Contributors
Emma Álvarez-Tabío Albo
Eric Felipe-Barkin
Anke Birkenmaier
Velia Cecilia Bobes
Mario Coyula-Cowley
Elisabeth Enenbach
Sujatha Fernandes
Jill Hamberg
Patricio del Real
Cecelia Lawless
Jacqueline Loss
Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo
Antonio José Ponte
Nicolás Quintana
Jose Quiroga
Laura Redruello
Rafael Rojas
Joseph L. Scarpaci
Esther Whitfield
According to a commonplace narrative, the rise of modern political thought in the West resulted from secularization—the exclusion of religious arguments from political discourse. But in this pathbreaking work, Eric Nelson argues that this familiar story is wrong. Instead, he contends, political thought in early-modern Europe became less, not more, secular with time, and it was the Christian encounter with Hebrew sources that provoked this radical transformation.
During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Christian scholars began to regard the Hebrew Bible as a political constitution designed by God for the children of Israel. Newly available rabbinic materials became authoritative guides to the institutions and practices of the perfect republic. This thinking resulted in a sweeping reorientation of political commitments. In the book’s central chapters, Nelson identifies three transformative claims introduced into European political theory by the Hebrew revival: the argument that republics are the only legitimate regimes; the idea that the state should coercively maintain an egalitarian distribution of property; and the belief that a godly republic would tolerate religious diversity. One major consequence of Nelson’s work is that the revolutionary politics of John Milton, James Harrington, and Thomas Hobbes appear in a brand-new light.
Nelson demonstrates that central features of modern political thought emerged from an attempt to emulate a constitution designed by God. This paradox, a reminder that while we may live in a secular age, we owe our politics to an age of religious fervor, in turn illuminates fault lines in contemporary political discourse.
The American West has taken on a rich and evocative array of regional identities since the late nineteenth century. Wilderness wonderland, Hispanic borderland, homesteader’s frontier, cattle kingdom, urban dynamo, Native American homeland. Hell of a Vision explores the evolution of these diverse identities during the twentieth century, revealing how Western regionalism has been defined by generations of people seeking to understand the West’s vast landscapes and varied cultures.
Focusing on the American West from the 1890s up to the present, Dorman provides us with a wide-ranging view of the impact of regionalist ideas in pop culture and diverse fields such as geography, land-use planning, anthropology, journalism, and environmental policy-making.
Going well beyond the realm of literature, Dorman broadens the discussion by examining a unique mix of texts. He looks at major novelists such as Cather, Steinbeck, and Stegner, as well as leading Native American writers. But he also analyzes a variety of nonliterary sources in his book, such as government reports, planning documents, and environmental impact studies.
Hell of a Vision is a compelling journey through the modern history of the American West—a key region in the nation of regions known as the United States.
The prevailing assumption regarding the Victorians’ relationship to ancient Greece is that Greek knowledge constituted an exclusive discourse within elite male domains. Heretical Hellenism: Women Writers, Ancient Greece, and the Victorian Popular Imagination challenges that theory and argues that while the information women received from popular sources was fragmentary and often fostered intellectual insecurities, it was precisely the ineffability of the Greek world refracted through popular sources and reconceived through new fields of study that appealed to women writers’ imaginations.
Examining underconsidered sources such as theater history and popular journals, Shanyn Fiske uncovers the many ways that women acquired knowledge of Greek literature, history, and philosophy without formal classical training. Through discussions of women writers such as Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Jane Harrison, Heretical Hellenism demonstrates that women established the foundations of a heretical challenge to traditional humanist assumptions about the uniformity of classical knowledge and about women’s place in literary history.
Heretical Hellenism provides a historical rationale for a more expansive definition of classical knowledge and offers an interdisciplinary method for understanding the place of classics both in the nineteenth century and in our own time.
For thousands of years, the region of Palestine and the East Mediterranean has been denied an indigenous voice for an inclusive history. Three religions ascribe their origins to this part of the world, appropriating and re-appropriating the "Holy Land" time and again.
Hidden Histories offers a powerful corrective to common understandings. It emphasizes Palestine's long history and dispels many old and new myths – covering issues of religious origins and sacred sites, identity and self-colonization, and the retrieval of ancient heritage.
The first half of the fourteen essays deal with historical issues including Native Americans, pioneer settlement, slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction, industrialization, the Great Depression, migration, and finally, modernization. The remaining essays take a more cultural focus, addressing stereotypes, music, folklife, language, literature, and religion.
Bringing together many of the most prestigious scholars in Appalachian studies, this volume has been designed for general and classroom use, and includes suggestions for further reading.
Among the great civilizations of the world, Islam remains an enigma to Western readers. Now, in a beautifully illustrated historical atlas, noted scholar of religion Malise Ruthven recounts the fascinating and important history of the Islamic world.
