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3748 books match the query 'Europe' and 180 start with p

cover of Political Epistemics: The Secret Police, the Opposition, and the End of East German Socialism

Political Epistemics

The Secret Police, the Opposition, and the End of East German Socialism

Andreas Glaeser

University of Chicago Press, 2011

What does the durability of political institutions have to do with how actors form knowledge about them? Andreas Glaeser investigates this question in the context of a fascinating historical case: socialist East Germany’s unexpected self-dissolution in 1989. His analysis builds on extensive in-depth interviews with former secret police officers and the dissidents they tried to control as well as research into the documents both groups produced. In particular, Glaeser analyzes how these two opposing factions’ understanding of the socialist project came to change in response to countless everyday experiences. These investigations culminate in answers to two questions: why did the officers not defend socialism by force? And how was the formation of dissident understandings possible in a state that monopolized mass communication and group formation? He also explores why the Stasi, although always well informed about dissident activities, never developed a realistic understanding of the phenomenon of dissidence.

Out of this ambitious study, Glaeser extracts two distinct lines of thought. On the one hand he offers an epistemic account of socialism’s failure that differs markedly from existing explanations. On the other hand he develops a theory—a sociology of understanding—that shows us how knowledge can appear validated while it is at the same time completely misleading.

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cover of Political Justice in Budapest after World War II

Political Justice in Budapest after World War II

Andrea Peto

Central European University Press, 2015

In Hungary, which fell under Soviet influence at the end of World War II, those who had participated in the wartime atrocities were tried by so called people’s courts. This book analyses this process in an objective, quantitative way, contributing to the present timely discussion on the Hungarian war guilt. The authors apply a special focus on the gender aspect of the trials.

Political justice had a specific nature in Hungary. War criminals began to be brought to trial while fighting was still underway in the western part of the country, well before the Nuremberg trials. Not only crimes committed during the war were tried in the same frame but also post-war ones. As far as the post-war period is concerned, legal proceedings regarding these crimes were most often launched on the basis of Act VII of 1946. This act of law concerned “the criminal law protection of the democratic constitutional order and the republic” and its basic aim was to facilitate the creation of a communist dictatorship and to deal with perceived or real enemies of the regime.

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cover of Political Radicalism in Late Imperial Vienna: Origins of the Christian Social Movement, 1848-1897

Political Radicalism in Late Imperial Vienna

Origins of the Christian Social Movement, 1848-1897

John W. Boyer

University of Chicago Press, 1995

John Boyer offers a meticulously researched examination of the social and political atmosphere of late imperial Vienna. He traces the demise of Vienna's liberal culture and the burgeoning of a new radicalism, exemplified by the rise of Karl Lueger and the Christian Socialist Party during the latter half of the nineteenth century. This important study paves the way for new readings of fin de siecle Viennese politics and their broader European significance.

"Offers a comprehensive, multicausal study of the rise of Christian Socialism in Vienna, that phenomenon which was experienced nowhere else in urban Central Europe and which culminated in the famous clash between the Austrian establishment and the colourful, domineering lead of the movement, Karl, Lueger."—R.J.W. Evans, History

"Boyer's analysis is masterful in terms of research, exposition, and organization. His use of available economic data is judicious, and his sense of the social structure of late nineteenth-century Vienna is formidable."—William A. Jenks, American Historical Review

"To understand Viennese and even imperial politics in the latter half of the nineteenth century, Boyer's book is absolutely essential.""—Robert Wegs, Review of Politics
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cover of Political Survival of Small Parties in Europe

Political Survival of Small Parties in Europe

Jae-Jae Spoon

University of Michigan Press, 2015

It is often thought that small party survival or failure is a result of institutional constraints, the behavior of large parties, and the choices of individual politicians. Jae-Jae Spoon, in contrast, argues that the decisions made by small parties themselves determine their ability to balance the dual goals of remaining true to their ideals while maximizing their vote and seat shares, thereby enabling them to survive even in adverse electoral systems.

Spoon employs a mixed-methods approach in order to explore the policy, electoral, and communication strategies of West European Green Parties from 1980 to the present. She combines cross-national data on these parties with in-depth comparative case studies of two New Politics parties, the French and British Green Parties, that have survived in similar national-level plurality electoral systems. Both of these parties have developed as organizations which run candidates in elections at the local, national, and European levels in their respective countries. The parties’ survival, Spoon asserts, results from their ability to balance their competing electoral, policy, and communication goals.

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cover of Political Thought and Political Thinkers

Political Thought and Political Thinkers

Judith N. Shklar

University of Chicago Press, 1998

Ethics described Judith Shklar as "a towering presence" at Harvard for decades, an "influential teacher and mentor to many of the best known political theorists working today in the United States." One of this century's most important liberal scholars, she is remembered for her "sharp intellect, forceful personality, and passionate intellectual honesty and curiosity." Political Thought and Political Thinkers makes startlingly clear her role in the reinvigoration of liberal theory that has been taking place over the last two decades.

This second volume of Shklar's work—which follows the 1997 publication of Redeeming American Political Thought—brings together heretofore uncollected (and several unpublished) essays on a number of themes, including the place of the intellect in the modern political world and the dangers of identity politics. While many of these essays have been previously published, they remain far from accessible. In collecting the work scattered over the past forty years in journals and other publications, noted political theorist Stanley Hoffmann provides an essential guide to Shklar's thought, complemented by George Kateb's comprehensive introduction to her work. Hoffmann's selection, which includes Shklar's classic essay "The Liberalism of Fear," showcases her distinctive defense of liberalism and follows her explorations in this history of moral and political thought as she engages with Bergson, Arendt, and Rousseau.

Political Thought and Political Thinkers displays one of the century's most compelling and flexible intellects in action and is the definitive collection of her work on European history and thinkers.

"Shklar's legacy is an inspiring example of liberal thought at its arresting best, unflinchingly courageous and unmoved by the dreary and unmeaning harmonies conjured up by theories of justice and rights."—John Gray, Times Literary Supplement

Judith N. Shklar (1928-1992) was Cowles Professor of Government at Harvard University and the author of nine books in political theory.
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cover of Politics as Development: The Emergence of Political Parties in Nineteenth-Century Serbia

Politics as Development

The Emergence of Political Parties in Nineteenth-Century Serbia

Gale Stokes

Duke University Press, 1990

Nineteenth-century Serbia was an economically and socially backward country with an urban population of approximately 3 percent and a literacy rate in the countryside of less than 10 percent. Still, during that century it created a functioning democracy with a constitution, independent courts, political parties, and civil liberties. The Serbian experience challenges the view that political structures fundamentally depend on socioeconomic ones, since Serbia created a modern political system without developing economically. Politics as Development analyzes one aspect of that process, the emergence of political parties in the 1870s and the 1880s, especially the creation of the Serbian Radical Party under the leadership of Nikola Pasic. By mobilizing the peasantry through organizing the countryside, the Radicals proved themselves the most original nineteenth-century Balkan political movement. Based on thorough research of primary documents, Stokes’s study supports the view that the state and its attending class constitute an independent variable in the developmental process.
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cover of Politics of Contemporary European Cinema

Politics of Contemporary European Cinema

Mike Wayne

Intellect Books, 1995

How does contemporary European Cinema reflect the drive for political and economic integration and recent trends in globalisation, if at all? This book is a valuable excursion into the politics of European cinema and extensively addresses questions like this.

