Search results for ""University of Pennsylvania Press""

This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.

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This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.

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This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.

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This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.

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A chronicle of neighborhood redevelopment politics in West Philadelphia over 60 yearsIn twenty-first-century American cities, policy makers increasingly celebrate university-sponsored innovation districts as engines of inclusive growth. But the story is not so simple. In University City, Laura Wolf-Powers chronicles five decades of planning in and around the communities of West Philadelphia's University City to illuminate how the dynamics of innovation district development in the present both depart from and connect to the politics of mid-twentieth-century urban renewal. Drawing on archival and ethnographic research, Wolf-Powers concludes that even as university and government leaders vow to develop without displacement, what existing residents value is imperiled when innovation-driven redevelopment remains accountable to the property market.The book first traces the municipal and institutional politics that empowered officials to demolish a predomina

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An examination of the transformation of the Democratic Party since the late 1960sWho governs political parties? Recent insurgent campaigns, such as those of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, have thrust this critical question to the center of political debate for casual observers and scholars alike. Yet the dynamics of modern party politics remain poorly understood. Assertions of either elite control or interest group dominance both fail to explain the Trump victory and the surprise of the Sanders insurgency and their subsequent reverberations through the American political landscape. In True Blues, Adam Hilton tackles the question of who governs parties by examining the transformation of the Democratic Party since the late 1960s. Reconceiving parties as contentious institutions, Hilton argues that Democratic Party change was driven by recurrent conflicts between groups and officeholders to define and control party identity, program, and policy. The outcome of this prolonged struggle

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An ethnographic exploration of anthropological failure through the Mapuche archetypes of witch, clown, and usurperHow do we learn what failure looks like? During the years anthropologist Magnus Course spent living with Indigenous Mapuche people in southern Chile, he came to understand failureboth his own and those of the discipline of anthropologythrough Mapuche narratives of the witch, the clown, and the usurper. In a context of enduring poverty and racism, increasing state repression, and his own disintegration, he began to realize that these figures of failure, and their insatiable appetites for destruction, greed, and property, reflected as much upon his own failings as on anybody else's, but also showed the way forward to a better way to live.Set amidst the stunning natural beauty and political tragedies of southern Chile, Three Ways to Fail is the story of what it means to become a part of other people's lives, of what it means to fail them, and of wh

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Over the course of the long eighteenth century, a network of some fifty women writers, working in French, English, Dutch, and German, staked out a lasting position in the European literary field. These writers were multilingual and lived for many years outside of their countries of origin, translated and borrowed from each others'' works, attended literary circles and salons, and fashioned a transnational women''s literature characterized by highly recognizable codes. Drawing on a literary geography of national types, women writers across Western Europe read, translated, wrote, and rewrote stories about exceptional young women, literary heroines who transcend the gendered destiny of their distinctive cultural and national contexts. These transcultural heroines struggle against the cultural constraints determining the sexualized fates of local girls.In Heroines and Local Girls, Pamela L. Cheek explores the rise of women''s writing as a distinct, transnational category in

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Scripts of Blackness shows how the early modern mass media of theatre and performance culture at-large helped turn blackness into a racial category, that is, into a type of difference justifying emerging social hierarchies and power relations in a new world order driven by colonialism and capitalism.In this book, Noémie Ndiaye explores the techniques of impersonation used by white performers to represent Afro-diasporic people in England, France, and Spain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, using a comparative and transnational framework. She reconstructs three specific performance techniquesblack-up (cosmetic blackness), blackspeak (acoustic blackness), and black dances (kinetic blackness)in order to map out the poetics of those techniques, and track a number of metaphorical strains that early modern playtexts regularly associated with them. Those metaphorical strains, the titular scripts of blackness of this book, operated across national borders and constitut

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This book gets to the bottom of the twenty-first-century city, literally. Underground moves beneath Romania's capital, Bucharest, to examine how the demands of global accumulation have extended urban life not just upward into higher skylines, and outward to ever more distant peripheries, but also downward beneath city sidewalks. Underground details how developers and municipal officials have invested tremendous sums of money to gentrify and expand Bucharest's constellation of subterranean Metro stations and pedestrian pathways, basements and cellars, bunkers and crypts to provide upwardly mobile residents with space to live, work, and play in an overcrowded and increasingly unaffordable city center. In this sense, the repurposed underground facilitates dreams of middle-class ascendancy. This sense of optimism, the book shows, invariably gives way to ambivalence as the middle classes confront the indignities of being incorporated into the city from below.Bruce O'N

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Daniel O'Quinn investigates the complex interpersonal, political, and aesthetic relationships between Europeans and Ottomans in the long eighteenth century. Bookmarking his analysis with the conflict leading to the 1699 Treaty of Karlowitz on one end and the 1815 bid for Greek independence on the other, he follows the fortunes of notable British, Dutch, and French diplomats to the Sublime Porte of the Ottoman Empire as they lived and worked according to the capitulations surrendered to the Sultan. Closely reading a mixed archive of drawings, maps, letters, dispatches, memoirs, travel narratives, engraved books, paintings, poems, and architecture, O'Quinn demonstrates the extent to which the Ottoman state was not only the subject of historical curiosity in Europe but also a key foil against which Western theories of governance were articulated. Juxtaposing narrative accounts of diplomatic life in Constantinople, such as those contained in the letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, wife of the English ambassador, with visual depictions such as those of the costumes of the Ottoman elite produced by the French-Flemish painter Jean Baptiste Vanmour, he traces the dissemination of European representations and interpretations of the Ottoman Empire throughout eighteenth-century material culture. In a series of eight interlocking chapters, O'Quinn presents sustained and detailed case studies of particular objects, personalities, and historical contexts, framing intercultural encounters between East and West through a set of key concerns: translation, mediation, sociability, and hospitality. Richly illustrated and provocatively argued, Engaging the Ottoman Empire demonstrates that study of the Ottoman world is vital to understanding European modernity.

