BiblioVault - Books about Its Rise

Peter Brown

University of Chicago Press

Following the fall of the Roman Empire in the West, the cult of the saints was the dominant form of religion in Christian Europe. In this elegantly written work, Peter Brown explores the role of tombs, shrines, relics, and pilgrimages connected with the sacred bodies of the saints. He shows how men and women living in harsh and sometimes barbaric times relied upon the merciful intercession of the holy dead to obtain justice, forgiveness, and to find new ways to accept their fellows. Challenging the common treatment of the cult as an outbreak of superstition among the lower classes, Brown demonstrates how this form of religiousity engaged the finest minds of the Church and elicited from members of the educated upper classes some of their most splendid achievements in poetry, literature, and the patronage of the arts.

"Brown has an international reputation for his fine style, a style he here turns on to illuminate the cult of the saints. Christianity was born without such a cult; it took rise and that rise needs chronicling. Brown has a gift for the memorable phrase and sees what the passersby have often overlooked. An eye-opener on an important but neglected phase of Western development."—The Christian Century

"Brilliantly original and highly sophisticated . . . . [The Cult of the Saints] is based on great learning in several disciplines, and the story is told with an exceptional appreciation for the broad social context. Students of many aspects of medieval culture, especially popular religion, will want to consult this work."—Bennett D. Hill, Library Journal

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The Cult of the Saints

Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity, Enlarged Edition

Peter Brown

University of Chicago Press, 2014

In this groundbreaking work, Peter Brown explores how the worship of saints and their corporeal remains became central to religious life in Western Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire. During this period, earthly remnants served as a heavenly connection, and their veneration is a fascinating window into the cultural mood of a region in transition.

Brown challenges the long-held “two-tier” idea of religion that separated the religious practices of the sophisticated elites from those of the superstitious masses, instead arguing that the cult of the saints crossed boundaries and played a dynamic part in both the Christian faith and the larger world of late antiquity. He shows how men and women living in harsh and sometimes barbaric times relied upon the holy dead to obtain justice, forgiveness, and power, and how a single sainted hair could inspire great thinkers and great artists.

An essential text by one of the foremost scholars of European history, this expanded edition includes a new preface from Brown, which presents new ideas based on subsequent scholarship.

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Entrepreneurial Litigation

Its Rise, Fall, and Future

John C. Coffee, Jr.

Harvard University Press, 2015

Uniquely in the United States, lawyers litigate large cases on behalf of many claimants who could not afford to sue individually. In these class actions, attorneys act typically as risk-taking entrepreneurs, effectively hiring the client rather than acting as the client’s agent. Lawyer-financed, lawyer-controlled, and lawyer-settled, such entrepreneurial litigation invites lawyers to sometimes act more in their own interest than in the interest of their clients. And because class litigation aggregates many claims, defendants object that its massive scale amounts to legalized extortion. Yet, without such devices as the class action and contingent fees, many meritorious claims would never be asserted.

John Coffee examines the dilemmas surrounding entrepreneurial litigation in a variety of specific contexts, including derivative actions, securities class actions, merger litigation, and mass tort litigation. His concise history traces how practices developed since the early days of the Republic, exploded at the end of the twentieth century, and then waned as Supreme Court decisions and legislation sharply curtailed the reach of entrepreneurial litigation. In an evenhanded account, Coffee assesses both the strengths and weaknesses of entrepreneurial litigation and proposes a number of reforms to achieve a fairer balance. His goal is to save the class action, not discard it, and to make private enforcement of law more democratically accountable. Taking a global perspective, he also considers the feasibility of exporting a modified form of entrepreneurial litigation to other countries that are today seeking a mechanism for aggregate representation.

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The IS-LM Model

Its Rise, Fall, and Strange Persistence, Volume 36

Michel De Vroey and Kevin D. Hoover, eds.

Duke University Press

For some twenty-five years after the end of the Second World War, the IS-LM model dominated macroeconomics. Inspired by the work of John Maynard Keynes, this model demonstrates the relationship among savings, income, investments, and interest rates, showing the point at which the interaction of these elements produces “equilibrium” in an economy. With the advent of the new classical macroeconomics in the early 1970s, the dominance of the IS-LM model was effectively challenged. While no longer central to the graduate training of most macroeconomists or to cutting-edge macroeconomic research, the IS-LM model continues to be a mainstay of undergraduate textbooks, to find wide use in applied macroeconomics, and to lie at the conceptual core of most government and commercial macroeconometric models. This volume, the annual supplement to History of Political Economy, explores the rise, the fall, and the persistence of the IS-LM model. In addition to presenting papers from the History of Political Economy conference held at Duke University in April 2003, the volume includes the text of an address delivered at the conference by Nobel laureate Robert E. Lucas Jr., one of the central players in the intellectual movement that dethroned the IS-LM model.

Contributors. Roger E. Backhouse, Mauro Boianovsky, Michael Bordo, David Colander, William Darity Jr., Michel De Vroey, Robert W. Dimand, Kevin D. Hoover, David Laidler, Robert E. Lucas Jr., Edward Nelson, Goulven Rubin, Anna Schwartz, Scott Sumner, Warren Young

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