Mike Wayne identifies some key themes pertinent to a study of the contemporary cultural and political dynamics of European cinema from the mid-1980's, including the fall of the Berlin wall and the end of the Soviet Empire.

Throughout the book, issues are raised that question European culture and the nature of national cinema, including;

• The cultural relationship with Hollywood;
• Debates over cultural plurality and diversity;
• The disintegration of nation states along the eastern flank;
• Postcolonial travels and the hybridisation of the national formation.
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cover of Politics of James Connolly

Politics of James Connolly

Kieran Allen

Pluto Press, 1990

Born in 1868 and executed by the British in 1916 for his role in the Easter Rising, the work of Irish national hero James Connolly has long been misunderstood. From Fianna Fáil and Sinn Féin, to conservative Irish nationalists and the Church, many groups have claimed Connolly as their own, his ideas and strategies used and distorted to justify particular political positions.

Kieran Allen breaks this mould, assessing the founder of the Irish Marxist movement ideas from a revolutionary socialist perspective. Allen considers the strengths and weaknesses of Connolly’s revolutionary strategy, the effect of his commitment to international socialism on his nationalist loyalties and arguing that, ultimately, Connolly's enduring relevance derives from his anti-imperialism. Any socialist movement today ignores this book at its peril.
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cover of Politics of the Sword: Dueling, Honor, and Masculinity in Modern Italy

Politics of the Sword

Dueling, Honor, and Masculinity in Modern Italy

Steven C. Hughes

The Ohio State University Press, 2007

            Following its creation as a country in 1861, Italy experienced a wave of dueling that led commentators to bemoan a national “duellomania” evidenced by the sad spectacle of a duel a day. Pamphlets with titles like “Down with the Duel” and “The Shame of the Duel” all communicated the passion of those who could not believe that a people supposedly just returned to the path of progress and civilization had wholeheartedly embraced such a “barbaric” custom. Yet these critics were consistently countered by sober-minded men of rank and influence who felt that the duel was necessary for the very health of the new nation.
            Steven C. Hughes argues that this extraordinary increase in chivalric combat occurred because the duel played an important role in the formation, consolidation, and functioning of united Italy. The code of honor that lay at the heart of the dueling ethic offered a common model and bond of masculine identity for those patriotic elites who, having created a country of great variety and contrast for often contradictory motives, had to then deal with the consequences. Thus dueling became an iconic weapon of struggle during the Risorgimento, and, as Italy performed poorly on the stage of great power politics, it continued to offer images of martial valor and manly discipline. It also enhanced the social and political power of the new national elites, whose monopoly over chivalric honor helped reinforce the disenfranchisement of the masses. Eventually, the duel fed into the hypermasculinity and cult of violence that marked the early fascist movement, but in the end it would prove too individualistic in its definition of honor to stand up to the emerging totalitarian state. Although Mussolini would himself fight five duels at the start of his career, the duel would disappear along with the liberal regime that had embraced it.
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cover of Politics on the Fringe: The People, Policies, and Organization of the French National Front

Politics on the Fringe

The People, Policies, and Organization of the French National Front

Edward G. DeClair

Duke University Press, 1999

Once a marginal political coalition, the French National Front has become the most high-profile far-right organization in Europe. In Politics on the Fringe Edward G. DeClair provides the first extensive analysis of the Front’s history, from its creation in 1972 and outcast status in the early 1980s to its achievement of broad-based support and show of political strength in the 1997 elections.

Using rare, in-depth interviews with twenty-nine members of the Front elite, as well as public opinion survey data and electoral results, DeClair examines the internal structure of the Front, its political agenda, and its growing influence in France. DeClair shows how the party has dramatically expanded its traditionally narrow core constituency by capitalizing upon anxieties about national identity, immigration, European unification, and rising unemployment. In illustrating how the rhetoric surrounding such topics is key to the Front’s success, DeClair examines the Front’s legacy by detailing the links between the French far-right and similar movements in such countries as Germany, Belgium, Austria, Italy, and the United States. Finally, Politics on the Fringe offers not only a complete picture of the Front’s increasingly influential role in French partisan politics but also further insight into the resurgence of right-wing extremism throughout western societies in the late twentieth century.

This volume will be of primary importance to political scientists and those engaged with European politics, culture, and history. It will also appeal to those concerned with right-wing populism and political movements.

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cover of Politics without a Past: The Absence of History in Postcommunist Nationalism

Politics without a Past

The Absence of History in Postcommunist Nationalism

Shari J. Cohen

Duke University Press, 1999

In Politics without a Past Shari J. Cohen offers a powerful challenge to
common characterizations of postcommunist politics as either a resurgence of
aggressive nationalism or an evolution toward Western-style democracy. Cohen
draws upon extensive field research to paint a picture of postcommunist
political life in which ideological labels are meaningless and exchangeable
at will, political parties appear and disappear regularly, and citizens
remain unengaged in the political process.
In contrast to the conventional wisdom, which locates the roots of widespread intranational strife in deeply rooted national identities from the past, Cohen argues that a profound ideological vacuum has fueled destructive tension throughout postcommunist Europe and the former Soviet Union. She uses Slovakia as a case study to reveal that communist regimes bequeathed an insidious form of historical amnesia to the majority of the political elite and the societies they govern. Slovakia was particularly vulnerable to communist intervention since its precommunist national consciousness was so weak and its only period of statehood prior to 1993 was as a Nazi puppet-state. To demonstrate her argument, Cohen focuses on Slovakia’s failure to forge a collective memory of the World War II experience. She shows how communist socialization prevented Slovaks from tying their individual family stories—of the Jewish deportations, of the anti-Nazi resistance, or of serving in the wartime government—to a larger historical narrative shared with others, leaving them bereft of historical or moral bearings.
Politics without a Past develops an analytical framework that will be important for future research in Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, and beyond. Scholars in political science, history, East European and post-Soviet studies will find Cohen’s methodology and conclusions enlightening. For policymakers, diplomats, and journalists who deal with the region, she offers valuable insights into the elusive nature of postcommunist societies.
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cover of Politics, Economy, and Society in Bourbon Central America, 1759-1821

Politics, Economy, and Society in Bourbon Central America, 1759-1821

Jordana Dym

University Press of Colorado, 2007

Politics, Economy, and Society in Bourbon Central America, 1759-1821 examines how the Spanish policies known broadly as the Bourbon Reforms affected Central American social, economic, and political institutions. Although historians have devoted significant attention to the purpose and impact of these reforms in Spain and some of Spain's other New World colonies, this book is the first to explore their impact on Central America.