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What does the keyword "continence" in Love's Labor's Lost reveal about geopolitical boundaries and their breaching? What can we learn from the contemporary identification of the "quince" with weddings that is crucial for A Midsummer Night's Dream? How does the evocation of Spanish-occupied "Brabant" in Othello resonate with contemporary geopolitical contexts, wordplay on "Low Countries," and fears of sexual/territorial "occupation"? How does "supposes" connote not only sexual submission in The Taming of the Shrew but also the transvestite practice of boys playing women, and what does it mean for the dramatic recognition scene in Cymbeline? With dazzling wit and erudition, Patricia Parker explores these and other critical keywords to reveal how they provide a lens for interpreting the language, contexts, and preoccupations of Shakespeare's plays. In doing so, she probes classical and historical sources, theatrical performance practices, geopolitical interrelations, hierarchies of race, gender, and class, and the multiple significances of "preposterousness," including reversals of high and low, male and female, Latinate and vulgar, "sinister" or backward writing, and latter ends both bodily and dramatic. Providing innovative and interdisciplinary perspectives on Shakespeare, from early to late and across dramatic genres, Parker's deeply evocative readings demonstrate how easy-to-overlook textual or semantic details reverberate within and beyond the Shakespearean text, and suggest that the boundary between language and context is an incontinent divide.

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The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is one of the world's best-known and most translated documents. When it was presented to the United Nations General Assembly in December in 1948, Eleanor Roosevelt, chair of the writing group, called it a new "Magna Carta for all mankind." The passage of time has shown Roosevelt to have been largely correct in her prediction as to the declaration's importance. No other document in the world today can claim a comparable standing in the international community. Roosevelt and French legal expert René Cassin have often been represented as the principal authors of the declaration. But in fact, it resulted from a collaborative effort involving a number of individuals in different capacities. One of the declaration's most important authors was the vice chairman of the Human Rights Commission, Peng Chun Chang (1892-1957), a Chinese diplomat and philosopher whose contribution has been the focus of growing attention in recent years. Indeed, it is Chang who deserves the credit for the universality and religious ecumenism that are now regarded as the declaration's defining features. Despite this, Chang's extraordinary contribution has been overlooked by historians. Peng Chun Chang was a modern-day Renaissance man—teacher, scholar, university chancellor, playwright, diplomat, and politician. A true cosmopolitan, he was deeply involved in the cultural exchange between East and West, and the dramatic events of his life left a profound mark on his intellectual and political work. P. C. Chang and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is the first biography of this extraordinary actor on the world stage, who belonged to the same generation as Mao Zedong and Chiang Kai-shek. Drawing on previously unknown sources, it casts new light on Chang's multifaceted life and involvement with one of modern history's most important documents.

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In Occupied America, Donald F. Johnson chronicles the everyday experience of ordinary people living under military occupation during the American Revolution. Focusing on day-to-day life in port cities held by the British Army, Johnson recounts how men and women from a variety of backgrounds navigated harsh conditions, mitigated threats to their families and livelihoods, took advantage of new opportunities, and balanced precariously between revolutionary and royal attempts to secure their allegiance. Between 1775 and 1783, every large port city along the Eastern seaboard fell under British rule at one time or another. As centers of population and commerce, these cities—Boston, New York, Newport, Philadelphia, Savannah, Charleston—should have been bastions from which the empire could restore order and inspire loyalty. Military rule's exceptional social atmosphere initially did provide opportunities for many people—especially women and the enslaved, but also free men both rich and poor—to reinvent their lives, and while these opportunities came with risks, the hope of social betterment inspired thousands to embrace military rule. Nevertheless, as Johnson demonstrates, occupation failed to bring about a restoration of imperial authority, as harsh material circumstances forced even the most loyal subjects to turn to illicit means to feed and shelter themselves, while many maintained ties to rebel camps for the same reasons. As occupations dragged on, most residents no longer viewed restored royal rule as a viable option. As Johnson argues, the experiences of these citizens reveal that the process of political change during the Revolution occurred not in a single instant but gradually, over the course of years of hardship under military rule that forced Americans to grapple with their allegiance in intensely personal and highly contingent ways. Thus, according to Johnson, the quotidian experience of military occupation directly affected the outcome of the American Revolution.

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Japan is a place where powerful earthquakes have occurred more frequently and have caused more harm in the modern era than they have in all but a handful of other locations on the planet. In the twentieth century alone, earthquake disasters in Japan took almost as many lives as they had in all of the country’s recorded history up to that point. Predicting Disasters is the first English-language book to explore how scientists convinced policy makers and the public in postwar Japan that catastrophic earthquakes were coming, and the first to show why earthquake prediction has played such a central role in Japan’s efforts to prepare for a dangerous future ever since. Kerry Smith shows how, in the twentieth century, scientists struggled to make large-scale earthquake disasters legible to the public and to policy makers as significant threats to Japan’s future and as phenomena that could be anticipated and prepared for. Smith also explains why understanding those struggles matters. Disasters, Smith contends, belong alongside more familiar topics of analysis in modern Japanese history—such as economic growth and its impacts, political crises and popular protest, and even the legacies of the war—for the work they do in helping us better understand how the past has influenced beliefs about Japan’s possible futures, and how beliefs about the future shape the present. Predicting Disasters makes relevant elements of Japan’s past more accessible to readers interested in the histories of disaster and scientific communities, as well as to those who want to gain a better understanding of the risk and uncertainty surrounding natural phenomena.

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The Violence of Recognition offers an unprecedented firsthand account of the operations of Hindu nationalists and their role in sparking the largest incident of anti-Christian violence in India’s history. Through vivid ethnographic storytelling, Pinky Hota explores the roots of ethnonationalist conflict between two historically marginalized groups—the Kandha, who are Adivasi (tribal people considered indigenous in India), and the Pana, a community of Christian Dalits (previously referred to as “untouchables”). Hota documents how Hindutva mobilization led to large-scale violence, culminating in attacks against many thousands of Pana Dalits in the district of Kandhamal in 2008. Bringing indigenous studies as well as race and ethnic studies into conversation with Dalit studies, Hota shows that, despite attempts to frame these ethnonationalist tensions as an indigenous population’s resistance against disenfranchisement, Kandha hostility against the Pana must be understood as anti-Christian, anti-Dalit violence animated by racial capitalism. Hota’s analysis of caste in relation to race and religion details how Hindu nationalists exploit the singular and exclusionary legal recognition of Adivasis and the putatively liberatory, anti-capitalist discourse of indigeneity in order to justify continued oppression of Dalits—particularly those such as the Pana. Because the Pana lost their legal protection as recognized minorities (Scheduled Caste) upon conversion to Christianity, they struggle for recognition within the Indian state’s classificatory scheme. Within the framework of recognition, Hota shows, indigeneity works as a political technology that reproduces the political, economic, and cultural exclusion of landless marginalized groups such as Dalits. The Violence of Recognition reveals the violent implications of minority recognition in creating and maintaining hierarchies of racial capitalism.

