part of the real and imagined landscape of the Greek mentality. To address the sea more systematically, Beaulieu presents six case studies that explore the dynamic interaction between the “real” sea and the imaginary significations it inspires in storytelling. To attend to such a broad collection of material, Beaulieu opts for an eclectic methodological approach that alternates between synchronic and diachronic analysis, thus charting a middle ground between previous research that focused on either narrative questions or chronological issues.
Beaulieu’s first chapter surveys perceptions of the sea from the Archaic through Roman periods. The Homeric image of the sea as boundless space signals its ability to resist simple understanding: authors may describe it alternatively as dark or gleaming, liquid or solid, and a plane or abyss. A persistent motif, however, is the notion of the sea as a passageway, one that enables communication between peoples but presents its travellers with innumerable dangers. Foremost among these dangers is death, and it is thus not surprising that the poets envisioned the sea as the space between civilization and Ocean, the river marking the boundary between the living and dead. Complementing this geographical positioning of the sea in physical space is a “vertical” conception that positions it as the intermediary between mortality and immortality. Mythicists routinely speak of the sea as a site of exchange between humans and the gods. It is where Poseidon and other divinities reside and descents to and ascents from Hades take place. The sea’s role in transitions from life to death also help explain the prominence of nekyomanteia near the seas and the use of seawater in funerary rituals.
The second chapter examines the role of the sea in the coming-of-age stories of Perseus (Pind. Pyth. 10), Theseus (Bacch. Ode 17), and Jason (Pind. Pyth. 4). In each hymn, Pindar and Bacchylides utilize the sea crossings of heroes as metaphors to resolve current social and political tensions and to establish proper behavior for elite men. Perseus’ journey to the otherworldly land of the Hyperboreans is designed to praise the leading aristocrats in Thessaly for their noble lineage, divine favor, and future joy in the land of the dead. In the story of Theseus, Bacchylides recounts the hero’s defeat of King Minos in a contest while on board a ship sailing to Crete. Theseus defends a young girl subject to the aggressions of the Cretan king, demonstrates his divine lineage through Poseidon by visiting his father’s residence in the sea, and returns with gifts that make him an attractive marriage candidate. For Beaulieu, this myth reinforces the notion of just rule, a point designed to defend Athens’ position of leadership in the Delian League, and contrasts a tyrannical understanding of sexuality with an aristocratic view of marriage. Pindar scores a similar political point, this time for the Euphemid family in Cyrene, by narrating Jason’s sea voyage to Colchis. Here the poet recalls that Medea had prophesied that the descendants of Euphemus, a member of Jason’s expedition, were destined to found Cyrene. Having underscored their legitimacy, he then invites his audience to view the sea journey of Jason as a model for political rule in Cyrene: just as the hero’s quest enabled him to overcome political opposition in Iolcos, so too should the city celebrate the restoration of peace through the return to the throne of the legitimate Euphemid king.
Beaulieu turns to myths of women and the sea in the third chapter. An examination of the stories of Danae, Auge, and Rhoeo reveals a common pattern: a god or hero rapes a young, unmarried woman, which causes family disorder that the father attempts to resolve by imprisoning his daughter (and sometimes the son) in a chest and casting it out to sea. While Auge and Rhoeo emerge from this symbolic death to become reintegrated into society through marriage to kings and the subsequent legitimation of their sons (one becomes king of the Mysians, the other a prophet and king of Delos through his divine father Apollo), the status of Danae remains ambiguous, experiencing a failed marriage that leads to continued suffering and, ultimately, her status as the bride of Hades. In all of these myths, however, the sea functions as an indeterminate space for women who, as unmarried mothers, do not fit neatly into the social order and thus hover between life and death.
Greek literature is replete with descriptions of real and mythical creatures that inhabited the sea. Among these, the dolphin distinguishes itself as an animal with close connections to seafarers. In fact, as Beaulieu demonstrates in the fourth chapter, writers assigned the dolphin certain human-like traits that made it a mediating figure, between both the living and dead and humans and gods. An illustration of this motif appears in the story of Arion, who encounters sailors who steal his valuables and give him the choice of being killed on their ship or jumping into the sea. Arion chooses the latter, a katabasis into the underworld where he meets the gods (likely Poseidon) and then a dolphin, who aids in his anabasis by transporting him to Taenarum, a site known to the ancient world as the gateway to the underworld. The dolphin also assists Hesiod and Melicertes in their transitions from death to afterlife. For example, when the poet is murdered and thrown into the sea, a dolphin, acting as an agent of Poseidon, recovers the body and deposits it on land. When villagers discover it, they give it a burial at the shrine of Nemean Zeus, thus cementing the poet’s reputation as beloved by the gods. The dolphin also figures prominently in myths of colonization, saving figures who ultimately founded new societies on Lesbos, at Tarentum, and at Delphi.