From the birth of the prophet Muhammed to the independence of post-Soviet Muslim states in Central Asia, this accessible and informative atlas explains the historical evolution of Islamic societies. Short essays cover a wide variety of themes, including the central roles played by sharia (divine law) and fiqh (jurisprudence); philosophy; arts and architecture; the Muslim city; trade, commerce, and manufacturing; marriage and family life; tribal distributions; kinship and dynastic power; ritual and devotional practices; Sufism; modernist and reformist trends; the European domination of the Islamic world; the rise of the modern national state; oil exports and arms imports; and Muslim populations in non-Muslim countries, including the United States.
Lucid and inviting full-color maps chronicle the changing internal and external boundaries of the Islamic world, showing the principal trade routes through which goods, ideas, and customs spread. Ruthven traces the impact of various Islamic dynasties in art and architecture and shows the distribution of sects and religious minorities, the structure of Islamic cities, and the distribution of resources. Among the book's valuable contributions is the incorporation of the often neglected geographical and environmental factors, from the Fertile Crescent to the North African desert, that have helped shape Islamic history.
Rich in narrative and visual detail that illuminates the story of Islamic civilization, this timely atlas is an indispensable resource to anyone interested in world history and religion.
An insightful historical account of Phoenicia that illustrates its cities, culture, and daily life
Hélène Sader presents the history and archaeology of Phoenicia based on the available contemporary written sources and the results of archaeological excavations in Phoenicia proper. Sader explores the origin of the term Phoenicia; the political and geographical history of the city-states Arwad, Byblos, Sidon, and Tyre; and topography, climate, and natural resources of the Phoenician homeland. Her limited focus on Phoenicia proper, in contrast to previous studies that included information from Phoenician colonies, presents the bare realities of the opportunities and difficulties shaping Phoenician life. Sader’s evaluation and synthesis of the evidence offers a corrective to the common assumption of a unified Phoenician kingdom.
Features
First of the widely celebrated and sumptuously illustrated series, this book reveals in intimate detail what life was really like in the ancient world. Behind the vast panorama of the pagan Roman empire, the reader discovers the intimate daily lives of citizens and slaves—from concepts of manhood and sexuality to marriage and the family, the roles of women, chastity and contraception, techniques of childbirth, homosexuality, religion, the meaning of virtue, and the separation of private and public spaces.
The emergence of Christianity in the West and the triumph of Christian morality with its emphasis on abstinence, celibacy, and austerity is startlingly contrasted with the profane and undisciplined private life of the Byzantine Empire. Using illuminating motifs, the authors weave a rich, colorful fabric ornamented with the results of new research and the broad interpretations that only masters of the subject can provide.
In this work of sweeping erudition, one of our foremost historians of early Christianity considers a variety of theoretical critiques to examine the problems and opportunities posed by the ways in which history is written. Elizabeth Clark argues forcefully for a renewal of the study of premodern Western history through engagement with the kinds of critical methods that have transformed other humanities disciplines in recent decades.
History, Theory, Text provides a user-friendly survey of crucial developments in nineteenth- and twentieth-century debates surrounding history, philosophy, and critical theory. Beginning with the "noble dream" of "history as it really was" in the works of Leopold von Ranke, Clark goes on to review Anglo-American philosophies of history, schools of twentieth-century historiography, structuralism, the debate over narrative history, the changing fate of the history of ideas, and the impact of interpretive anthropology and literary theory on current historical scholarship. In a concluding chapter she offers some practical case studies to illustrate how attending to theoretical considerations can illuminate the study of premodernity.
Written with energy and clarity, History, Theory, Text is a clarion call to historians for richer and more imaginative use of contemporary theory.
Greek tragedy has held sway over the imagination of audiences for well over two millennia. This collection of essays on Athenian drama, the proceedings of a conference held at the University of Texas at Austin in 1992, demonstrates that Greek tragedy still retains its power to provoke debate and to engage the interest of specialists and non-classicists alike.
The book includes essays by seven of the foremost scholars of Greek drama—Helene Foley, Michelle Gellrich, Peter W. Rose, David Rosenbloom, Richard Seaford, Bernd Seidensticker, and Froma I. Zeitlin. These writers explore the work of all three great tragedians, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and approach them from a variety of perspectives on history and theory, including poststructuralism and Marxism. They investigate the possibilities for coordinating theoretically informed readings of tragedy with a renewed attention to the pressure of material history within those texts. The collection thus represents a response within classics to "New Historicism" and the debates it has generated within related literary disciplines.
The collapse of China’s Qing dynasty coincided roughly with discoveries that helped revolutionize views of infectious disease. Together, these parallel developments generated a set of paradigm shifts in the understanding of society, the individual, as well as the cultural matrix that mediates between them. In Homesickness, Carlos Rojas examines an array of Chinese literary and cinematic tropes of illness, arguing that these works approach sickness not solely as a symptom of dysfunction but more importantly as a key to its potential solution.