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Stephen Porter's Benevolent Empire examines political-refugee aid initiatives and related humanitarian endeavors led by American people and institutions from World War I through the Cold War, opening an important window onto the "short American century." Chronicling both international relief efforts and domestic resettlement programs aimed at dispossessed people from Europe, Latin America, and East Asia, Porter asks how, why, and with what effects American actors took responsibility for millions of victims of war, persecution, and political upheaval during these decades. Diverse forces within the American state and civil society directed these endeavors through public-private governing arrangements, a dynamic yielding both benefits and liabilities. Motivated by a variety of geopolitical, ethical, and cultural reasons, these advocates for humanitarian action typically shared a desire to portray the United States, to the American people and international audiences, as an exceptional, benevolent world power whose objects of concern might potentially include any vulnerable people across the globe. And though reality almost always fell short of that idealized vision, Porter argues that this omnivorous philanthropic energy helped propel and steer the ascendance of the United States to its position of elite global power. The messaging and administration of refugee aid initiatives informed key dimensions of American and international history during this period, including U.S. foreign relations, international humanitarianism and human rights, global migration and citizenship, and American political development and social relations at home. Benevolent Empire is thus simultaneously a history of the United States and the world beyond.

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A radical shift took place in medieval Europe that still shapes contemporary intellectual life: freeing themselves from the fixed beliefs of the past, scholars began to determine and pursue their own avenues of academic inquiry. In Knowledge True and Useful, Frank Rexroth shows how, beginning in the 1070s, a new kind of knowledge arose in Latin Europe that for the first time could be deemed “scientific.” In the twelfth century, when Peter Abelard proclaimed the primacy of reason in all areas of inquiry (and started an affair with his pupil Heloise), it was a scandal. But he was not the only one who wanted to devote his life to this new enterprise of “scholastic” knowledge. Rexroth explores how the first students and teachers of this movement came together in new groups and schools, examining their intellectual debates and disputes as well as the lifelong connections they forged with one another through the scholastic communities to which they belonged. Rexroth shows how the resulting transformations produced a new understanding of truth and the utility of learning, as well as a new perspective on the intellectual tradition and the division of knowledge into academic disciplines—marking a turning point in European intellectual culture that culminated in the birth of the university and, with it, traditions and forms of academic inquiry that continue to organize the pursuit of knowledge today.

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Circumventing the Law probes the rabbinic logic behind the use of loopholes, the legal phenomenon of finding and using gaps within law to achieve otherwise illegal outcomes. The logic of ha’aramah, a subset of rabbinic legal circumventions mostly defined as a tool for private life, underpins both well-known circumventions, such as selling leaven before Passover, and lesser-known mechanisms, such as designating an animal intended for sacrifice “blemished” before birth to allow it to be slaughtered for food instead. Elana Stein Hain traces the development of these loopholes over time, revealing that rabbinic literature does not consistently accept or reject loopholes. Instead, rabbinic Judaism applies categories of evasion (prohibited), avoidance (permitted), and avoision (contested) to loopholes on a case-by-case basis. The intended outcome of a given loophole determines its classification, as does the legal integrity of the circumventive process in question. Yet these understandings of loopholes are not static—instead, rabbinic attitudes toward loopholing change over time. Early works display an objective, performative understanding of the self and of intention, but evolve over time to reflect more subjective and intimate understanding of the self and intention. This evolution redefines what legal integrity means in Jewish legal philosophy. Circumventing the Law brings readers through the Second Temple period to the modern era to see how loopholing has evolved over millennia. With a focus on late antiquity, Stein Hain explores tannaitic literature, the Palestinian Talmud, and contemporaneous Greco-Roman and Persian thought to show that when warranted, Jewish rhetoric and philosophy around understandings of loopholes was a unique phenomenon that relied on changes in understanding the definition of integrity itself, a key finding for scholars of Jewish Studies and of religious and of secular law writ large.

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Refuting the common perception that the American left has a religion problem, Vaneesa Cook highlights an important but overlooked intellectual and political tradition that she calls "spiritual socialism." Spiritual socialists emphasized the social side of socialism and believed the most basic expression of religious values—caring for the sick, tired, hungry, and exploited members of one's community—created a firm footing for society. Their unorthodox perspective on the spiritual and cultural meaning of socialist principles helped make leftist thought more palatable to Americans, who associated socialism with Soviet atheism and autocracy. In this way, spiritual socialism continually put pressure on liberals, conservatives, and Marxists to address the essential connection between morality and social justice. Cook tells her story through an eclectic group of activists whose lives and works span the twentieth century. Sherwood Eddy, A. J. Muste, Myles Horton, Dorothy Day, Henry Wallace, Pauli Murray, Staughton Lynd, and Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke and wrote publicly about the connection between religious values and socialism. Equality, cooperation, and peace, they argued, would not develop overnight, and a more humane society would never emerge through top-down legislation. Instead, they believed that the process of their vision of the world had to happen in homes, villages, and cities, from the bottom up. By insisting that people start treating each other better in everyday life, spiritual socialists transformed radical activism from projects of political policy-making to grass-roots organizing. For Cook, contemporary public figures such as Senator Bernie Sanders, Pope Francis, Reverend William Barber, and Cornel West are part of a long-standing tradition that exemplifies how non-Communist socialism has gained traction in American politics.

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In The Enslaved and Their Enslavers, Edward Pearson offers a sweeping history of slavery in South Carolina, from British settlement in 1670 to the dawn of the Civil War. For enslaved peoples, the shape of their daily lives depended primarily on the particular environment in which they lived and worked, and Pearson examines three distinctive settings in the province: the extensive rice and indigo plantations of the coastal plain; the streets, workshops, and wharves of Charleston; and the farms and estates of the upcountry. In doing so, he provides a fine-grained analysis of how enslaved laborers interacted with their enslavers in the workplace and other locations where they encountered one another as plantation agriculture came to dominate the colony. The Enslaved and Their Enslavers sets this portrait of early South Carolina against broader political events, economic developments, and social trends that also shaped the development of slavery in the region. For example, the outbreak of the American Revolution and the subsequent war against the British in the 1770s and early 1780s as well as the French and Haitian revolutions all had a profound impact on the institution’s development, both in terms of what enslaved people drew from these events and how their enslavers responded to them. Throughout South Carolina’s long history, enslaved people never accepted their enslavement passively and regularly demonstrated their fundamental opposition to the institution by engaging in acts of resistance, which ranged from vandalism to arson to escape, and, on rare occasions, organizing collectively against their oppression. Their attempts to subvert the institution in which they were held captive not only resulted in slaveowners tightening formal and informal mechanisms of control but also generated new forms of thinking about race and slavery among whites that eventually mutated into pro-slavery ideology and the myth of southern exceptionalism.

