Search results for ""taylor francis""

This book presents a unique effort to create a new understanding of the Christian sign of the cross. At its core, it traces the conscious and unconscious influence of this visual symbol through time. What began as the crucifixion of a Jewish troublemaker in Roman-occupied Judea in the first century eventually gave rise to a broad spectrum of readings of the instrument used to accomplish such a punishment, a cross.The author argues that Jesus was a provocative, grandiose masochist whose suffering and death initially signified redemption for believers. This idea gradually morphed into a Christian sense of freedom to persecute and wage war against non-believers, however, as can be seen in the Crusades ("wars of the cross"). Many believers even construed the murder of their savior as a crime perpetrated by "the Jews," and this paranoid notion culminated in the mass murder of European Jews under the sign of the Nazi hooked cross (Hakenkreuz).Rancour-Laferriere's book is expertly written and argued; it will be readable to a large audience because it touches on many areas of controversy, interest, and scholarship. The work is critical, but not unfair; it employs psychoanalysis, art history (the study of the symbol of the cross in works of art), religion and religious texts, and world history generally. The interweaving of these various themes is what gives this work its ability to draw in readers—and will ultimately be what keeps the reader interested through the conclusion.

Read more less

Despite a growing literature debating the consequences of neo-liberal political and economic policy in the former Eastern bloc, the idea of neo-liberal personhood has so far received limited attention from scholars of the region. Presenting a range of ethnographic studies, this book lays the groundwork for a new disciplinary agenda by critically examining novel technologies of self-government which have appeared in the wake of political and economic liberalization. Neoliberalism, Personhood, and Postsocialism explores the formation of subjectivities in newly marketized or marketizing societies across the former Eastern Bloc, documenting the rise of the neo-liberal discourse of the ’enterprising’ self in government policy, corporate management and education, as well as examining the shifts in forms of capital amongst marginal capitalists and entrepreneurs working in the grey zone between the formal and informal economies. A rich investigation of the tools of neo-liberal governance and the responses of entrepreneurs and families in changing societies, this book reveals the full complexity of the relationship between historically and socially embedded economic practices, and the increasing influence of libertarian political and economic thought on public policy, institutional reform, and civil society initiatives. As such, it will appeal to anthropologists, sociologists and geographers with interests in political discourse, identity, entrepreneurship and organizations in post-socialist societies.

Read more less

In 1853 Robert Schumann identified fully-formed compositional mastery in the young Brahms, who nevertheless in the years following embarked on a period of intensive further study, producing, among other works, the neo-baroque Sarabande and Gavotte. These dances have not been properly recognized as constituting a distinct Brahms work before now, but manuscript evidence and their performance history indicate that Brahms and his friends thought of them as such in the mid-1850s, when they became the first music of his performed publicly in Gdansk, Vienna, Budapest and London. He later suppressed the dances, using them instead as a thematic quarry for three chamber music masterpieces, from different stages in his life and in distinctly different ways: the Second String Sextet, the First String Quintet and the Clarinet Quintet. This book gives an account of the compositional and performance history, stylistic features and re-uses of the dances, setting these in the wider context of Brahms’s developing creative concerns and trajectory. It constitutes therefore a study of a ’lost’ work, of how a fully-formed master opens himself to ’the in-flowing from afar’ (in Martin Heidegger’s terms), and of the transformative reach and concomitant expressive richness of Brahms’s creative thought.

Read more less

This student-friendly textbook offers a comprehensive introduction to globalization studies and the European Union within a multipolar world. It provides its readers with critical analysis of the key concepts of multilateral global and regional governance and Europe’s role in the world; and this in an accessible and intelligible fashion. This volume collects contributions by eminent scholars from world class universities from five different continents. As such, this unique exercise in transnational multi-disciplinary cooperation, provides extensive coverage of the main issues pertaining to multilateral cooperation - notably its history, troubles, legitimacy challenges and efficiency questions - from a variety of national perspectives. The book covers the major issues confronting students of European and global studies, amongst which: pressing security challenges, new forms of institutionalized cooperation, shifting international trade flows, the notion of responsibility to protect, social imbalances and environmental emergencies, the need for less contingent forms of legitimacy for global regulation, as well as global public opinion and transnational civil society networks. Each chapter includes a summary of its salient points; methodological indications; illuminating illustrations; and a suggested list for further reading. This textbook strives to help students develop a better and more secure grasp of the innovative balance between interdisciplinary openness and disciplinary rigor when engaging with global governance studies, comparative regionalism, normative studies, international political economy or international law.

