1. Hope and Futurity: Emotions, Strategies and Virtues in the Premodern World -- 2. From Superstition to Agency: Ancient and Modern Approaches to Hope -- 3. Searching for Hope in Roman Antiquity: Changing Patterns of Discourses and Agency -- 4. Is there Hope for the Barbarian? Imagining Outgroup Futurities in Ammianus Marcellinus and Eunapius of Sardis -- 5. Lost Hopes? Parental Hope and the Death of Children in Ancient Rome -- 6. Looking Back for Hope: Patterns of Salvation and Positive Performances in the Third-Century Synagogue at Dura Europos -- 7. caelestia regna petisti: Seeking Hope in Late Antique Funerary Verse Inscription -- 8. Family Crises and the Construction of Hope: The Case of Michael Psellos -- 9. Earthly Ambitions and Otherworldly Hopes in Twelfth-Century Constantinople: Nicholas Kallikles’ Funerary Epigrams for the Komnenian Elite -- 10. Heretical Hope: Striving for Salvation and the Good Death in Medieval Languedoc -- 11. Latter-day Lazaruses: Hoping to Avoid Death in the Late Middle Ages -- 12. Infirmity, Hope, and Lived Religion in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe -- 13. Hope, Nostalgia and the Use of Emotions in Early Modern Medicine -- 14. Constructing and Performing Hope in the Premodern World.

Open Access

This open access book provides the first scholarly account of the role of hope and hopefulness from the perspective of social and cultural life in ancient, medieval and early modern societies. This edited collection brings together fourteen chapters based on case-studies from its contributors, along with a theoretical chapter that serves as the introduction. Throughout history, people have gone on with their lives despite many kinds of trials and tribulations. In this, hope, understood as a future-oriented positive disposition, has been a major driving force to manage uncertainty, mitigate despair, and to give meaning to living. This book analyzes these life situations and changing responses to them in the context of hope and futurity in a longue durée perspective. Oana-Maria Cojocaru is an Independent Researcher based in Bucharest, Romania. Ville Vuolanto is Senior Lecturer in History at Tampere University, Finland.

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