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In this book, renowned anthropologist Michael Jackson draws on philosophy, biography, ethnography, and literature to explore the meanings and affordances of friendship—a relationship just as significant as, yet somehow different from, kinship and love. Beginning with Aristotle’s accounts of friendship as a political virtue and Montaigne’s famous essay on friendship as a form of love, Jackson examines the tension between the political and personal resonances of friendship in the philosophy of Hannah Arendt, the biography of the Indian historian Brijen Gupta, and the oral narratives of a Kuranko storyteller, Keti Ferenke Koroma. He offers reflections on childhood friends, imaginary friends, lifelong friendships, and friendships with animals. He ruminates particularly on the complications of friendship in the context of anthropological fieldwork, exploring the contradiction between the egalitarian spirit of friendship on the one hand and, on the other, the power imbalance between ethnographers and their interlocutors. Through these stories, Jackson explores the unpredictable interplay of mutability and mutuality in intimate human relationships, and the critical importance of choice in forming friendship—what it means to be loyal to friends through good times and bad, and even in the face of danger. Through a blend of memoir, theory, ethnography, and fiction, Jackson shows us how the elective affinities of friendship transcend culture, gender, and age, and offer us perennial means of taking stock of our lives and getting a measure of our own self-worth.

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Spanning the fields of literature, history, philosophy, and theology, Unsettling Jewish Knowledge adopts a fresh approach to the study of Jewish thought and culture. By creatively foregrounding the role of emotions, senses, and the imagination in Jewish experience, the book invites readers to consider what it means for Jewish identity and experience to be constituted outside the frameworks of reasoned thought and inquiry. The collection’s eight essays offer innovative and provocative approaches to a diverse array of topics including modern Jewish-Christian relations, the book of Isaiah, contemporary Jewish fiction, and philosophical meditations on Jewish law. Their bold interpretations of Jewish texts and histories are centered on questions of faith, loss, prejudice, and enchantment—and the darker implications of these questions. The book’s essays also illuminate the importance of desire as a key motivating force in the pursuit of knowledge. Weaving together insights from several disciplines, Unsettling Jewish Knowledge challenges us to grapple with the unexpected, the unconventional, and the uncomfortable aspects of Jewish experience and its representations. Contributors: Anne C. Dailey, John Efron, Yael S. Feldman, Galit Hasan-Rokem, Martin Kavka, Lital Levy, Shaul Magid, Eva Mroczek, Paul E. Nahme, Eli Schonfeld, Shira Stav.

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In Rhetoric, Poetics, and Literary Historiography, Stefan H. Uhlig offers a new account of the emergence of literary studies. Most histories of the early years of the field search for unifying origins of literature as a discipline and object of study. Uhlig turns to the decades around 1800 in Europe to reveal that the inception of the literary field was instead defined by intellectual diversity and contestation. He draws on an array of European writers to show how three schools of literary study—rhetoric teaching, theories of poetry, and literary history—emerged and clashed during this time, offering near-contemporaneous, yet divergent, visions of how to understand literature. Rhetoric and poetics thwarted criticism, to different ends, while literary historiography proved institutionally reassuring yet less useful as a tool for textual understanding. Uhlig details how Scottish writers like Adam Smith and Hugh Blair taught rhetoric as a form self-expression, while Anglophone and German theorists of poetry like William Wordsworth, Friedrich Schlegel, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe both engaged with and resented critics. At the same time, varying opinions on the practice of literary history emerged, with Immanuel Kant and Thomas De Quincey arguing for the independence of literature from historical forces while writers like Matthew Arnold approached literature as a means of narrating cultural archives instead of drawing on close reading and analysis. Rhetoric, Poetics, and Literary Historiography traces current debates in literary studies back to this formative moment, serving as a guide to past and present controversies in the field.

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Thirty years have passed since Cornel West’s book Race Matters rose to the top of the bestseller lists in 1993. Yet his book remains as relevant as ever to American culture—even more so, if one considers its influence on contemporary racial justice movements such as Black Lives Matter, prison justice, and the fight for police reform. Prophetic Leadership and Visionary Hope, an edited volume of essays by leading scholars in Black studies, religious studies, and social justice history, looks back to the original 1993 text and forward into the future of racial understanding and healing in our current century, responding to Dr. West’s own repeated insistence that we can only understand our present and future by looking back. By reengaging with West’s book at this seminal moment, Prophetic Leadership and Visionary Hope offers new points of entry into the thorny issues that the 1993 text addressed: the challenge of leadership in a culture marked by the legacy of white supremacy; the limited value of liberal affirmative action programs in promoting the affirmation of Black humanity; the dangerous seductions of African American conservatism and the question of Black self-regard (what West called “black nihilism”); the necessity and difficulty of cross-race solidarity and cross-religious affinity; the need to channel legitimate Black rage over untenable conditions of existence into productive opportunities and viewpoints. All of these issues are even more marked in American society today. The voices collected in this volume are the legitimate intellectual heirs of the original Race Matters. With essays that span the topics of history, politics, philosophy, religion, cultural studies, music, and aesthetics, Prophetic Leadership and Visionary Hope is as wide-ranging as the thinker whose ideas it engages, interrogates, and celebrates. Contributors: Nkosi Du Bois Anderson, Paul A. Bové, Matthew M. Briones, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Susannah Heschel, Lucius T. Outlaw Jr., Andrew Prevot, Brandon M. Terry, Cornel West, Barbara Will.