Read more less

This is the first general selection from the substantial body of surviving documents about Elizabeth’s navy. It is a companion to The Navy of Edward VI and Mary I (Vol.157 in the NRS Series), where the apparatus serving both volumes was printed, and it complements the other NRS volumes that deal specifically with the Spanish Armada. This collection concentrates (though not exclusively so) on the early years of Elizabeth’s reign when there was no formal war. From 1558-1585 the navy was involved in a number of small-scale campaigns, pursuit of pirates and occasional shows of force. The documents selected emphasize the financial and administrative processes that supported these operations, such as mustering, victualing, demobilisation, and ship maintenance and repair. The fleet varied in size from about 30 to 45 ships during the period and a vast amount of maintenance and repair was required. The main component of the volume is the massively detailed Navy Treasurer's account for 1562-3 which is followed by and collated with the corresponding Exchequer Account. The documents illustrate just how efficiently the dockyards functioned. They were one of the great early Elizabethan achievements.

Read more less

The significance of fundamental individual rights to substantive criminal law, criminal procedure law and sentencing law is undeniable for anyone who is familiar with the criminal justice system. The fourteen essays selected for this volume portray and discuss the meaning and rationale of those human rights that are most relevant to that system. They have been chosen for their high quality, timeless approach and general attention to issues that are of universal interest and thus not too closely related to the technicalities of a specific criminal justice system. In combination with the introduction to this volume, the essays cover almost the entire criminal justice system and offer a general overview as well as an in-depth examination of criminal law and human rights. As a result, this volume is essential for researchers, lecturers and students concerned with the tensions and harmonies between the values the criminal justice system and human rights respectively serve.

Read more less

The last fifty years have seen a notable expansion of philosophical scrutiny of the fundamental concepts and structures of Anglo-American criminal law and this volume offers a selection from journal articles and book chapters of significant and influential work in this field. Taken together, these essays illustrate how contemporary philosophical reflection on criminal law has broadened its focus beyond the longstanding and still active debate over the moral legitimacy of punishment. In addition to punishment, the subjects also covered in this collection range from excuse and justification defenses and the conundrums of attempt liability to the bases of culpability and criminal responsibility and the appropriate limits of the criminal law. The introduction clarifies the contexts in which these subjects are discussed, and the volume includes an extensive bibliography.

Read more less

As most jurisdictions move away from the death penalty, some remain strongly committed to it, while others hold on to it but use it sparingly. This volume seeks to understand why, by examining the death penalty’s relationship to state governance in the past and present. It also examines how international, transnational and national forces intersect in order to understand the possibilities of future death penalty abolition. The chapters cover the USA - the only western democracy that still uses the death penalty - and Asia - the site of some 90 per cent of all executions. Also included are discussions of the death penalty in Islam and its practice in selected Muslim majority countries. There is also a comparative chapter departing from the response to the mass killings in Norway in 2011. Leading experts in law, criminology and human rights combine theory and empirical research to further our understanding of the relationships between ways of governance, the role of leadership and the death penalty practices. This book questions whether the death penalty in and of itself is a hazard to a sustainable development of criminal justice. It is an invaluable resource for all those researching and campaigning for the global abolition of capital punishment.

