Caroline Lawrence | |
---|---|
Born | 1954 |
Genre | Historical fiction |
Notable works | The Roman Mysteries |
Caroline Lawrence (born 1954) is an English American author, best known for The Roman Mysteries series of historical novels for children. The series is about a Roman girl called Flavia and her three friends: Nubia (a freed slave girl), Jonathan (a shunned Jewish boy) and Lupus (a beggar boy without a tongue). The series has won numerous awards and has been published in many different languages worldwide. In March 2010, Lawrence was commissioned to write another history mystery series of books called The Western Mysteries, set in Virginia City, Nevada Territory in the early 1860s.
Lawrence was born in London, England. Her American parents returned to the United States shortly afterwards and she grew up in Bakersfield, California with her younger brother and sister. Her father taught English and drama in a local high school and her mother was an artist.
When she was twelve, Caroline's family moved to Stanford University in northern California so that her father could study Linguistics. She afterwards studied Classics at Berkeley, where she won a Marshall Scholarship to Cambridge. [1] There, at Newnham College, she studied Classical Art and Archaeology.
After Cambridge, Caroline remained in England, and later took an MA in Hebrew and Jewish Studies at University College London. She then taught Latin, French and art at a small London primary school. In 2000 she wrote The Thieves of Ostia , the first in a series of children's adventure stories set in Ancient Rome, the book was published in 2001. The Roman Mysteries combine Caroline's love of art history, ancient languages and travel. Her other passions include cinema, jazz and London. Caroline has a son Simon, from a previous marriage, and she now lives by the Thames in London with her husband Richard, a graphic designer. In 2009, Caroline won the Classical Association Prize of £5000 for "a significant contribution to the public understanding of Classics". [2]
Lawrence has also worked on the University of Reading's educational website Romans Revealed, creating stories about Roman Britain closely based on archaeological finds. [3]
In 2013 she was chosen to be President of JACT (The Joint Association of Classical Teachers) following in the footsteps of Boris Johnson, Bettany Hughes and Paul Cartledge.
Associated non-fiction books include:
Ancient Greece was a northeastern Mediterranean civilization, existing from the Greek Dark Ages of the 12th–9th centuries BC to the end of classical antiquity, that comprised a loose collection of culturally and linguistically related city-states and other territories. Prior to the Roman period, most of these regions were officially unified once under the Kingdom of Macedon from 338 to 323 BC. In Western history, the era of classical antiquity was immediately followed by the Early Middle Ages and the Byzantine period.
Ostia Antica is an ancient Roman city and the port of Rome located at the mouth of the Tiber. It is near modern Ostia, 25 km (16 mi) southwest of Rome. Due to silting and the invasion of sand, the site now lies 3 km (2 mi) from the sea. The name Ostia derives from Latin os 'mouth'.
Gaius Valerius Flaccus was a 1st-century Roman poet who flourished during the "Silver Age" under the Flavian dynasty, and wrote a Latin Argonautica that owes a great deal to Apollonius of Rhodes' more famous epic.
Steven Saylor is an American author of historical novels. He is a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin, where he studied history and classics.
The Metamorphoses of Apuleius, which Augustine of Hippo referred to as The Golden Ass, is the only ancient Roman novel in Latin to survive in its entirety.
The Roman Mysteries is a series of historical novels for children by Caroline Lawrence. The first book, The Thieves of Ostia, was published in 2001, finishing with The Man from Pomegranate Street, published in 2009, and totaling 17 novels, plus a number of "mini-mysteries", spinoffs, and companion titles.
A Greek Slave is a musical comedy in two acts, first performed on 8 June 1898 at Daly's Theatre in London, produced by George Edwardes and ran for 349 performances. The score was composed by Sidney Jones with additional songs by Lionel Monckton and lyrics by Harry Greenbank and Adrian Ross. The libretto was written by Owen Hall. It starred Marie Tempest, Letty Lind, Hayden Coffin, Scott Russell, Huntley Wright and Rutland Barrington among other popular London stars. The show had a brief Broadway run in 1899.