These reforms profoundly changed aspects of Central America's politics and society; however, these essays reveal that changes in the region were shaped both internally and externally and that they weakened the region's ties to metropolitan Spain as often as they reinforced them. Contributors focus on specific policy changes and their consequences as well as transformations throughout the region for which no direct Bourbon inspiration appears to be responsible. Together they demonstrate that whether or not the Crown achieved its primary goals of centralization and control, its policies nevertheless provided opportunities for evident, often subtle, and occasionally unintentional shifts in the colonial government's relationship to its constituent populations. Contributors include Christophe Belaubre, Michel Bertrand, Jordana Dym, Jorge H. González, Timothy Hawkins, Sajid Alfredo Herrera, Gustavo Palma, Eugenia Rodriguez, Doug Tompson, and Stephen Webre.
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cover of Pompadour's Medium: Luxury and Reproduction in Eighteenth-Century France

Pompadour's Medium

Luxury and Reproduction in Eighteenth-Century France

Susan M. Wager

University of Delaware Press, 2027

Pompadour's Medium reveals the depth of patron, amateur artist, and royal mistress Madame de Pompadour's contributions to the visual arts, long dismissed as superficial and trivial. Her artistic activities centered on an innovative exploration of the relationships between painting, sculpture, and the decorative arts at a moment when advances in reproductive printmaking threatened to flatten the differences between individual mediums. Eighteenth-century France experienced an unprecedented surge in the circulation of images. Increasingly faithful and affordable reproductive prints introduced works of art to ever-widening audiences, while a culture of reproduction was simultaneously thriving at the highest end of the artistic and economic spectrum—in luxury media, such as ceramics, textiles, and metalwork. This book recovers the pivotal role of luxury reproduction in Pompadour’s artistic endeavors, and her essential role in cultivating the intermedial approach of her frequent collaborator, painter François Boucher, who tended to think between media. It is only by restoring the centrality of reproductive media in this artist-patron relationship that we can understand the magnitude of Pompadour’s and Boucher’s contributions to the history of modern art.

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cover of Poor Kids in a Rich Country: America's Children in Comparative Perspective

Poor Kids in a Rich Country

America's Children in Comparative Perspective

Lee Rainwater

Russell Sage Foundation, 2003

In Poor Kids in a Rich Country, Lee Rainwater and Timothy Smeeding ask what it means to be poor in a prosperous nation - especially for any country's most vulnerable citizens, its children. In comparing the situation of American children in low-income families with their counterparts in fourteen other countries—including Western Europe, Australia, and Canada—they provide a powerful perspective on the dynamics of child poverty in the United States. Based on the rich data available from the transnational Luxembourg Income Study (LIS), Poor Kids in a Rich Country puts child poverty in the United States in an international context. Rainwater and Smeeding find that while the child poverty rate in most countries has been relatively stable over the past 30 years, child poverty has increased markedly in the United States and Britain—two of the world's wealthiest countries. The book delves into the underlying reasons for this difference, examining the mix of earnings and government transfers, such as child allowances, sickness and maternity benefits, unemployment insurance, and other social assistance programs that go into the income packages available to both single- and dual-parent families in each country. Rainwater and Smeeding call for policies to make it easier for working parents to earn a decent living while raising their children—policies such as parental leave, childcare support, increased income supports for working poor families, and a more socially oriented education policy. They make a convincing argument that our definition of poverty should not be based solely on the official poverty line—that is, the minimum income needed to provide a certain level of consumption—but on the social and economic resources necessary for full participation in society. Combining a wealth of empirical data on international poverty levels with a thoughtful new analysis of how best to use that data, Poor Kids in a Rich Country will provide an essential tool for researchers and policymakers who make decisions about child and family policy.
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cover of Poor and Pregnant in Paris: Strategies for Survival in the Nineteenth Century

Poor and Pregnant in Paris

Strategies for Survival in the Nineteenth Century

Rachel G Fuchs

Rutgers University Press, 1992

Rachel Fuchs shows how poor urban women in Paris negotiated their environment, and in some respects helped shape it, in their attempt to cope with their problems of poverty and pregnancy. She reveals who the women were and provides insight into the nature of their work and living arrangements. With dramatic detail, and drawing on actual court testimonies, Fuchs portrays poor women's childbirth experiences, their use of charity and welfare, and their recourse to abortion and infanticide as desperate alternatives to motherhood.

Fuchs also provides a comprehensive description of philanthropic and welfare institutions and outlines the relationship between the developing welfare state and official conceptions of womanhood. She traces the evolution of a new morality among policymakers in which secular views, medical hygiene, and a new focus on the protection of children replaced religious morality as a driving force in policy formation.

Combining social, intellectual, and medical history, this study of poor mothers in nineteenth-century society illuminates both class and gender relations in Paris, and illustrates the connection between social policy and the way ordinary women lived their lives.


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cover of Popular Culture in the Middle Ages

Popular Culture in the Middle Ages

University of Wisconsin Press, 1986

The culture of the Middle Ages was as complex, if not as various, as our own, as the essays in this volume ably demonstrate. The essays cover a wide range of tipics, from church sculpture as "advertisement" to tricks and illusions as "homeeconomics."

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cover of Popular Music in Leeds: Histories, Heritage, People and Places

Popular Music in Leeds

Histories, Heritage, People and Places

Edited by Brett Lashua, Karl Spracklen, and Kitty Ross

Intellect Books, 2023

A groundbreaking study of music and musical history in Leeds.

This is the first scholarly volume to focus on popular music in Leeds. It delves into the rich musical history of Leeds and its long tradition of vibrant venues, nightclubs, dance halls, pubs, and other sites of musical entertainment. The contributors use the popular music of Leeds to exemplify and inform understandings of broader cultural and urban changes, the social and historical significance of music as mass media; music and migration; music, racialization, and social equity; and industrial decline, deindustrialization, neoliberalism, and the rise of the twenty-four-hour city. Charting moments of stark musical politicization and de-politicization, while also tracing arguments about heritagizing popular music within discussions about music’s place in museums and in the urban economy, this book contributes to debates about why music matters, has mattered, and continues to matter in Leeds and beyond. 
 
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cover of Popular Sovereignty and the Crisis of German Constitutional Law: The Theory and Practice of Weimar Constitutionalism

Popular Sovereignty and the Crisis of German Constitutional Law

The Theory and Practice of Weimar Constitutionalism

Peter C. Caldwell

Duke University Press, 1997

Popular Sovereignty and the Crisis of German Constitutional Law is a historical analysis of competing doctrines of constitutional law during the Weimar Republic. It chronicles the creation of a new constitutional jurisprudence both adequate to the needs of a modern welfare state and based on the principle of popular sovereignty. Peter C. Caldwell explores the legal nature of democracy as debated by Weimar’s political theorists and constitutional lawyers. Laying the groundwork for questions about constitutional law in today’s Federal Republic, this book draws clear and insightful distinctions between strands of positivist and anti-positivist legal thought, and examines their implications for legal and political theory.
Caldwell makes accessible the rich literature in German constitutional thought of the Weimar period, most of which has been unavailable in English until now. On the liberal left, Hugo Preuss and Hans Kelsen defended a concept of democracy that made the constitution sovereign and, in a way, created the "Volk" through constitutional procedure. On the right, Carl Schmitt argued for a substantial notion of the "Volk" that could overrule constitutional procedure in a state of emergency. Rudolf Smend and Heinrich Triepel located in the constitution a set of inviolable values of the political community, while Hermann Heller saw in it a guarantee of substantial social equality. Drawing on the work of these major players from the 1920s, Caldwell reveals the various facets of the impassioned constitutional struggles that permeated German legal and political culture during the Weimar Republic.
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cover of Populus: Living and Dying in Ancient Rome

Populus

Living and Dying in Ancient Rome

Guy de la Bédoyère

University of Chicago Press, 2024

This revealing look at life in ancient Rome offers a compelling journey through the vivid landscape of politics, domestic life, entertainment, and inequality experienced daily by Romans of all social strata.

Frenzied crowds, talking ravens, the stench of the Tiber River: life in ancient Rome was stimulating, dynamic, and often downright dangerous. The Romans relaxed and gossiped in baths, stole precious water from aqueducts, and partied and dined to excess. Everyone from senators to the enslaved crowded into theaters and circuses to watch their favorite singers, pantomime, and comedies and scream their approval at charioteers. The lucky celebrated their accomplishments with elaborate tombs. Amid pervasive inequality and brutality, beauty also flourished through architecture, poetry, and art.
 