Read more less

Debates surrounding the concept of law are not new. For a wide variety of reasons and in a wide variety of ways, the meaning of 'law' has long been an important part of Western thought, both within legal scholarship and beyond. The contributors to Concepts of Law are international experts from the fields of comparative law, legal philosophy, and the social sciences. Combining theoretical analyses with case studies, they explore various legal concepts and contexts from diverse national and disciplinary perspectives. Legal and normative pluralism is a theme throughout. Some chapters discuss the development of state law and legal systems. Others wrestle with law’s rhetoric and the potential utility of alternative vocabularies, e.g., 'governance' and ’governmentality’. Others reveal the rich polyjurality of the present, from the local to the global. The result is a rich picture of both present scholarship on laws and norms and the state of contemporary legal complexity, each crossing traditional boundaries.

Read more less

As seen from the perspective of 1492, the medieval expansion of Latin Europe was nowhere as dramatic or enduring as in the Iberian Peninsula and the Atlantic. Its Christian kingdoms continued their advance against Al-Andalus up to 1492, whereas territorial expansion elsewhere against the Muslim world had either ceased or subsided by the late 13th century. Castile and Portugal also transformed the Atlantic Ocean from the inaccessible dead-end of Eurasia into the most promising avenue for European expansion for the first time in history. The articles collected in this volume explore the causes and the nature of this expansion, from a variety of historical traditions. They investigate the extent to which the ’transference’ of Mediterranean traditions aided this process; the characteristics of Iberian conflict that eventually led to the success of its Christian kingdoms; and the motives for launching, and techniques for running, the first European ’overseas empires’ in the unfolding Atlantic frontier. In the process they illuminate the new identities and cultural interactions that this expansion produced in its wake, while the new introduction sets them in the broader context.

Read more less

This volume contributes to the codification debate by bringing together research articles which compare and contrast the experience of countries which have a criminal code with those operating a case law system. The articles consider the criticisms that are often made of criminal code systems such as: the implicit restrictions on judicial discretion; the tendency towards inflexibility; the discrepancy that can develop between the theory and the development of the law in practice; and the potential difficulty of a criminal code fitting into a country’s domestic socio-legal culture. The advantages of the case law system are also considered such as reliance on the judiciary for the development of the nation’s criminal law as well as the ability to legislate on the problems of the day by enacting topical laws for distinct subjects. Whereas wholesale codification is a much more accepted phenomenon in the continental law traditions, simplistic transplants from one legal tradition can result in systemic frictions and other anomalies which may offend domestic culture. This collection is an invaluable reference tool which supports the discussion over codification and promotes better understanding across the common law/civil law divide.

Read more less

Taking cross-disciplinary and comparative approaches to the volume’s subject, this exciting collection of essays offers a reassessment of Shakespeare’s erotic and Ovidian mythology within classical and continental aesthetic contexts. Through extensive examination of mythological visual and textual material, scholars explore the transmission and reinvention of Ovidian eroticism in Shakespeare’s plays to show how early modern artists and audiences collectively engaged in redefining ways of thinking pleasure. Within the collection’s broad-ranging investigation of erotic mythology in Renaissance culture, each chapter analyses specific instances of textual and pictorial transmission, reception, and adaptation. Through various critical strategies, contributors trace Shakespeare’s use of erotic material to map out the politics and aesthetics of pleasure, unravelling the ways in which mythology informs artistic creation. Received acceptions of neo-platonic love and the Petrarchan tensions of unattainable love are revisited, with a focus on parodic and darker strains of erotic desire, such as Priapic and Dionysian energies, lustful fantasy and violent eros. The dynamics of interacting tales is explored through their structural ability to adapt to the stage. Myth in Renaissance culture ultimately emerges not merely as near-inexhaustible source material for the Elizabethan and Jacobean arts, but as a creative process in and of itself.

Read more less

Deterrence is a theory which claims that punishment is justified through preventing future crimes, and is one of the oldest and most powerful theories about punishment. The argument that punishment ought to secure crime reduction occupies a central place in criminal justice policy and is the site for much debate. Should the state deter offenders through the threat of punishment? What available evidence is there about the effectiveness of deterrence? Is deterrence even possible? This volume brings together the leading work on deterrence from the dominant international figures in the field. Deterrence is examined from various critical perspectives, including its diversity, relation with desert, the relation of deterrence with incapacitation and prevention, the role deterrence has played in debates over the death penalty, and deterrence and corporate crime.