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In A Constitutional Culture, Adrian Chastain Weimer uncovers the story of how, more than a hundred years before the American Revolution, colonists pledged their lives and livelihoods to the defense of local political institutions against arbitrary rule. With the return of Charles II to the English throne in 1660, the puritan-led colonies faced enormous pressure to conform to the crown’s priorities. Charles demanded that puritans change voting practices, baptismal policies, and laws, and he also cast an eye on local resources such as forests, a valuable source of masts for the English navy. Moreover, to enforce these demands, the king sent four royal commissioners on warships, ostensibly headed for New Netherland but easily redirected toward Boston. In the face of this threat to local rule, colonists had to decide whether they would submit to the commissioners’ authority, which they viewed as arbitrary because it was not accountable to the people, or whether they would mobilize to defy the crown. Those resisting the crown included not just freemen (voters) but also people often seen as excluded or marginalized such as non-freemen, indentured servants, and women. Together they crafted a potent regional constitutional culture in defiance of Charles II that was characterized by a skepticism of metropolitan ambition, a defense of civil and religious liberties, and a conviction that self-government was divinely sanctioned. Weimer shows how they expressed this constitutional culture through a set of well-rehearsed practices—including fast days, debates, committee work, and petitions. Equipped with a ready vocabulary for criticizing arbitrary rule, with a providentially informed capacity for risk-taking, and with a set of intellectual frameworks for divided sovereignty, the constitutional culture that New Englanders forged would not easily succumb to an imperial authority intent on consolidating its power.

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Constructing Gardens, Cultivating the City is the first cultural history of major new parks developed in Paris in the late twentieth century, as part of the city’s program of adaptive reuse of industrial spaces. Thanks to laws that gave the city more political autonomy, Paris’s local government launched a campaign of park creation in the late 1970s that continued to the turn of the millennium. The parks in this book represent this campaign and illustrate different facets of their cultural and historical context. Archival research, interviews, and analyses of the parks reveal how postmodern debates about urban planning, the historic city, public space, and nature’s presence in an urban setting influenced their designs. In sum, the city adopted the garden as a model for public parks, investing in complex, richly symbolic and representational spaces. These parks were intended to represent contemporary twists on traditional designs and serve local residents as much as they would contribute to Paris’s role as a world city. The parks’ development process often included points of conflict, pointing to differing views on what Parisian space should represent and fundamental contradictions between the characteristics of public space and the garden as it is traditionally defined. These parks demonstrate the ongoing cultivation of the city over time, in which transformed sites not only fulfil new functions but also engage with history and their surroundings to create new meaning. They stand for landscape as a form of signifying cultural production that directly engages with other art forms and ways of knowing. Just as the Luxembourg Gardens, the Tuileries, and the Buttes-Chaumont parks exemplify their eras’ cultural dynamics, such parks as the Jardin Atlantique, Parc André-Citroën, and the Jardin des Halles express contemporary French culture within the archetypal space of their era, the city. Finally, they point the way to current trends in landscape architecture, such as citizen gardening and ecological initiatives.

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Jewish Life in Medieval Spain is a detailed exploration of the Jewish experience in medieval Spain from the dawn of Sephardic society in the ninth century to the expulsion of 1492. An important contribution of the book is the integration of the rise and fall of Jewish life in Muslim al-Andalus into the history of the Jews in medieval Christian Spain. It traces the collapse of Jewish life in Muslim Spain, the emigration of Andalusi Jewry to the lands of Christian Iberia, and the long and difficult confluence of these two distinct Jewish subcultures. Focusing on internal developments of Jewish society, it offers a narrative of Jewish history from the inside out, bringing to light the various divisions and rivalries within the Jewish community. This approach, in turn, allows for a deeper understanding of the complex relations between Spanish Jews and their Muslim and Christian neighbors. Jonathan Ray’s original perspective on the Jewish experience is particularly instructive when considering the widescale anti-Jewish riots of 1391. The combination of violence and mass conversion of the Jews irrevocably shifted the dynamics of inter-religious relations as well as those within the Jewish community itself. Yet even in the wake of these tragic events, the Jews of Spain continued to flourish, fostering a culture that they would carry into exile and that would preserve the memory of Jewish Spain for centuries to come.

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The story of freedom pivots on the choices black women made to retain control over their bodies and selves, their loved ones, and their futures. The story of freedom and all of its ambiguities begins with intimate acts steeped in power. It is shaped by the peculiar oppressions faced by African women and women of African descent. And it pivots on the self-conscious choices black women made to retain control over their bodies and selves, their loved ones, and their futures. Slavery's rise in the Americas was institutional, carnal, and reproductive. The intimacy of bondage whet the appetites of slaveowners, traders, and colonial officials with fantasies of domination that trickled into every social relationship—husband and wife, sovereign and subject, master and laborer. Intimacy—corporeal, carnal, quotidian—tied slaves to slaveowners, women of African descent and their children to European and African men. In Wicked Flesh, Jessica Marie Johnson explores the nature of these complicated intimate and kinship ties and how they were used by black women to construct freedom in the Atlantic world. Johnson draws on archival documents scattered in institutions across three continents, written in multiple languages and largely from the perspective of colonial officials and slave-owning men, to recreate black women's experiences from coastal Senegal to French Saint-Domingue to Spanish Cuba to the swampy outposts of the Gulf Coast. Centering New Orleans as the quintessential site for investigating black women's practices of freedom in the Atlantic world, Wicked Flesh argues that African women and women of African descent endowed free status with meaning through active, aggressive, and sometimes unsuccessful intimate and kinship practices. Their stories, in both their successes and their failures, outline a practice of freedom that laid the groundwork for the emancipation struggles of the nineteenth century and reshaped the New World.

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At first glance, Barbara Kalish fit the stereotype of a 1950s wife and mother. Married at eighteen, Barbara lived with her husband and two daughters in a California suburb, where she was president of the Parent-Teacher Association. At a PTA training conference in San Francisco, Barbara met Pearl, another PTA president who also had two children and happened to live only a few blocks away from her. To Barbara, Pearl was "the most gorgeous woman in the world," and the two began an affair that lasted over a decade. Through interviews, diaries, memoirs, and letters, Her Neighbor's Wife traces the stories of hundreds of women, like Barbara Kalish, who struggled to balance marriage and same-sex desire in the postwar United States. In doing so, Lauren Jae Gutterman draws our attention away from the postwar landscape of urban gay bars and into the homes of married women, who tended to engage in affairs with wives and mothers they met in the context of their daily lives: through work, at church, or in their neighborhoods. In the late 1960s and 1970s, the lesbian feminist movement and the no-fault divorce revolution transformed the lives of wives who desired women. Women could now choose to divorce their husbands in order to lead openly lesbian or bisexual lives; increasingly, however, these women were confronted by hostile state discrimination, typically in legal battles over child custody. Well into the 1980s, many women remained ambivalent about divorce and resistant to labeling themselves as lesbian, therefore complicating a simple interpretation of their lives and relationship choices. By revealing the extent to which marriage has historically permitted space for wives' relationships with other women, Her Neighbor's Wife calls into question the presumed straightness of traditional American marriage.