From the smells of fragrant cookshops and religious sacrifices to the cries of public executions and murderous electoral mobs, Guy de la Bédoyère’s Populus draws on a host of historical and literary sources to transport us into the intensity of daily life at the height of ancient Rome.
 
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cover of Portraits of Medieval and Renaissance Living: Essays in Memory of David Herlihy

Portraits of Medieval and Renaissance Living

Essays in Memory of David Herlihy

Samuel K. Cohn, Jr. and Steven A. Epstein, Editors

University of Michigan Press, 1996

This volume--a collection of essays dedicated to one of this century's most distinguished medieval historians, David Herlihy--introduces the general reader to the new social history of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The essays address three themes: sex and the family, power and patronage in local history, and society in town and countryside. The authors use current research to illustrate how Herlihy's ideas continue to shape work about the lives of powerful and ordinary people in this long and important period of Western history. Portraits of Medieval and Renaissance Living opens with Herlihy's final summary of his views on family history, followed by a reminiscence by his most important collaborator, Christiane Klapisch-Zuber. The first group of essays takes us inside specific familial settings, using recent methods in anthropological, legal, and women's studies to uncover new dimensions of medieval and Renaissance family life. A second group of studies focuses on the question of authority in medieval society and advances new theses about politics and society in Florence and other local settings. The final group of authors considers the special circumstances of town and countryside in Italy, England, and Spain and draws insightful generalizations across territorial and national boundaries. Like Herlihy's own work, these essays present innovative and challenging hypotheses about significant problems in the history of medieval and Renaissance Europe. Important new material on Florence, family history, religion, the Inquisition, and taxation is presented for the first time, but the essays are not simply technical exercises focused on small or isolated pieces of research. Thus the volume will go beyond the interest of specialists in medieval and Renaissance social history and will attract a wide audience of students and scholars. Samuel K. Cohn, Jr., is Professor of History, Brandeis University. Steven Epstein is Professor of History, University of Colorado.
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cover of Portugal's Other Kingdom: The Algarve

Portugal's Other Kingdom

The Algarve

By Dan Stanislawski

University of Texas Press, 1963

A land of long ago on the brink of tomorrow. That is the Algarve, the southernmost province of Portugal, a land that knew the Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Greeks, Romans, Visigoths, Moslems—and yet retained its own distinctive personality. In the 1950s it first felt the impact of industrialization, and from that situation the author developed this book.

In presenting this descriptive geography of the Algarve, Dan Stanislawski offers no thesis, except that geographers, economists, politicians, humanists—all those interested in the way the world is developing—should watch the small, culturally disparate areas of the world, to learn what they have of value to teach, to enjoy the qualities of their independent ways of living, and to observe and evaluate their reaction to modern change. This book, the result of detailed observation of one such region, is a valuable contribution to the knowledge necessary to form sound value judgments on the future development of these areas.

From this account the charm of the Algarve emerges in all of its picturesqueness. With the aid of Stanislawski's vivid descriptions, his eighteen helpful maps and graphs, and his more than ninety photographs, the reader moves leisurely through this appealing, but unpublicized, region: along roadways bordered by rock walls and blooming almonds, traveled by sturdy burros bearing their loads of produce; through colorful landscapes of the Lower Algarve, with their pastel-calcimined dwellings and their intensively cultivated plots of olives, figs, carobs, grain, and vegetables; along the rugged cliff coast near Portimão, and the boat-filled port of Faro; past the canyon gardens of the Caldeirão; along the Arade River with its cork barges; northward past Cape S. Vicente to the area of wind-sheared trees.

Guided by Stanislawski, the reader comes to understand Algarvian problems inherent in soils, topography, climate, location, and history. He sees the Algarvians following the occupational practices that have produced for them, in the midst of difficult conditions, a stable culture: fishing, netmaking, shipbuilding, farming, herding, and so on. He realizes that these people, with their unique cultural background and environment, desire to live, and to change, in their own way. Finally, he learns how it is possible to communicate effectively with the Algarvians and with millions of other people whose peculiar problems tend to isolate them from the rest of the world.

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cover of Post-Communism: An Introduction

Post-Communism

An Introduction

Leslie Holmes

Duke University Press, 1997

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cover of Post-Communism: An Introduction

Post-Communism

An Introduction

Leslie Holmes

Duke University Press, 0

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cover of Post-Communist Malaise: Cinematic Responses to European Integration

Post-Communist Malaise

Cinematic Responses to European Integration

Zoran Samardzija

Rutgers University Press, 2020

The collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe was supposed to bring about the “end of history” with capitalism and liberal democracy achieving decisive victories. Europe would now integrate and reconcile with its past. However, the aftershocks of the financial crisis of 2008—the rise in right-wing populism, austerity politics, and mass migration—have shown that the ideological divisions which haunted Europe in the twentieth century still remain. It is within this context that Post-Communist Malaise revives discourses of political modernism and revisits debates from Marxism and seventies film theory. Analyzing work of Theo Angelopoulos, Věra Chytilová, Srdjan Dragojević, Jean-Luc Godard,  Miklós Jancsó, Emir Kusturica, Dušan Makavejev, Cristi Puiu, Jan Švankmajer, Andrei Tarkovsky, and Béla Tarr, the book focuses on how select cinemas from Eastern Europe and the Balkans critique the neoliberal integration of Europe whose failures fuel the rise of nationalism and right-wing politics. By politicizing art cinema from the regions, Post-Communist Malaise asks fundamental questions about film, aesthetics, and ideology. It argues for the utopian potential of the materiality of cinematic time to imagine a new political and cultural organization for Europe.
 
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cover of Post-World War One Plebiscites and Their Legacies: Exploring the Right of Self-Determination

Post-World War One Plebiscites and Their Legacies

Exploring the Right of Self-Determination

Sergiusz Bober

Central European University Press, 2024

Plebiscites, or referendums, are epitomes of direct democracy and the right of self-determination. While direct democracy has always been a key subject in the theory and practice of western liberal democracies, the issue of self-determination has been propelled to the fore by the hegemonistic moves of Russia. By providing a historical analysis of the post-World War One plebiscites, this book deals with enduring, painfully contemporary, and in in any case fundamental, concepts.

The contributors to this edited volume approach the referendums comparatively. After grounding the analysis theoretically, the authors look at detailed aspects of individual cases, with the two plebiscites held in the Danish-German border region of Schleswig in the winter of 1920 as points of departure. They then extend the exploration through the inter-war period and address the effects of border delimitations on everyday life or gender roles in the context of ethnic mobilization. Finally, the book places the post-World War One plebiscites in a long-term perspective. The concluding essays assess, among others, the applicability of plebiscitary solutions to contemporary conflicts, taking into consideration issues of borders, religion, language, identity, and minority rights.