Read more less

Tackling juvenile offending has become a key part of crime reduction strategies. The articles selected for this volume examine juvenile offending from various critical perspectives and represent the work of the most influential international figures in the field. The issues addressed include: the different needs and perspectives of youth offenders; whether offenders should be treated differently from others because of their age; recommendations of policy changes; identification of risk factors; issues surrounding the sentencing of juvenile offenders; and the relevance of restorative justice.

Read more less

New Mobilities Regimes analyses how global mobilities are changing the world of today and the role of political and economic power. Bringing together essays by leading scholars and social scientists, including Mimi Sheller and Bülent Diken with the work of well-known artists and art theorists such as Jordan Crandall, Ursula Bieman, Gülsün Karamustafa and Dan Perjovschi this book is a unique document of the cross-disciplinary mobility and power discourse. The specific design, integrating the text and art elements to create a singular dialogue makes for an exciting intellectual and aesthetic experience. Illustrated by a range of studies which examine the regulation and structure of mobility, such as the daily routines of teleworkers, Ukrainian cleaners in Western Europe, the mobility policies of global corporations, and the impact of bicycle policies on public space, New Mobilities Regimes emphasizes the routes and crossroads of migration flows as well as at the interaction of mobility and new spatial concepts. The contributors are concerned with both the positive outcomes and the disappointments of the global mobilizations in modern lives. This book is ground-breaking in that it calls for the reassessment of the figurative arts in providing independent and insightful knowledge-generating research on the nature of mobility and highlights the new appreciation of visual representations in sociology, cultural geography and anthropology.

Read more less

Despite William Hunter's stature as one of the most important collectors and men of science of the eighteenth century, and the fact that his collection is the foundation of Scotland's oldest public museum, The Hunterian, until now there has been no comprehensive examination in a single volume of all his collections in their diversity. This volume restores Hunter to a rightful position of prominence among the medical men whose research and amassing of specimens transformed our understanding of the natural world and man's position within it. This volume comprises essays by international specialists and are as diverse as Hunter's collections themselves, dealing as they do with material that ranges from medical and scientific specimens, to painting, prints, books and manuscripts. The first sections focus upon Hunter's own collection and his response to it, while the final section contextualises Hunter within the wider sphere. A special feature of the volume is the inclusion of references to the Hunterian's web pages and on-line databases. These enable searches for items from Hunter's collections, both from his museum and library. Locating Hunter's collecting within the broader context of his age and environment, this book provides an original approach to a man and collection whose importance has yet to be comprehensively assessed.

Read more less

This interdisciplinary collection of essays addresses the theoretical, practical and legal dimensions of equality for persons with disabilities. The issues covered include the central problem of defining disability and impairment; the dilemma of same versus different treatment; the balance between autonomy and external influence and support; linkages to other anti-discrimination categories such as race and sex; the place of disability theory within identity politics; and issues of life, death, and our most intimate relationships. The articles reflect a wealth of international viewpoints and interdisciplinary areas which include philosophy, economics, memoirs, cultural studies, empirical studies and legal scholarship. The selection also includes classic texts which set out foundational ideas such as the social model of disability or the goal of integration, alongside essays that critique these conceptual mainstays. This volume brings into sharp focus a wide range of contentious and complex issues in the field of disability studies and is of interest to researchers and students from a wide range of fields.

Read more less

The essays selected for this volume focus on issues that arise when attempting to design, review and undertake research involving human participants who are experiencing a private or public emergency. The main themes discussed by the essays are: the distinctive and significant ethical questions as to how research participants can be treated during emergency settings; the ethical challenges raised by emergencies for researchers undertaking research and its effects on the nature of research pursued; and procedural obstacles raised by emergencies which can affect the quality of good research ethics review. The volume is unique in that it is the first collection to exclusively deal with all of the central ethical aspects of conducting human subject research in the context of emergency.

