Edith Hall MEDEA : A LIFE with Alistair Pitts
About this Event
Medea : A Life
Mothers who K*ll their children are universally abhorred but perennially fascinating. In this book, the award-winning scholar Edith Hall explores the possibility that Medea, mythology's archetypal murderous mother, could be based on a historical figure who migrated to Greece in the late Bronze Age.
Medea has appeared in countless works of art-plays, operas, musicals, ballets, movies, poems, paintings, sculptures, and novels-but until now no one has written a biography of her. Through meticulous research and fast-paced narrative, Hall brings new life to Medea's story, from her lonely childhood on the shores of the Black Sea through her dramatic escape with Jason and the Argonauts, the murders and attempted palace coup in Thessaly, her deadly revenge in Corinth, and her final exile in Athens.
In reframing a figure long reduced to villainy, Hall restores Medea's humanity, illuminating a woman pushed to extremes by betrayal and displacement-a brilliant, embattled outsider navigating the violent patriarchies of the ancient Mediterranean.
Edith Hall
Edith Hall is Professor in the department of classics and ancient history at Durham University. She travels across Britain and the world speaking about the ancient world to schools, universities, theatre companies and to the general public and media.
Her specialism is ancient Greek literature, but she enjoys putting the pleasure as well as the rigour into all aspects of ancient Greek and Roman history, society, and thought.
Her current research investigates ecological issues in ancient myth, epic and drama, Aristotle’s presences beyond the Academy, Aristotle’s writing styles, the afterlives of women in the Aeneid and Classics and Social Class in the North-East of England.
Edith has now published more than thirty books, broadcasts frequently on radio and television, works as consultant with professional theatres, lectures all over the world, and publishes widely in academic and mainstream journals and newspapers.
Alistair Pitts
Ally Pitts is a freelance writer and speaker on culture, history, marketing, and neurodiversity from Milton Keynes, and currently based in Oxford.
After completing a history degree at Lancaster University in the mid 2000s, he spent five years working as an English language teacher in Moscow in the first half of the 2010s, leaving in 2014, the year of Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea. After a brief spell as a museum tour guide at the Lascaris War Rooms in Malta, he moved back to the UK and spent his mid-30s in the historic railway town of Wolverton.
His writing has appeared in outlets including The London Evening Standard, Film Stories Magazine, and Milton Keynes Pulse, and he recently recorded an audio commentary for Eureka Entertainment’s Blu-ray release of the East German 1959 adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Tinderbox.
A prolific independent podcaster, and lapsed guitarist, he is also the creator and host of the long running A Russian and Soviet Movie Podcast, the co-host of Gentlemen Don’t Get Caught: A track-by-track R.E.M. podcast, and he regularly introduces films at Oxford’s Ultimate Picture Palace.
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