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cover of Postcards from Checkpoint Charlie: Images of the Berlin Wall

Postcards from Checkpoint Charlie

Images of the Berlin Wall

Edited by the Bodleian Library

Bodleian Library Publishing, 2008

Between 1945 and 1961, an estimated 2.5 million people fled East Germany in search of the political and economic freedom offered by West Germany. To thwart this tide of defections, on the morning of August 13, 1961, hundreds of East German troops began erecting the Berlin wall—a barrier that would take nearly twenty years to complete and would eventually span 166 kilometers. In Postcards from Checkpoint Charlie, the Bodleian Library assembles a stunning collection of images to document the wall’s impact worldwide.
The postcards in this fascinating volume trace the development of the wall—from its beginnings as a simple stretch of barbed wire to the daunting final structure made of concrete and containing over 300 watchtowers. The images capture scenes of tension and urgency, such as those at Checkpoint Charlie, where we see Allied and East German soldiers coldly observing one another through binoculars. Others document the wall’s ties with American history, including pictures of John F. Kennedy in 1963 when he declared his solidarity with all Berliners and a picture of Ronald Regan when he implored Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the wall. Also included are images from the toppling of the wall, when thousands of joyful East Germans realized the fulfillment of their personal dreams and marked the conclusion of the cold war.
An intimate look at one of the most visible manifestations of the postwar divide, Portraits from Checkpoint Charlie presents a key location in twentieth-century history through the eyes of those on the scene.     
 
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cover of Postcards from the Trenches: Images from the First World War

Postcards from the Trenches

Images from the First World War

Edited by the Bodleian Library

Bodleian Library Publishing, 2008

World War I has come down to us in indelible images—those of airplane bombers, bleak-eyed soldiers, stern-faced commanders, and the ruins of countless villages. But soldiers themselves also took photographs on the battlefield, and many of their striking images were transformed into postcards that were sent home to family and friends or collected as war mementos. Postcards from the Trenches gathers a number of these postcards to create a striking visual history of World War I.

The cards in this compelling volume were created not only by soldiers, but also by embedded journalists from France, Belgium, Austria, Germany, and Britain. The images capture scenes both humorous and poignant, including soldiers having a mock party with little food to eat, wounded soldiers smiling for the camera, a makeshift trench hospital, the bloody aftermath of a battle, and a huddle of men taking what they know could be their last communion before marching onto the battlefield. Other cards document the mundane duties that dominated wartime life, including men digging trenches, troops marching to new trenches and battlefields, and or soldiers nearly comatose with boredom while waiting for the fight to begin. This stunning visual narrative opens a new window into one of the most analyzed events in history, as the postcards’ images testify to the resilience and bravery of soldiers in the most trying circumstances.

            A fascinating and unprecedented historical document, Postcards from the Trenches draws back the curtain to unflinchingly show the daily horror and humanity that define life in war.
 
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cover of Postcards, Translators and Esperanto Pioneers: An Alternative History of International Communication

Postcards, Translators and Esperanto Pioneers

An Alternative History of International Communication

Guilherme Fians, Bernhard Struck, and Claire Taylor

University of London Press, 2025

The early twentieth century was a time when steamships, international postal services and the telephone were setting the pace of an early wave of globalisation in Europe. In this increasingly international scenario, what role did language play? To address the geopolitical problem of cross-border linguistic (mis)understanding, international auxiliary languages like Esperanto were created. But what happened to a constructed language when it travelled to different places?

This book tackles these questions by exploring the letters, postcards and activities of John Beveridge (1857–1943) and his family. This Scottish clergyman was a proficient Esperanto speaker, translator and co-founder of several Esperanto organisations. His long-standing engagement with the language left a unique archive that reveals how many Esperanto speakers exchanged letters across borders, produced literature for an international readership, organised congresses and used this language as an entry point into modernity and globalisation from their ‘marginal’ positions in the world.

By tracing this language-based form of grassroots internationalism, the book uncovers wide-reaching networks connecting a corner of Scotland with rural settings and villages in Finland, Bulgaria and Brazil. Ultimately, it asks: what do we learn about international communication and globalisation through the lens of Esperanto and postcards? Focusing on a constructed language and communication technologies that preceded the dominance of global English and social media, this book offers an alternative vantage point on the history of international communication.

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cover of Postcolonial Dublin: Imperial Legacies And The Built Environment

Postcolonial Dublin

Imperial Legacies And The Built Environment

Andrew Kincaid

University of Minnesota Press, 2006

For hundreds of years, Ireland has been a testing ground for colonizing techniques. Postcolonial Dublin shows how perpetrators of colonialism have made use of urban planning and architecture to underscore and legitimate ideologies. From suburban development to building facades, the conflict between nationalists and colonialists has inscribed itself on Dublin’s landscape. Andrew Kincaid illustrates how the architecture and urban planning of Dublin have been integral to debates about nationalism, modernism, and Ireland’s relationship to the rest of the world. Looking at objects such as Londonderry’s Market House, Patrick Abercrombie’s Dublin of the Future, and the urban renewal project of today’s Temple Bar, Kincaid highlights Ireland’s colonial history and the significance of architecture in the evolution of national identity. In doing so, he demonstrates how ideology “spatializes” itself. Postcolonial Dublin engages the prevailing historical representations of Irish nationalism, arguing that the evolving city reflected a debate over who would hold the reins of power. Bringing the tools of literary criticism and postcolonial theory to bear on the field of urban studies, Kincaid places Dublin at the forefront of debates over modernism, modernity, and globalization.Andrew Kincaid is assistant professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee.
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cover of Postcoloniality-Decoloniality-Black Critique: Joints and Fissures

Postcoloniality-Decoloniality-Black Critique

Joints and Fissures

Edited by Sabine Broeck and Carsten Junker

Campus Verlag, 2014

Can Western modernity be analyzed and critiqued through the lens of enslavement and colonial history? As this volume reveals, such analysis is not only possible, it is essential to our understanding of contemporary race relations and society generally. Drawing from the fields of  postcolonial, decolonial, and black studies, this book assembles contributions from renowned scholars that offer timely and critical perspectives from a variety of disciplines, including history, sociology, political science, gender studies, cultural and literary studies, and philosophy.
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cover of Postwar Architecture Between Italy and the UK: Exchanges and Transcultural Influences

Postwar Architecture Between Italy and the UK

Exchanges and Transcultural Influences

Edited by Lorenzo Ciccarelli and Clare Melhuish

University College London, 2021

Explores how cultural exchange after World War II produced twentieth-century British and Italian architecture.
 
In the aftermath of World War II’s devastation, Italy and the United Kingdom reimagined urban space. Post-war Architecture Between Italy and the UK explores how architects, urbanists, and historians in both countries collaborated around the shared need to rebuild. The authors discuss the far-reaching effects of this cultural exchange, including the influence of historic Italian town centers on British public space and the origin of postmodernism in clashes between British critics and Italian architects. Drawing on a wealth of archival materials, this volume offers new insights into architectural history in post-war Europe.
 
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cover of Poverty and Charity in Early Modern Theater and Performance

Poverty and Charity in Early Modern Theater and Performance

Robert Henke

University of Iowa Press, 2015

Whereas previous studies of poverty and early modern theatre have concentrated on England and the criminal rogue, Poverty and Charity in Early Modern Theatre and Performance takes a transnational approach, which reveals a greater range of attitudes and charitable practices regarding the poor than state poor laws and rogue books suggest. Close study of German and Latin beggar catalogues, popular songs performed in Italian piazzas, the Paduan actor-playwright Ruzante, the commedia dell’arte in both Italy and France, and Shakespeare demonstrate how early modern theatre and performance could reveal the gap between official policy and actual practices regarding the poor.

