Political factions at Carthage cannot be identified beyond a simple polarity: supporters and opponents of Hannibal’s family, ‘Barcids’ and ‘anti-Barcids’. At Rome, the richer naming system has encouraged prosopographic studies, conjectures about political alliances based on kinship, marriage ties, and shared local origins. But more than temporary existence of such ‘groups’ is doubtful. It is also disputed whether Republican Rome was any sort of democracy: Polybius controversially claimed that tribunes of the plebs were there to do the people’s will. In the second Punic war, where we rely on Livy, elections do not look very democratic, but there is a special and temporary reason for this: demography. Casualties in the 218−216 disasters produced a top-heavy senate for years to come. The trials of the Scipios (180s) do not support the idea of groups but rather exemplify the ruling class’s concern to prevent ambitious individuals from upsetting a competitive equilibrium.

This chapter investigates names making a reference to the king or royal power, in particular names that contain the element šarru ‘king’. After elucidating the typology of these names and the changing conceptions of royalty that are reflected in them, it turns to the question, based on prosopography, of how such typological ‘Beamtennamen’ are actually represented among the names of officials, and to which degree names of this type are indicative of a specific socio-economic and administrative collocation of the name-bearers.

The second chapter explores how literary writing in the Romantic period denies and decries caricature. I describe a ’caricature talk’, dominated by anti-caricature rhetoric, that seeks to establish the quality, verisimilitude and representational justice of textual characterisations; and I explore how caricature talk constitutes formal realism in the literary criticism of the Romantic period. The second part of the chapter positions imaginative literary caricature in relation to anxiety about prospographic and personal caricature describing real people, providing essential context for Chapter 3’s discussion of character originality and realism.

Chapter 5 discusses methodologies for the analysis of social groups in ancient Egypt, addressing their benefits as well as their limitations. Anthropological study of kinship has usually been undertaken in living societies, but can also be tackled for cultures no longer existing Some methodologies used for social analysis in the past include the Lévi-Straussian notion of house societies, Social Network Analysis, prosopography, or sociography. The choice of method is reliant on the type of evidence that is available; in particular, the limited number of sources in ancient Egypt favours qualitative over quantitative analysis.

For that reason, I propose a model called koinography that combines suggestions from several of these approaches. It is based on the idea that social groups, and not individuals, should be treated as the preferred unit of social analysis, and that the factor of time is a fundamental tool to explore the position and role of that group in wider society. In particular, the model of the developmental cycle of the group originally proposed by Meyer Fortes has served as inspiration for the incorporation of a more dynamic and diachronic dimension into the study of ancient Egyptian groups.

The Introduction establishes the subject of this book, Irish Protestant nationalists, and argues that they constituted an important counterculture in the period. It links the historiography of Protestant nationalists with the competing ‘modernist’ and ‘perennialist’ perspectives on the origins of nationalism, and will argue that Ireland constitutes an important outlier, where both classically modernist and perennialist features co-existed, by reference to Irish history since the Tudor conquest. It argues that although parallels with the central European experience can be discerned, it is difficult to meaningfully place Protestant nationalists within frameworks put forward by scholars of continental Europe. The literature on Protestant nationalists is reviewed, and it is suggested that the way forward for historiography is to follow up the implications of the circles that have been reconstructed by biographers, and produce a collective biography that seeks to reconstruct the entire Protestant nationalist experience. The sources used in this book are discussed, and prosopography, the primary methodology which will be employed, is described and justified. The Introduction closes with a brief statistical summary of the Irish Protestant community in 1901.

The chapter summarizes the findings in the book, focusing on the need for new approaches to the study of Muslim historical writing. It begins by documenting the utility of the model proposed in chapter one for the case studies in chapters two through four. It then turns to more foundational questions about the nature of early Muslim historiography focusing on three areas: presuppositions that governed the craft of historical writing, the intended audiences of historical works, and the methods employed by historians. This chapter also explicitly rejects the arbitrary division between Sunni and Shi‘i historical works.

This chapter surveys recent scholarship in Muslim historiography and offers a new model for examining early Muslim historical works that draws on Late Antiquity. It also engages questions of audience and genre pertaining to Islamic historical writing.

This prosopography, or collective biography, gives a more rounded idea of the College and its people. Institutional histories can concentrate so much on the leadership, and the consequences of leaders’ decisions, that the reader may not discover very much about the centrality of the contributions others have made. In the College’s case, this means the teachers themselves. This selection includes some of the more celebrated (and therefore familiar) College figures, but also brings in from the shadows some who were once very influential, but now are largely forgotten; they often feature routinely in biographies (as, for example, R. O. Morris does for Michael Tippett), but usually with little to indicate the scope of the musical guidance they gave to their students. This prosopography cannot be, in any sense, comprehensive; rather, the criterion for inclusion is to illustrate a particular point or circumstance about the transmission of musical influence and the role that the College and its teachers have played in this.