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The Renaissance, scholars have long argued, was a period beset by the loss of philosophical certainty. In Possible Knowledge, Debapriya Sarkar argues for the pivotal role of literature—what early moderns termed poesie—in the dynamic intellectual culture of this era of profound incertitude. Revealing how problems of epistemology are inextricable from questions of literary form, Sarkar offers a defense of poiesis, or literary making, as a vital philosophical endeavor. Working across a range of genres, Sarkar theorizes “possible knowledge” as an intellectual paradigm crafted in and through literary form. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers such as Spenser, Bacon, Shakespeare, Cavendish, and Milton marshalled the capacious concept of the “possible,” defined by Philip Sidney as what “may be and should be,” to construct new theories of physical and metaphysical reality. These early modern thinkers mobilized the imaginative habits of thought constitutive to major genres of literary writing—including epic, tragedy, romance, lyric, and utopia—in order to produce knowledge divorced from historical truth and empirical fact by envisioning states of being untethered from “nature” or reality. Approaching imaginative modes such as hypothesis, conjecture, prediction, and counterfactuals as instruments of possible knowledge, Sarkar exposes how the speculative allure of the “possible” lurks within scientific experiment, induction, and theories of probability. In showing how early modern literary writing sought to grapple with the challenge of forging knowledge in an uncertain, perhaps even incomprehensible world, Possible Knowledge also highlights its most audacious intellectual ambition: its claim that while natural philosophy, or what we today term science, might explain the physical world, literature could remake reality. Enacting a history of ideas that centers literary studies, Possible Knowledge suggests that what we have termed a history of science might ultimately be a history of the imagination.

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Defensive Relativism describes how governments around the world use cultural relativism in legal argument to oppose international human rights law. Defensive relativist arguments appear in international courts, at the committees established by human rights treaties, and at the United Nations Human Rights Council. The aim of defensive relativist arguments is to exempt a state from having to apply international human rights law, or to stop international human rights law evolving, because it would interfere with cultural traditions the state deems important. It is an everyday occurrence in international human rights law and defensive relativist arguments can be used by various types of states. The end goal of defensive relativism is to allow a state to appear human rights compliant while at the same time not implementing international human rights law. Drawing on a range of materials, such as state reports on the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) and cases from the European Court of Human Rights involving freedom of religion, this book provides a definitive survey of defensive relativism. Crucially, Frederick Cowell argues, defensive relativism is not about alternative practices of human rights law, or debates about the origins or legitimacy of human rights as a concept. Defensive relativism is instead a variety of tactical argument used by states to justify ignoring international human rights law. Yet, as Cowell concludes, defensive relativism can’t be removed from the law, as it is a reflection of unresolved tensions about the nature of what it means for rights to be universal.

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In Shakespearean Issues, Richard Strier has written a set of linked essays bound by a learned view of how to think about Shakespeare’s plays and also how to write literary criticism on them. The essays vary in their foci—from dealing with passages and key lines to dealing with whole plays, and to dealing with multiple plays in thematic conversation with each other. Strier treats the political, social, and philosophical themes of Shakespeare’s plays through recursive and revisionary close reading, revisiting plays from different angles and often contravening prevailing views. Part I focuses on characters. Moments of bad faith, of unconscious self-revelation, and of semi-conscious self-revelation are analyzed, along with the problem of describing characters psychologically and ethically. In an essay on “Happy Hamlet,” the famous melancholy of the prince is questioned, as is the villainy of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, while another essay asks the reader to reconsider moral judgments and negative assessments of characters who may be flawed but do not seem obviously wicked, such as Edgar and Gloucester in King Lear. Part II moves to systems, arguing that Henry IV, Measure for Measure, and The Merchant of Venice raise doubts about fundamental features of legal systems, such as impartiality, punishments, and respect for contracts. Strier reveals King Lear’s radicalism, analyzing its concentration on poverty and its insistence on the existence and legitimacy of a material substratum to human life. Essays on The Tempest offer original takes on the play’s presentation of coercive power, of civilization and its discontents, and of humanist ideals. Part III turns to religious and epistemological beliefs, with Strier challenging prevailing views of Shakespeare’s relation to both. A culminating reading sees The Winter’s Tale as ultimately affirming the mind’s capacities, and as finding a place for something like religion within the world. Anyone interested in Shakespeare’s plays will find Shakespearean Issues bracing and thought-provoking.

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In Corrosive Solace, Daniel O’Quinn argues that the loss of the American colonies instantiated a complex reorganization in sociability and politics in the British metropole that has had long-lasting effects on British national and imperial culture, which can be seen and analyzed within its performative repertoire. He examines how the analysis of feeling or affect can be deployed to address the inchoate causal relation between historical events and their mediation. In this sense, Corrosive Solace’s goals are twofold: first, to outline the methodologies necessary for dealing with the affective recognition of historical crisis; and second, to make the historically familiar strange again, and thus make visible key avenues for discussion that have remained dormant. Both of these objectives turn on recognition: How do we theorize the implicit affective recognition of crisis in a distant historical moment? And how do we recognize what we, in our present moment, cannot discern? Corrosive Solace addresses this complex cultural reorientation by attending less to “new” cultural products than to the theoretical and historical problems posed by looking at the transformation of “old” plays and modes of performance. These “old” plays—Shakespeare, post-Restoration comedy and she-tragedy—were a vital plank of the cultural patrimony, so much of O’Quinn’s analysis lies in how tradition was recovered and redirected to meet urgent social and political needs. Across the arc of Corrosive Solace, he tracks how the loss of the American War forced Britons to refashion the repertoire of cultural signs and social dispositions that had subtended its first empire in the Atlantic world in a way more suited to its emergent empire in South Asia.

