Description
Book Synopsis In the last decade or so, many books have been devoted to the history of Europe.Two conceptual axes predominate in a large number of these accounts: a discourse focusing on Europe’s values, and another discourse, fashioned largely in opposition to the first, which emphasizes the process of European “construction.” The first conceives of Europe’s past teleologically, as a process by which certain values (Christian ethics, individualism, capitalism, tolerance, republicanism, due process, etc.) were affirmed and came to define European culture. The second approach rejects the discourse on values emphasizes the post-Enlightenment emergence of the concept of Europe, and the political and ideological implications in its continuous redefinitions (and re elaborations) during the past two or more centuries. This volume offers new approaches that integrate the long temporal dimension of the values-based approach, albeit devoid of its teleological element, with the “constructivist” interpretation.
Trade Review “This is an important collection and starting point for the worthy goal of promoting a better understanding of the past that makes it less able to be manipulated for contemporary political and religious aims…Compiled out of the European past, its aim of a better understanding of traditional values ought to be useful for contemporary cultures and for the work of scholars of all cultures and continents." · Renaissance Quarterly
Table of Contents Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations
Introduction
A Harlequin’s Dress: Reflections on Europe’s Public Discourse
Anthony Molho
Rethinking the History of Europe: Old and New Approaches
Diogo Ramada Curto
PART I: MARGINS
Chapter 1. Crypto-identities: Disguised Turks, Christians and Jews
Giovanni Ricci
Chapter 2. Segregation, Migration and Recuperation of the Orient in Mediterranean Europe during the First Modernity: The Case of Semitic Spain
André Stoll
Chapter 3. Gender and the Body
Giulia Calvi
Chapter 4. Magic and Witchcraft
Stuart Clark
PART II: COMMUNITIES
Chapter 5. A Republic of Merchants?
Francesca Trivellato
Chapter 6 A European Community of Scholars: Exchange and Friendship among Early Modern Natural Historians
Florike Egmond
Chapter 7. The Court Galaxy
Rita Costa Gomes
Chapter 8. Rites of Passage and the Grand Tour: Discovering, Imagining and Inventing European Civilization in the Age of Enlightenment
Robert Wokler
Chapter 9. Citizenship and the Language of Statecraft
Janet Coleman
Chapter 10. Images of Law in Europe: In Search of Shared Traditions
Pietro Costa
Chapter 11. Resisting Public Violence: Actions, Law and Emotions
Angela De Benedictis
PART III: IMAGES
Chapter 12. The Tree
Christiane Klapisch-Zuber
Chapter 13. From the Renaissance to the Englightenment ... through Antiquity: The Beginnings of the European Network of Museums
Edouard Pommier
Chapter 14. Sainthood and Heroism: Images and Imagery in Sixteenth-century Europe
Denis Crouzet
Chapter 15. Latin
Françoise Waquet
Abstracts of Chapters 1–15 in French
Index