The fifth chapter interprets instances of leaping into the sea as acts of boundary crossing. While these stories can represent a movement from life to death, as in the case of those who jump off the White Rock to enter Hades, or the Hyperboreans, who, when they have had their fill of the good life, enter the afterlife by diving off a rock. In contrast to this serene image, Hellenistic poets often associate leaping into the sea with women who see the act as a countermeasure against the advances of unwanted suitors. The leap not only relieves them of their distress, it also culminates in an apotheosis. In these stories, the sea effects a personal transformation while, paradoxically, ensuring that the women will remain virgins never fully integrated into society. Instead, they consign themselves to occupying liminal space, which mythicists often underscore by describing leaping women changing into marine birds, amphibious animals that are continuously in transition.
The final chapter investigates the relationship between Dionysus and the sea through the Homeric Hymn to Dionysus, later literary interpreters, and related iconography. Beaulieu shows that in this famous encounter with Dionysus, Seneca and Nonnus invest the scene with funerary motifs that affirm the pirates’ jump into the sea as a movement from the human realm to a death-like state. Yet as they enter the waters, the pirates become dolphins, creatures closely associated with Dionysus. Rather than dying, they undergo a psychological transformation caused by a mania characteristic of the Dionysiac symposium: those who were once the god’s enemies, it would appear, have now become his votaries, reveling in the watery depths, suspended, like Dionysus’ human worshipers, between life and death.
Beaulieu has collected a disparate body of evidence, both literary and iconographic, to present a compelling case for Greek perceptions of the sea. She defends her argument with close readings of a wide range of literature, which is often illuminated through careful analysis of artistic symbolism. Specialists will appreciate the new insights that emerge from this interdisciplinary work. Moreover, her interest in the interplay of the “real” sea and the sea of the imagination is also provocative, in that it reminds the reader of the significance of the “geographies of the mind,” those “cultural constructs that shape men’s perceptions of the world and of their own place in it” (8). In other words, while the sea may exist in physical space, its creation through the imaginative power of human thought reveals how an interpreter’s values and interests in identity formation combine to produce a distinct socio-cultural map.
THE SEA IN THE GREEK IMAGINATION
Posted on 15 June 2016
Marie-Claire Beaulieu
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Pennsylvania (2016) h/b 267pp £52.00 (ISBN 9780812247657)
As is made clear from the outset, this is not a comprehensive evaluation of the Greek view of the sea. Rather it is a series of six case studies, which in B.’s words ‘address the role of the sea as a boundary between the visible and invisible world, or between the world of humans, the gods, and the dead’: voyages of heroes (such as Heracles and Odysseus), the sea as locus for heroic comings-of-age (such as those of Theseus and Jason), girls set adrift in chests (such as Danae), mortals or mortal remains rescued by dolphins (such as the live Arion and Hesiod’s corpse), gods, heroes, heroines and mortals who leap into the sea (such as Ino and Sappho) and finally Dionysus and the sea.
Drawing on mythology, ritual practice and a wealth of academic material, B. argues that in the Greek imagination the sterile salt water of the sea occupies a medial position not only between ports on dry land but between the fertile fresh waters of rivers and the all-encircling Ocean as well as between the upper sky and the underworld. It is ‘the meeting point of different planes of reality’, its water a liminal, purifying element, contact with which can effect lasting changes in physical or psychological status. Initiates into the Eleusinian Mysteries bathe in the sea as part of their process of rebirth, statues are dipped into the sea to re-energize their sanctity, and in a host of myths heroes and heroines experience transformative adventures at sea.
At the same time, the sea is home to a host of creatures, some malignant (such as Scylla and the fish which eat the corpses of the drowned), some benign (such as dolphins, a creature ‘at the center of a web of relations between animals, men, the dead, and the gods’), and others who must be tamed in order that they might benefit mankind (such as the prophesying shape-shifting Old Man of the Sea, or the Graeae). Many of the book’s arguments are compelling and in the final chapter B.’s brief analysis of (albeit Etruscan) wall-paintings—including the famous Paestum diver leaping into death and transfiguration—convincingly ties together many of them.
Well illustrated with 27 useful black-and-white photographs, and containing quotations from Greek and Latin authors both in the original language and in translation, this is a volume which will enhance the understanding of scholars of classical literature and beliefs as well as provoking debate about those areas which it does not cover.
David Stuttard