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This book centers on a fascinating woman, Clare of Rimini (c. 1260 to c. 1324–29), whose story is preserved in a fascinating text. Composed by an anonymous Franciscan, the Life of the Blessed Clare of Rimini is the earliest known saint’s life originally written in Italian, and one of the few such lives to be written while its subject was still living. It tells the story of a controversial woman, set against the background of her roiling city, her star-crossed family, and the tumultuous political and religious landscape of her age. Twice married, twice widowed, and twice exiled, Clare established herself as a penitent living in a roofless cell in the ruins of the Roman walls of Rimini. She sought a life of solitary self-denial, but was denounced as a demonic danger by local churchmen. Yet she also gained important and influential supporters, allowing her to establish a fledgling community of like-minded sisters. She traveled to Assisi, Urbino, and Venice, spoke out as a teacher and preacher, but also suffered a revolt by her spiritual daughters. A Female Apostle in Medieval Italy presents the text of the Life in English translation for the first time, bringing modern readers into Clare’s world in all its excitement and complexity. Each chapter opens a different window into medieval society, exploring topics from political power to marriage and sexuality, gender roles to religious change, pilgrimage to urban structures, sanctity to heresy. Through the expert guidance of scholars and translators Jacques Dalarun, Sean L. Field, and Valerio Cappozzo, Clare’s life and context become a springboard for readers to discover what life was like in a medieval Italian city.

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In many rapidly urbanizing countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, local politics undermines the effectiveness of urban planning. Politicians have incentives to ignore formal urban plans and sideline planners, and instead provide urban land and services through informal channels in order to cultivate political constituencies (a form of what political scientists refer to as “clientelism”). This results in inequitable and environmentally damaging patterns of urban growth in some of the largest and most rapidly urbanizing countries in the world. The technocratic planning solutions often advocated by governments and international development organizations are not enough. To overcome this problem, urban planners must understand and adapt to the complex politics of urban informality. In this book, Chandan Deuskar explores how politicians in developing democracies provide urban land and services to the urban poor in exchange for their political support, demonstrates how this impacts urban growth, and suggests innovative and practical ways in which urban planners can try to be more effective in this challenging political context. He draws on literature from multiple disciplines (urban planning, political science, sociology, anthropology, and others), statistical analysis of global data on urbanization, and an in-depth case study of urban Ghana. Urban planners and international development experts working in the Global South, as well as researchers, educators, and students of global urbanization will find Urban Planning in a World of Informal Politics informative and thought-provoking.

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China turned majority urban only in the recent decade, a dramatic leap given that less than 20 percent of its population lived in cities before 1980. This book situates China’s urbanization in the interconnected forces of historical legacies, contemporary state interventions, and human and ecological conditions. It captures the complexity of the phenomenon of urbanization in its historical and regional variations, and explores its impact on the country’s socioeconomic welfare, environment and resources, urban form and lifestyle, and population and health. It is also a book about China, in which the contributors provide new perspectives to understand the transitions underway and the gravity of the progress, particularly in the context of demographic shifts and climate change. The chapters in China Urbanizing, written by American and Chinese scholars, achieve three interconnected aims. The first is to explore how the process of urbanization has shaped and been influenced by the social, economic, and physical interactions that take place in and beyond cities, and the state interventions intended to regulate such interactions. The second is to examine the shifts and evolutions emerging in urban China, such as the economic slowdown, population aging and low fertility rates, and how cities interact with the environment and planet given China’s rising role in the global discourse on climate change. The third is to explore new sources of information for conducting research on urban China, such as satellite and street-level imagery data and online listings, to account for the complexity and heterogeneity that characterize contemporary Chinese urbanization. Contributors: Juan Chen, Dean Curran, Deborah Davis, Peilei Fan, Qin Gao, Pierre F. Landry, Shi Li, Shiqi Ma, Justin Remais, Alan Smart, Shin Bin Tan, Jeremy Wallace, Sarah Williams, Binbin Wu, Weiping Wu, Guibin Xiong, Wenfei Xu.

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Bad Blood explores representations of race in early modern English and Spanish literature, especially drama. It addresses two different forms of racial ideology: one concerned with racialized religious difference—that is, the notion of having Jewish or Muslim “blood”—and one concerned with Blackness and whiteness. Shakespeare’s Othello tells us that he was “sold to slavery” in his youth, a phrase that evokes the Atlantic triangle trade for readers today. For many years, however, scholars have asserted that racialized slavery was not yet widely understood in early modern England, and that the kind of enslavement that Othello describes is related to Christian-Muslim conflict in the Mediterranean rather than the rise of the racialized enslavement of Afro-diasporic subjects. Bad Blood offers a new account of early modern race by tracing the development of European racial vocabularies from Spain to England. Dispelling assumptions, stemming from Spain’s historical exclusion of Jews and Muslims, that premodern racial ideology focused on religious difference and purity of blood more than color, Emily Weissbourd argues that the context of the Atlantic slave trade is indispensable to understanding race in early modern Spanish and English literature alike. Through readings of plays by Shakespeare, Lope de Vega, and their contemporaries, as well as Spanish picaresque fiction and its English translations, Weissbourd reveals how ideologies of racialized slavery as well as religious difference come to England via Spain, and how both notions of race operate in conjunction to shore up fantasies of Blackness, whiteness, and “pure blood.” The enslavement of Black Africans, Weissbourd shows, is inextricable from the staging of race in early modern literature.

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Situated between the 1970s Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan and the post–2001 War on Terror, Refugee Cities tells the story of how global wars affect everyday life for Afghans who have been living as refugees in Pakistan. This book provides a necessary glimpse of what ordinary life looks like for a long-term refugee population, beyond the headlines of war, terror, or helpless suffering. It also increases our understanding of how cities—rather than the nation—are important sites of identity-making for people of migrant origins. In Refugee Cities, Sanaa Alimia reconstructs local microhistories to chronicle the lives of ordinary people living in low-income neighborhoods in Peshawar and Karachi and the ways in which they have transformed the cities of which they are a part. In Pakistan, formal citizenship is almost impossible for Afghans to access; despite this, Afghans have made new neighborhoods, expanded city boundaries, built cities through their labor in construction projects, and created new urban identities—and often they have done so alongside Pakistanis. Their struggles are a crucial, neglected dimension of Pakistan’s urban history. Yet given that the Afghan experience in Pakistan is profoundly shaped by geopolitics, the book also documents how, in the War-on-Terror era, many Afghans have been forced to leave Pakistan. This book, then, is also a documentation of the multiple displacements migrants are subject to and the increased normalization of deportation as a part of “refugee management.”

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An account of how the three most interested powers—Great Britain, France, and Spain—manipulated the problem of native protection for economic advantage and the unsatisfactory results of their efforts.