The actor-based theatre and performance traditions examined in this study, which persistently explore felt connections between the itinerant actor and the vagabond beggar, evoke the poor through complex and variegated forms of imagination, thought, and feeling. Early modern theatre does not simply reflect the social ills of hunger, poverty, and degradation, but works them through the forms of poverty, involving displacement, condensation, exaggeration, projection, fictionalization, and marginalization. As the critical mass of medieval charity was put into question, the beggar-almsgiver encounter became more like a performance. But it was not a performance whose script was prewritten as the inevitable exposure of the dissembling beggar. Just as people’s attitudes toward the poor could rapidly change from skepticism to sympathy during famines and times of acute need, fictions of performance such as Edgar’s dazzling impersonation of a mad beggar in Shakespeare’s King Lear could prompt responses of sympathy and even radical calls for economic redistribution.
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cover of Poverty, Charity, and Motherhood: Maternal Societies in Nineteenth-Century France

Poverty, Charity, and Motherhood

Maternal Societies in Nineteenth-Century France

Christine Adams

University of Illinois Press, 2010

This far-reaching study of maternal societies in post-revolutionary France focuses on the philanthropic work of the Society for Maternal Charity, the most prominent organization of its kind. Administered by middle-class and elite women and financed by powerful families and the government, the Society offered support to poor mothers, helping them to nurse and encouraging them not to abandon their children. In Poverty, Charity, and Motherhood, Christine Adams traces the Society's key role in shaping notions of maternity and in shifting the care of poor families from the hands of charitable volunteers with religious-tinged social visions to paid welfare workers with secular goals such as population growth and patriotism.
 
Adams plumbs the origin and ideology of the Society and its branches, showing how elite women in Paris, Lyon, Bordeaux, Rouen, Marseille, Dijon, and Limoges tried to influence the maternal behavior of women and families with lesser financial means and social status. A deft analysis of the philosophy and goals of the Society details the members' own notions of good mothering, family solidarity, and legitimate marriages that structured official, elite, and popular attitudes concerning gender and poverty in France. These personal attitudes, Adams argues, greatly influenced public policy and shaped the country's burgeoning social welfare system.
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cover of Poverty, Inequality, and the Future of Social Policy: Western States in the New World Order

Poverty, Inequality, and the Future of Social Policy

Western States in the New World Order

Katherine McFate

Russell Sage Foundation, 1995

"Extremely coherent and useful, this much needed volume is concerned with the current status of the poor in Western industrial states. Its closely linked essays allow comparisons between case studies and are often themselves cross-national comparisons....The essays also comment on the meaning of globalization for social policy." —Choice "Excellent and tightly integrated articles by a group of prominent international scholars....A timely and important book, which will surely become the basic reference point for all future research on inequality and social policy." —Contemporary Sociology The social safety net is under strain in all Western nations, as social and economic change has created problems that traditional welfare systems were not designed to handle. Poverty, Inequality, and the Future of Social Policy provides a definitive analysis of the conditions that are fraying the social fabric and the reasons why some countries have been more successful than others in addressing these trends. In the United States, where the poverty rate in the 1980s was twice that of any advanced nation in Europe, the social protection system—and public support for it—has eroded alarmingly. In Europe, the welfare system more effectively buffered the disadvantaged, but social expenditures have been indicted by many as the principal cause of high unemployment. Concluding chapters review the progress and goals of social welfare programs, assess their viability in the face of creeping economic, racial, and social fragmentation, and define the challenges that face those concerned with social cohesion and economic prosperity in the new global economy. This volume illuminates the disparate effects of government intervention on the incidence and duration of poverty in Western countries. Poverty, Inequality, and the Future of Social Policy is full of lessons for anyone who would look beyond the limitations of the welfare debate in the United States.
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cover of Power and Gender in Renaissance Spain: Eight Women of the Mendoza Family, 1450-1650

Power and Gender in Renaissance Spain

Eight Women of the Mendoza Family, 1450-1650

Edited by Helen Nader

University of Illinois Press, 2003

The Mendoza family was one of Spain's most prominent Renaissance dynasties, and this collection, a groundbreaking overview of two hundred years of Spanish history, provides in-depth portraits of eight of its female members.
 
These essays explore the lives of powerful women whose lineage gave them status within a patriarchal society designed to keep women from public life. Each of the influential and literary women discussed in this volume handled her status differently, and their concerns were not dissimilar from the concerns of feminists today: the blurring of the personal and the political, public versus private space, language and voice, and property.
 
Spanning the two centuries between Juana Pimentel, a widow who manipulated the patronage system to her own ends, and Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza, who rejected both convent and marriage in favor of missionary work, Power and Gender in Renaissance Spain reveals a complex society in which women were limited by law, and yet their social status made those laws negotiable.
 
These women found that their personal agendas had a broad societal impact, challenging the laws of the land and patriarchal assumptions about women's inferiority.
 
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cover of Power and Knowledge Under Communism: A Political History of Economic and Sociological Research in Hungary

Power and Knowledge Under Communism

A Political History of Economic and Sociological Research in Hungary

Gyorgy Peteri

Central European University Press, 2026

This book examines the transformation of economic and sociological knowledge under Hungarian state socialism from the late 1940s to the mid-1970s. It argues that the fate of the social sciences was determined less by episodic repression than by successive academic regimes asserting political authority through epistemological criteria and professional ethos. We follow the trajectory of economics from the Stalinist imposition of radical class-relativism, through the erosion of this epistemology during the New Course and the restoration of empirical research and professional communities as sources of policy-relevant knowledge. The post-Stalinist academic order was based on patronage, managed pluralism, and selective purges, culminating in the disciplining of both reform economics and critical sociology. The book demonstrates how limited professional autonomy could coexist with political control—and why such autonomy remained structurally fragile. It offers a historically grounded account of how modern states can govern social knowledge without fully suppressing it.
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cover of Power in Concert: The Nineteenth-Century Origins of Global Governance

Power in Concert

The Nineteenth-Century Origins of Global Governance

Jennifer Mitzen

University of Chicago Press, 2013

How states cooperate in the absence of a sovereign power is a perennial question in international relations. With Power in Concert, Jennifer Mitzen argues that global governance is more than just the cooperation of states under anarchy: it is the formation and maintenance of collective intentions, or joint commitments among states to address problems together. The key mechanism through which these intentions are sustained is face-to-face diplomacy, which keeps states’ obligations to one another salient and helps them solve problems on a day-to-day basis.

Mitzen argues that the origins of this practice lie in the Concert of Europe, an informal agreement among five European states in the wake of the Napoleonic wars to reduce the possibility of recurrence, which first institutionalized the practice of jointly managing the balance of power. Through the Concert’s many successes, she shows that the words and actions of state leaders in public forums contributed to collective self-restraint and a commitment to problem solving—and at a time when communication was considerably more difficult than it is today. Despite the Concert’s eventual breakdown, the practice it introduced—of face to face diplomacy as a mode of joint problem solving—survived and is the basis of global governance today.

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cover of Power of Petitioning in Early Modern Britain

Power of Petitioning in Early Modern Britain

Edited by Brodie Waddell and Jason Peacey

University College London, 2024

Brings together historians of popular politics, the civil wars, state welfare, and criminal justice to unveil the widespread influence of petitions in shaping politics and social dynamics in Early Modern Britain.

The humble petition was ubiquitous in early modern society and featured prominently in crucial moments such as the outbreak of civil wars and in everyday local negotiations about taxation, welfare, and litigation. People at all levels of society, from noblemen to paupers, used petitions to make their voices heard, and these are valuable sources for mapping the structures of authority and agency that framed early modern society.