The Cambridge Latin Course (CLC) is a series of textbooks published by Cambridge University Press, used to teach Latin to secondary school pupils. It provides a grounding in vocabulary, grammar and sense which allows progression through Common Entrance exams into a Secondary, or, Public School. First published in 1970, the series is in its fifth edition as of April 2019. It has reached high status in the United Kingdom, being the most-used Latin course in the country for secondary school pupils, and being used by 85% of Latin-teaching schools.
Scandal Takes a Holiday is a 2004 historical mystery crime novel by Lindsey Davis and the 16th book of the Marcus Didius Falco Mysteries series. Set in Ostia Antica during AD 76, the novel stars Marcus Didius Falco, informer and imperial agent. The title refers to the "holiday" taken by Infamia, gossip columnist of the Daily Gazette.
Flavia may refer to:
Edith Hall, is a British scholar of classics, specialising in ancient Greek literature and cultural history, and professor in the Department of Classics and Ancient History at Durham University. She is a Fellow of the British Academy. From 2006 until 2011 she held a chair at Royal Holloway, University of London, where she founded and directed the Centre for the Reception of Greece and Rome until November 2011. She resigned over a dispute regarding funding for classics after leading a public campaign, which was successful, to prevent cuts to or the closure of the Royal Holloway Classics department. Until 2022, she was a professor at the Department of Classics at King's College London. She also co-founded and is Consultant Director of the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama at Oxford University, Chair of the Gilbert Murray Trust, and Judge on the Stephen Spender Prize for poetry translation. Her prizewinning doctoral thesis was awarded at Oxford. In 2012 she was awarded a Humboldt Research Prize to study ancient Greek theatre in the Black Sea, and in 2014 she was elected to the Academy of Europe. She lives in Cambridgeshire.
The Code of Romulus is a children's novella by Caroline Lawrence, published in 2007 to celebrate the 10th anniversary of World Book Day. It is a re-publication of the short story Bread and Circuses that appeared in the anthology The Mammoth Book of Roman Whodunits published in 2003.
Jocelyn Mary Catherine Toynbee, was an English archaeologist and art historian. "In the mid-twentieth century she was the leading British scholar in Roman artistic studies and one of the recognized authorities in this field in the world." Having taught at St Hugh's College, Oxford, the University of Reading, and Newnham College, Cambridge, she became Laurence Professor of Classical Archaeology at the University of Cambridge from 1951 to 1962, the first and so far only female to hold this position.
Roman Mysteries is a television series based on the series of children's historical novels by Caroline Lawrence. It is reportedly the most expensive British children's TV series to date at £1 million per hour.
The study of the lives of women in classical Athens has been a significant part of classical scholarship since the 1970s. The knowledge of Athenian women's lives comes from a variety of ancient sources. Much of it is literary evidence, primarily from tragedy, comedy, and oratory; supplemented with archaeological sources such as epigraphy and pottery. All of these sources were created by—and mostly for—men: there is no surviving ancient testimony by classical Athenian women on their own lives.
Meet the Romans with Mary Beard is a 2012 BBC documentary series written and presented by Mary Beard about the ordinary citizens of Ancient Rome, the world's first metropolis. It was repeated in 2020.
Caroline Vout is a British classicist and art historian. As of 2019 she is a Professor in classics at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Christ's College. In 2021 she became Director of the Museum of Classical Archaeology, Cambridge.
Enemies at Home is a 2014 historical mystery crime novel by Lindsey Davis and the second book of the Flavia Alba Mysteries series. Set in Ancient Rome beginning in June AD 89, two months after the events of The Ides of April (2013), the novel stars Flavia Albia, the British-born adopted daughter of Marcus Didius Falco. Albia, a widow, works as a "delatrix" in ancient Rome, like Falco. The book's cover bears an image of two silver cups, one toppled, and a broken rope. It carries the strapline: "A Flavia Albia Novel".
Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity is a 1975 feminist history book by Sarah B. Pomeroy. The work covers the lives of women in antiquity from the Greek Dark Ages to the death of Constantine the Great. The book was one of the first English works on women's history in any period. It has been used as a textbook in many university-level courses on women in classical antiquity.
Janet DeLaine is Emeritus Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford and a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London. She is a Roman archaeologist whose research has focused on urban environments, with a particular focus on bath complexes, urban development and the building industry in the Roman world.