This volume presents a penetrating interview and sixteen essays that explore key intersections of medieval religion and philosophy. With characteristic erudition and insight, RemiBrague focuses less on individual Christian, Jewish, and Muslim thinkers than on their relationships with one another. Their disparate philosophical worlds, Brague shows, were grounded in different models of revelation that engendered divergent interpretations of the ancient Greek sources they held in common. So, despite striking similarities in their solutions for the philosophical problems they all faced,...
This volume presents a penetrating interview and sixteen essays that explore key intersections of medieval religion and philosophy. With characteri...
In this compact and illuminating history, Georges Minois examines how a culture's attitudes about suicide reflect its larger beliefs and values--attitudes toward life and death, duty and honor, pain and pleasure. Minois begins his survey with classical Greece and Rome, where suicide was acceptable--even heroic--under some circumstances. With the rise of Christianity, however, suicide was unequivocally condemned as self-murder and an insult to God. With the Renaissance and its renewed interest in classical culture, suicide reemerged as a philosophical issue. Minois finds examples of...
In this compact and illuminating history, Georges Minois examines how a culture's attitudes about suicide reflect its larger beliefs and values--at...
Between the end of the Middle Ages and the eighteenth century, what methods were used to monitor and control the increasing number of texts--from the early handwritten books to the later, printed volumes--that were being put into circulation? In The Order of Books, Chartier examines the different systems required to regulate the world of writing through the centuries, from the registration of titles to the classification of works. The modern world has, he argues, directly inherited the products of this labor: the basic principle of referring to texts, the dream of a universal library,...
Between the end of the Middle Ages and the eighteenth century, what methods were used to monitor and control the increasing number of texts--from the ...
The law of God: these words conjure an image of Moses breaking the tablets at Mount Sinai, but the history of the alliance between law and divinity is so much longer, and its scope so much broader, than a single Judeo-Christian scene can possibly suggest. In his stunningly ambitious new history, Remi Brague goes back three thousand years to trace this idea of divine law in the West from prehistoric religions to modern times-giving new depth to today's discussions about the role of God in worldly affairs. Brague masterfully describes the differing conceptions of divine law in Judaic,...
The law of God: these words conjure an image of Moses breaking the tablets at Mount Sinai, but the history of the alliance between law and divinity is...
From the late Middle Ages to "The Marriage of Figaro" to Mel Gibson's "Braveheart," the ultimate symbol of feudal barbarism has been the "droit de cuissage," or right of a feudal lord to sleep with the bride of a vassal on her wedding night. The "droit de cuissage" even resurfaced in the debate over the French Penal Code of 1992 as a synonym for sexual harassment. But, as Alain Boureau elegantly demonstrates in this book, the "droit de cuissage" is a myth. Under contextual examination, nearly all the supposed evidence for this custom melts away yet belief in it has survived for seven...
From the late Middle Ages to "The Marriage of Figaro" to Mel Gibson's "Braveheart," the ultimate symbol of feudal barbarism has been the "droit de cui...
Christiane Klapisch-Zuber Lydia G. Cochrane David V. Herlihy
Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, a brilliant historian of the Annales school, skillfully uncovers the lives of ordinary Italians of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Tuscans in particular, young and old, rich, middle-class, and poor. From the extraordinarily detailed records kept by Florentine tax collectors and the equally precise ricordanze (household accounts with notations of events great and small), Klapisch-Zuber draws a living picture of the Tuscan household. We learn, for example, how children were named, how wet nurses were engaged, how marriages were negotiated and...
Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, a brilliant historian of the Annales school, skillfully uncovers the lives of ordinary Italians of the fourteenth and fifte...
Cultural history on a grand scale, this immensely readable book-the summation of decades of study by one of the world's great scholars of the book-is the story of writing from its very beginnings to its recent transformations through technology. Traversing four millennia, Martin offers a chronicle of writing as a cultural system, a means of communication, and a history of technologies. He shows how the written word originated, how it spread, and how it figured in the evolution of civilization. Using as his center the role of printing in making the written way of thinking dominant, Martin...
Cultural history on a grand scale, this immensely readable book-the summation of decades of study by one of the world's great scholars of the book-is ...
The Baroque, which stretched from the end of the sixteenth to the second half of the seventeenth century, is one of the most enigmatic eras in history. In this book, thirteen distinguished scholars develop a portrait of institutions, ideologies, intellectual themes, and social structures as they are reflected in Baroque personae, or characteristic social roles. Studying the statesman, soldier, financier, secretary, rebel, preacher, missionary, nun, witch, scientist, artist, and bourgeois, the essays depart dramatically from traditional accounts of this era. The statesman, for example, is...
The Baroque, which stretched from the end of the sixteenth to the second half of the seventeenth century, is one of the most enigmatic eras in history...
Perhaps more than in any other city, Venice has been shaped by its environment. The lagoon on which it was built isolated the city's inhabitants from mainland Europe, forcing them to look seaward for their survival and to establish a maritime empire that generated incalculable wealth, making Venice the envy of Renaissance Europe. In Venice Triumphant, Elisabeth Crouzet-Pavan provides a rich, multilayered history of Venice from Roman times to the sixteenth century. Instead of employing a rigidly chronological framework, she looks at the history of Venice thematically, focusing on the...
Perhaps more than in any other city, Venice has been shaped by its environment. The lagoon on which it was built isolated the city's inhabitants fr...
The importance of history has been powerfully reaffirmed in recent years by the appearance of major new authors, pathbreaking works, and fresh interpretations of historical events, trends, and methods. Responding to these developments, Roger Chartier engages several of the most influential writers of cultural history whose works have spread far beyond academic audiences to become part of contemporary cultural argument. Challenging the assertion that history is no more than a -fiction-making operation- Chartier examines the relationships between history and fiction and proposes new...
The importance of history has been powerfully reaffirmed in recent years by the appearance of major new authors, pathbreaking works, and fresh inte...