The Power of Petitioning in Early Modern Britain offers a holistic study of this crucial topic in early modern British history. The contributors to this volume survey a vast range of sources, showing the myriad ways people petitioned the authorities from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. They cross the jurisdictional, sub-disciplinary, and chronological boundaries that have otherwise constrained the current scholarly literature on petitioning and popular political engagement. Teasing out broad conclusions from innumerable smaller interventions in public life, they not only address the aims, attitudes, and strategies of those involved but also assess the significance of the processes they used. This volume makes it possible to rethink the power of petitioning and to re-evaluate broad trends regarding political culture, institutional change, and state formation.
 
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cover of Power of the Weak: STUDIES ON MEDIEVAL WOMEN

Power of the Weak

STUDIES ON MEDIEVAL WOMEN

Edited by Jennifer Carpenter and Sally-Beth MacLean

University of Illinois Press, 1996

   Covering the eleventh through
        sixteenth centuries, these essays suggest that influence and power may
        have paradoxically been available to women despite, and sometimes precisely
        because of, their subordinate position in society. Striking for its range
        of scholarship, this collection explores the power and independence, relationships
        and influence of medieval queens, holy women, mothers, widows, Jewish
        conversas, and others. Latin and Anglo-Norman hagiography, confessors'
        manuals, coronation rituals, responsa literature, and legal theory
        are represented.
      "An intriguing exploration
        of a basic paradox of medieval society, and an excellent blend of theory
        and gender studies with detailed work relevant for social and political
        history." -- Joel Rosenthal, author of Patriarchy and Families
        of Privilege in Fifteenth-Century England
      JENNIFER CARPENTER
        is a lecturer in history at the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand.
 
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cover of Practical Cues and Social Spectacle in the Chester Plays

Practical Cues and Social Spectacle in the Chester Plays

Matthew Sergi

University of Chicago Press, 2020

Amid the crowded streets of Chester, guild players portraying biblical characters performed on colorful mobile stages hoping to draw the attention of fellow townspeople. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, these Chester plays employed flamboyant live performance to adapt biblical narratives. But the original format of these fascinating performances remains cloudy, as surviving records of these plays are sparse, and the manuscripts were only written down a generation after they stopped. Revealing a vibrant set of social practices encoded in the Chester plays, Matthew Sergi provides a new methodology for reading them and a transformative look at medieval English drama.

Carefully combing through the plays, Sergi seeks out cues in the dialogues that reveal information about the original staging, design, and acting. These “practical cues,” as he calls them, have gone largely unnoticed by drama scholars, who have focused on the ideology and historical contexts of these plays, rather than the methods, mechanics, and structures of the actual performances. Drawing on his experience as an actor and director, he combines close readings of these texts with fragments of records, revealing a new way to understand how the Chester plays brought biblical narratives to spectators in the noisy streets. For Sergi, plays that once appeared only as dry religious dramas come to life as raucous participatory spectacles filled with humor, camp, and devotion.
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cover of Practices of Coexistence: Constructions of the Other in Early Modern Perceptions

Practices of Coexistence

Constructions of the Other in Early Modern Perceptions

Marianna D. Birnbaum

Central European University Press, 2017

The essays in this book provide interesting contributions to the ongoing debate concerning the representation of differing cultures, i.e., the “image of the Other” in the early modern period . They deal with images, projections, and perceptions, based on various experiences of coexistence. Although the individual contributions contain sources and references of iconography, this is not just another volume of art history or visual studies. As examples of practices in diverse historical contexts, the book includes a variety of textual material, such as literary productions, rhetorical exercises, dramatic applications, chronicles, epistles, and diary-like historical accounts that express ethnographic sensitivities. Thus, supported by a thorough research apparatus, these studies propose a new cultural history of the early modern coexistence of various communities, as identified in current research by young scholars. Another novel feature of the volume is the deliberate digression of traditional scholars’ focus and the investigation of rarely examined regions and practices. This approach allows the contributors to spotlight their special areas of research and to share a fresh new look at “the Renaissance.”
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cover of Prague Palimpsest: Writing, Memory, and the City

Prague Palimpsest

Writing, Memory, and the City

Alfred Thomas

University of Chicago Press, 2010

A city of immense literary mystique, Prague has inspired writers across the centuries with its beauty, cosmopolitanism, and tragic history. Envisioning the ancient city in central Europe as a multilayered text, or palimpsest, that has been constantly revised and rewritten—from the medieval and Renaissance chroniclers who legitimized the city’s foundational origins to the modernists of the early twentieth century who established its reputation as the new capital of the avant-garde—Alfred Thomas argues that Prague has become a paradoxical site of inscription and effacement, of memory and forgetting, a utopian link to the prewar and pre-Holocaust European past and a dystopia of totalitarian amnesia.

Considering a wide range of writers, including the city’s most famous son, Franz Kafka, Prague Palimpsest reassesses the work of poets and novelists such as Bohumil Hrabal, Milan Kundera, Gustav Meyrink, Jan Neruda, Vítĕzslav Nezval, and Rainer Maria Rilke and engages with other famous authors who “wrote” Prague, including Guillaume Apollinaire, Ingeborg Bachmann, Albert Camus, Paul Celan, and W. G. Sebald. The result is a comparative, interdisciplinary study that helps to explain why Prague—more than any other major European city—has haunted the cultural and political imagination of the West.

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cover of Prague, Jan Hus and Prague University

Prague, Jan Hus and Prague University

Martin Nodl

Karolinum Press, 2024

Contextualizes the Czech Reformation in the setting of Prague University.

The Czech Reformation offered a radical solution to the spiritual and institutional crisis of the late medieval church at the end of the fourteenth century. The beginnings of this reform are distinctly connected with Prague University, which drew many educated people to Prague from across Europe. Through John Hus—a former Prague University student who became its rector in 1402—the Czech Reformation gave rise to a new, radical ecclesiology. Not only did Hus challenge the hierarchical system of the church, but under his influence, the Czech Reformation acquired a specific national shape, and elements of Czech messianism emerged with the university.

Prague, John Hus and Prague University explores that sentiment within Prague University, as well as its limits and restrictive consequences for the Czech Reformation and Czech medieval society. Emphasis is placed on showing how Prague and the university became a world that existed outside the Christian ecumenism of the time.
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cover of Precarious Intimacies: The Politics of Touch in Contemporary Western European Cinema

Precarious Intimacies

The Politics of Touch in Contemporary Western European Cinema

Maria Stehle and Beverly Weber

Northwestern University Press, 2020

Drawing on and responding to the writings of theorists such as Judith Butler, Sara Ahmed, Lauren Berlant, and Lisa Lowe, this book proposes the notion of “precarious intimacies” to navigate a dilemma: how to recognize, affirm, and value love, touch, and care while challenging the racialized and gendered politics in which they are embedded.
 
Twenty-first-century Europe is undergoing dramatic political and economic transformations that produce new forms of transnational contact as well as new regimes of exclusion and economic precarity. These political and economic shifts both circumscribe and enable new possibilities for intimacy. Many European films of the last two decades depict experiences of political and economic vulnerability in narratives of precarious intimacies. In these films, stories of intimacy, sex, love, and friendship are embedded in violence and exclusion, but, as Maria Stehle and Beverly Weber show, the politics of touch and connection also offers avenues to theorize forms of attention and affection that challenge exclusive notions of race, citizenship, and belonging.
 