Rojas focuses on a condition he calls “homesickness”—referring to a discomfort caused not by a longing for home but by an excessive proximity to it. The product of a dialectics of internal alienation and self-differentiation, this inverse homesickness marks a movement away from the “home,” conceived as spaces associated with the nation, the family, and the individual body. The result is a productive dynamism that gives rise to the possibility of long-term health. Without sickness, in other words, there could be no health.
Through a set of detailed analyses of works from China, Greater China, and the global Chinese diaspora—ranging from late-imperial figures such as Liu E and Zeng Pu to contemporary figures such as Yan Lianke and Tsai Ming-liang—Rojas asserts that the very possibility of health is predicated on this condition of homesickness.
How have major civilizations of the last two millennia treated people who were attracted to their own sex? In a narrative tour de force, Louis Crompton chronicles the lives and achievements of homosexual men and women alongside a darker history of persecution, as he compares the Christian West with the cultures of ancient Greece and Rome, Arab Spain, imperial China, and pre-Meiji Japan.
Ancient Greek culture celebrated same-sex love in history, literature, and art, making high claims for its moral influence. By contrast, Jewish religious leaders in the sixth century BCE branded male homosexuality as a capital offense and, later, blamed it for the destruction of the biblical city of Sodom. When these two traditions collided in Christian Rome during the late empire, the tragic repercussions were felt throughout Europe and the New World.
Louis Crompton traces Church-inspired mutilation, torture, and burning of “sodomites” in sixth-century Byzantium, medieval France, Renaissance Italy, and in Spain under the Inquisition. But Protestant authorities were equally committed to the execution of homosexuals in the Netherlands, Calvin’s Geneva, and Georgian England. The root cause was religious superstition, abetted by political ambition and sheer greed. Yet from this cauldron of fears and desires, homoerotic themes surfaced in the art of the Renaissance masters—Donatello, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Sodoma, Cellini, and Caravaggio—often intertwined with Christian motifs. Homosexuality also flourished in the court intrigues of Henry III of France, Queen Christina of Sweden, James I and William III of England, Queen Anne, and Frederick the Great.
Anti-homosexual atrocities committed in the West contrast starkly with the more tolerant traditions of premodern China and Japan, as revealed in poetry, fiction, and art and in the lives of emperors, shoguns, Buddhist priests, scholars, and actors. In the samurai tradition of Japan, Crompton makes clear, the celebration of same-sex love rivaled that of ancient Greece.
Sweeping in scope, elegantly crafted, and lavishly illustrated, Homosexuality and Civilization is a stunning exploration of a rich and terrible past.
Contributors. John Bloom, Gerry Bloustein, Aniko Bodroghkozy, Diane Brooks, Peter Chvany, Elana Crane, Alexander Doty, Rob Drew, Stephen Duncombe, Nick Evans, Eric Freedman, Joy Fuqua, Tony Grajeda, Katherine Green, John Hartley, Heather Hendershot, Henry Jenkins, Eithne Johnson, Louis Kaplan, Maria Koundoura, Sharon Mazer, Anna McCarthy, Tara McPherson, Angela Ndalianis, Edward O’Neill, Catherine Palmer, Roberta Pearson, Elayne Rapping, Eric Schaefer, Jane Shattuc, Greg Smith, Ellen Strain, Matthew Tinkhom, William Uricchio, Amy Villarego, Robyn Warhol, Charles Weigl, Alan Wexelblat, Pamela Robertson Wojcik, Nabeel Zuberi
Cundill Prize Finalist
A Financial Times Book of the Year
A Spectator Book of the Year
A Five Books Book of the Year
The Mongols are known for one thing: conquest. But in this first comprehensive history of the Horde, the western portion of the Mongol empire that arose after the death of Chinggis Khan, Marie Favereau takes us inside one of the most powerful engines of economic integration in world history to show that their accomplishments extended far beyond the battlefield. Central to the extraordinary commercial boom that brought distant civilizations in contact for the first time, the Horde had a unique political regime—a complex power-sharing arrangement between the khan and nobility—that rewarded skillful administrators and fostered a mobile, innovative economic order. From their capital on the lower Volga River, the Mongols influenced state structures in Russia and across the Islamic world, disseminated sophisticated theories about the natural world, and introduced new ideas of religious tolerance.
An eloquent, ambitious, and definitive portrait of an empire that has long been too little understood, The Horde challenges our assumptions that nomads are peripheral to history and makes it clear that we live in a world shaped by Mongols.
“The Mongols have been ill-served by history, the victims of an unfortunate mixture of prejudice and perplexity…The Horde flourished, in Favereau’s fresh, persuasive telling, precisely because it was not the one-trick homicidal rabble of legend.”
—Wall Street Journal
“Fascinating…The Mongols were a sophisticated people with an impressive talent for government and a sensitive relationship with the natural world…An impressively researched and intelligently reasoned book.”
—The Times
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