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Criticism of the way in which Europeans have treated the inhabitants of the non-European world in the course of European expansion has a long history, Three centuries before Christopher Columbus encountered the American Indians, European intellectuals and clergymen had criticized the treatment of the peoples whom the crusaders and other Europeans met as they moved outward from the heartland of European civilization. The connection between the sixteenth-century Spanish writers who criticized the Spanish conquest of the Americas and medieval writers who criticized the behavior of Europeans toward the non-Europeans they encountered on their borders, is more familiar. Yet, their criticism referred back to medieval legal traditions and arguments about the rights of infidels in the face of European expansion. However, it is the increased recognition of the importance of this connection that has inspired much new research in the field of medieval canon law. The most important theorist of what we now call "race relations", in the Middle Ages, was Sinibaldo Fieschi, a distinguished canon-lawyer, who became Pope Innocent IV (1243-54), whose pontificate is the starting point of this study. As a working canon-lawyer and pope, Innocent's work provides an unusual insight into the whole development of Christian-infidel relations, for his work covers those who lived within Christian Europe, those who were recent converts to Christianity, and those who lived beyond the bounds of Christendom. As pope he initiated the Mongol mission, the first attempt to deal with the Mongol threat to Eastern Europe on a diplomatic level, and to convert the Mongols to Christianity. As a lawyer he was also the author of a commentary on the nature of a just war that became the basis for all future discussion of the rights of infidels who lived in the path of European expansion. A wide knowledge of both legal theory and papal practice blended in a single career and it was this union of these two traditions that formed the intellectual background of Vitoria and Las Casas, and the eminent critics who followed them. This is the first complete study of this subject, based upon a careful analysis of papal and legal sources. Papal sources included letters found in papal registers, including the unpublished Vatican Register 62 which contains only letters dealing with the problems raised by infidel societies. The legal sources include commentaries on the basic texts of canon law that bear on the status of infidels, as well as legal opinions written to deal with specific problems involving Christian-infidel relations. Although directed to specialists and students of this period, this work, original in concept and exceptionally well-written, is sure to find a far wider audience. The whole subject is important, and topical too, in view of the current interest in racism and race relations, itself the subject of the author's Appendix.

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Through the use of language, as symbolic action, man attempts to control his social, natural, and supernatural environments. In this book J. David Sapir, J. Christopher Crocker, and their fellow contributors investigate the nature of metaphor and related symbolic forms as a means of coming to terms with the world.

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Embodying the Soul explores the possibilities and limitations of human intervention in the body's health across the ninth-century Carolingian Empire. Early medieval medicine has long been cast as a superstitious, degraded remnant of a vigorous, rational Greco-Roman tradition. Against such assumptions, Meg Leja argues that Carolingian scholars engaged in an active debate regarding the value of Hippocratic knowledge, a debate framed by the efforts to define Christian orthodoxy that were central to the reforms of Charlemagne and his successors. From a subject with pagan origins that had suspicious links with magic, medical knowledge gradually came to be classified as a sacred art. This development coincided with an intensifying belief that body and soul, the two components of individual identity, cultivated virtue not by waging combat against one another but by working together harmoniously. The book demonstrates that new discussions regarding the legitimacy of medical learning and the merits of good health encouraged a style of self-governance that left an enduring mark on medieval conceptions of individual responsibility. The chapters tackle questions about the soul's material occupation of the body, the spiritual meaning of illness, and the difficulty of diagnosing the ills of the internal bodily cavity. Combating the silence on "dark-age" medicine, Embodying the Soul uncovers new understandings of the physician, the popularity of preventative regimens, and the theological importance attached to dietary regulation and bloodletting. In presenting a cultural history of the body, the book considers a broad range of evidence: theological and pastoral treatises, monastic rules, court poetry, capitularies, hagiographies, biographies, and biblical exegesis. Most important, it offers a dynamic reinterpretation of the large numbers of medical manuscripts that survive from the ninth century but have rarely been the focus of historical study.

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In Medieval English Manuscripts and Literary Forms, Jessica Brantley offers an innovative introduction to manuscript culture that uses the artifacts themselves to open some of the most vital theoretical questions in medieval literary studies. With nearly 200 illustrations, many of them in color, the book offers both a broad survey of the physical forms and cultural histories of manuscripts and a dozen case studies of particularly significant literary witnesses, including the Beowulf manuscript, the St. Albans Psalter, the Ellesmere manuscript of the Canterbury Tales, and The Book of Margery Kempe. Practical discussions of parchment, scripts, decoration, illustration, and bindings mix with consideration of such conceptual categories as ownership, authorship, language, miscellaneity, geography, writing, editing, mediation, illustration, and performance—as well as of the status of the literary itself. Each case study includes an essay orienting the reader to particularly productive categories of analysis and a selected bibliography for further research. Because a high-quality digital surrogate exists for each of the selected manuscripts, fully and freely available online, readers can gain access to the artifacts in their entirety, enabling further individual exploration and facilitating the book’s classroom use. Medieval English Manuscripts and Literary Forms aims to inspire a broad group of readers with some of the excitement of literary manuscript studies in the twenty-first century. The interpretative frameworks surrounding each object will assist everyone in thinking through the implications of manuscript culture more generally, not only for the deeper study of the literature of the Middle Ages, but also for a better understanding of book cultures of any era, including our own.

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For over seven hundred years, bodies of writing in vernacular languages served an indispensable role in the religious and intellectual culture of medieval Christian England, yet the character and extent of their importance have been insufficiently recognized. A longstanding identification of medieval western European Christianity with the Latin language and a lack of awareness about the sheer variety and quantity of vernacular religious writing from the English Middle Ages have hampered our understanding of the period, exercising a tenacious hold on much scholarship. Bringing together work across a range of disciplines, including literary study, Christian theology, social history, and the history of institutions, Balaam's Ass attempts the first comprehensive overview of religious writing in early England's three most important vernacular languages, Old English, Insular French, and Middle English, between the ninth and sixteenth centuries. Nicholas Watson argues not only that these texts comprise the oldest continuous tradition of European vernacular writing, but that they are essential to our understanding of how Christianity shaped and informed the lives of individuals, communities, and polities in the Middle Ages. This first of three volumes lays out the long post-Reformation history of the false claim that the medieval Catholic Church was hostile to the vernacular. It analyzes the complicated idea of the vernacular, a medieval innovation instantiated in a huge body of surviving vernacular religious texts. Finally, it focuses on the first, long generation of these writings, in Old English and early Middle English.

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