Precarious Intimacies examines the aesthetic strategies that respond to this tension and proposes a politics of interpretation that identifies the potential and possibility of intimacy.
 
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cover of Precarious Partners: Horses and Their Humans in Nineteenth-Century France

Precarious Partners

Horses and Their Humans in Nineteenth-Century France

Kari Weil

University of Chicago Press, 2020

From the recent spate of equine deaths on racetracks to protests demanding the removal of mounted Confederate soldier statues to the success and appeal of War Horse, there is no question that horses still play a role in our lives—though fewer and fewer of us actually interact with them. In Precarious Partners, Kari Weil takes readers back to a time in France when horses were an inescapable part of daily life. This was a time when horse ownership became an attainable dream not just for soldiers but also for middle-class children; when natural historians argued about animal intelligence; when the prevalence of horse beatings led to the first animal protection laws; and when the combined magnificence and abuse of these animals inspired artists, writers, and riders alike.
 
Weil traces the evolving partnerships established between French citizens and their horses through this era. She considers the newly designed “races” of workhorses who carried men from the battlefield to the hippodrome, lugged heavy loads through the boulevards, or paraded women riders, amazones, in the parks or circus halls—as well as those unfortunate horses who found their fate on a dinner plate. Moving between literature, painting, natural philosophy, popular cartoons, sports manuals, and tracts of public hygiene, Precarious Partners traces the changing social, political, and emotional relations with these charismatic creatures who straddled conceptions of pet and livestock in nineteenth-century France.
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cover of Precarious Professionals: Gender, Identities and Social Change in Modern Britain

Precarious Professionals

Gender, Identities and Social Change in Modern Britain

Edited by Heidi Egginton and Zoë Thomas

University of London Press, 2021

Precarious Professionals details the fight for equality in the workplace, particularly among women and queer people in nineteenth and twentieth-century Britain.
 
Precarious Professionals uncovers the inequalities and insecurities which lay at the heart of professional life in nineteenth and twentieth-century Britain. This book challenges conventional categories in the history of work, exploring instead the everyday labor of maintaining a professional identity on the margins of the traditional professions. Situating new historical perspectives on gender at the forefront of their research, the contributors explore how professional cultures could not only define themselves against but often flourished outside of, the confines of patriarchal codes and structures.

Precarious Professionals offers twelve fascinating case studies, ranging between the 1840s and the 1960s. From pioneering female lawyers and scientists to ballet dancers, secretaries, historians, humanitarian relief workers, social researchers, and Cold War diplomats, this book reveals that precarity was a thread woven throughout the very fabric of modern professional life. Together, these essays enrich our understanding of the histories and mysteries of professional identity and help us to reimagine the future of work in precarious times.
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cover of Precarious Workers: History of Debates, Political Mobilization, and Labor Reforms in Italy

Precarious Workers

History of Debates, Political Mobilization, and Labor Reforms in Italy

Eloisa Betti

Central European University Press, 2023

The recent vast upsurge in social science scholarship on job precarity has generally little to say about earlier forms of this phenomenon. Eloisa Betti’s monograph convincingly demonstrates on the example of Italy that even in the post-war phase of Keynesian stability and welfare state, precarious labor was an underlying feature of economic development. She examines how in this short period exceptional politics of labor stability prevailed. The volume then presents the processes whereby labor precarity regained momentum— under the name of flexibility— in the post-Fordist phase from the early 1980s, taking on new forms in the Craxi and Berlusconi eras.

Multiple actors are addressed in the analysis. The book gives voice to intellectuals, scholars, politicians and trade unionists as they have framed the concept and debates on precarious work from the 1950s onwards. Views of labor law experts, politicians and public servants are investigated in regard to labor regulations. Positions of the very precarians are explored, ranging from rural women, industrial homeworkers and blue-collar workers to physicians, university researchers and trainees, unveiling the emergence of anti-precarity social movements. The continuous role of women’s associations and feminist groups in opposing labor precarity since the 1950s is prominently exposed.

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cover of Precious Materials: The Arts of Metal in the Medieval Iranian World

Precious Materials

The Arts of Metal in the Medieval Iranian World

Annabelle Collinet

Gingko, 2024

A historic collection of metal art from ancient Iran, featuring images of more than 150 objects described in detail and fully illustrated, some with X-rays.

Medieval metalwork is one of the artistic highlights of the Iranian world, as well as of the Département des Arts de l’Islam at the Louvre in Paris, which holds more than one hundred and fifty objects from this period. A new approach to the study of a historic collection, Precious Material: The Arts of Metal in the Medieval Iranian World is a comprehensive overview of the production of metal in medieval Iran. Although this is one of the most important collections in the world, the objects, some well-known but many more unpublished, have never been studied or published as an ensemble. This volume includes a presentation of the collection through the lens of its centers of manufacture, a full technical analysis, as well as the functions and contexts in which the pieces were used. Each object is fully described and illustrated in color with close-up or X-ray images, and many inscriptions have been translated and are included in the catalog entries.
 
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cover of Prefaces to Canon Law Books in Latin Christianity: Selected Translations, 500-1317, second edition

Prefaces to Canon Law Books in Latin Christianity

Selected Translations, 500-1317, second edition

Robert Somerville

Catholic University of America Press, 2021

An updated and expanded version of the original edition, published in 1998. That original edition went up through 1245. This new version extends to 1317 and adds two important prefaces. Praise for the First Edition “Both students and specialists can be grateful to the authors for this major contribution in English to the study of medieval canon law. It is a clear statement--one emphasized by the late John Gilchrist-that because of its critical importance in medieval life and culture canon law should not remain the obscure domain of specialists, but should be shared with students and non-specialists alike.” – The American Journal of Legal History “[A] learned and useful book, which for the first time assembles a body of canonistic prefaces, presents them in an accessible form, and provides students of medieval canonical thought with a valuable new resource for study and teaching.” – The Catholic Historical Review “This volume is an important and welcome addition to a field of studies where translations into English are few and far between. The breadth of the works selected, the quality of the translations, and the attention to detail that has long characterized the work of both editors make this a valuable resource for specialist and student alike.” – Church History “A welcome combination: a text that is informative for students and professionals alike. The translations succeed in rendering accessible to a general audience some otherwise highly inaccessible material. Somerville and Brasington are to be greatly commended for undertaking this very original enterprise and bringing it to successful parturition.” – Journal of Law and Religion “Somerville and Brasington have chosen to let their compilers and commentators speak for themselves. In doing so, they have had to wrestle with often obscure Latin and frequently less than satisfactory editions. That they succeed in making these texts intelligible through translation and annotation is no small feat.” – Sixteenth Century Journal “This is a significant, elegantly presented contribution to the field of theology, cultural history, and canon law.” – Theological Studies
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cover of Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia of Diderot

Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia of Diderot

Jean Le Rond d'Alembert

University of Chicago Press, 1995

Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia of Diderot expresses the hopes, dogmas, assumptions, and prejudices that have come to characterize the French Enlightenment. In this preface to the Encyclopedia, d'Alembert traces the history of intellectual progress from the Renaissance to 1751. Including a revision of Diderot's Prospectus and a list of contributors to the Encyclopedia, this edition, elegantly translated and introduced by Professor Richard Schwab, is one of the great works of the Enlightenment and an outstanding introduction to the philosophes.
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