Read more less

Health Communication and Mass Media is a much-needed resource for those with a professional or academic interest in the field of health communication. The chapters engage and expand upon significant theories informing efforts at mediated health communication and demonstrate the practical utility of these theories in on-going or completed projects. They consider how to balance the ethical and efficacy demands of mediated health communication efforts, and discuss both traditional media and communication systems and new web-based and mobile media. The book's treatment is broad, reflecting the topical and methodological diversity in the field. It offers an integrated approach to communication theory and application. Readers will be able to appreciate the ways that theory shapes health communication applications and how those applications inform the further construction of theory. They will find practical examples of mediated health communication that can serve as models for their own efforts. While the book serves as an introduction to mediated health communication for students, professionals, and practitioners with limited experience, researchers and advanced practitioners will also appreciate the exemplars and theoretical insights offered by the chapter authors. This book will be of interest to anyone involved in health communication programs or more generally with communication and allied studies, as well as to those in the health professions and their related fields.

Read more less

This volume explores a range of topics during a turbulent period in British history, with particular emphasis on political change and popular piety. On the eve of the Reformation, religious beliefs were shaped by a church which was falling under the growing control of the state, and by responses to England's one and only heretical movement, Lollardy. In political life, gradual disengagement from a cross-Channel political world was followed by civil war and the eventual rise of a strong Tudor monarchy. As this volume demonstrates in a number of ways, the impact of many of these macro changes was felt across the British Isles, not just in England. But the studies presented here frequently explore major change through the experience of the middling sort: the gentry active in local government, the English merchants and Scottish immigrants making important life choices in major cities, or the industrious clerics charged with the routine administration of the church. By looking at the case studies of these men in more detail, we begin to appreciate that even in this age of great change, there were profound continuities which carried through into the sixteenth century. Along the way, too, new light is thrown on the authorship, date and redaction of texts which continue to shape our understanding of late medieval British history.

Read more less

The volume gathers together seventeen articles dedicated to the monetary history of medieval Italy, most of them newly translated into English. The articles in the first section of the volume trace the development of monetisation in Italy from the Lombard period until the rise of the communes, taking Rome, Lazio, Tuscany, and several cities and regions in north-central Italy as case studies. The articles in the second section analyse different aspects of monetary production and circulation in Byzantine Italy, while the third gathers together studies on various aspects of Carolingian coinage: the transition from the Lombard system and the problem of furnishing an adequate supply of silver; mints and royal administration; and the activity and inactivity of mints operating at the edges of the Regnum Italiae. All of the articles share the author’s characteristic concern with setting the evidence from written sources against the wealth of new data emerging from recent archaeological research.

Read more less

Throughout human history luxury textiles have been used as a marker of importance, power and distinction. Yet, as the essays in this collection make clear, the term 'luxury' is one that can be fraught with difficulties for historians. Focusing upon the consumption, commercialisation and production of luxury textiles in Italy and the Low Countries during the late medieval and early modern period, this volume offers a fascinating exploration of the varied and subtle ways that luxury could be interpreted and understood in the past. Beginning with the consumption of luxury textiles, it takes the reader on a journey back from the market place, to the commercialisation of rich fabrics by an international network of traders, before arriving at the workshop to explore the Italian and Burgundian world of production of damasks, silks and tapestries. The first part of the volume deals with the consumption of luxury textiles, through an investigation of courtly purchases, as well as urban and clerical markets, before the chapters in part two move on to explore the commercialisation of luxury textiles by merchants who facilitated their trade from the cities of Lucca, Florence and Venice. The third part then focusses upon manufacture, encouraging consideration of the concept of luxury during this period through the Italian silk industry and the production of high-quality woollens in the Low Countries. Graeme Small draws the various themes of the volume together in a conclusion that suggests profitable future avenues of research into this important subject.

Read more less

This volume of leading scholarly articles addresses the international dynamics of emergency policy and practice. In a world of increasing technological, economic and political interdependency, it is no longer feasible for states to ignore the pervasive influence of globalisation. The crises wrought by industrial disasters, catastrophic weather events, pandemics, financial implosion and cyber intrusion now transcend and challenge national interests with increasing frequency. The case-studies collected here explore these global dimensions of crisis and the state through the lenses of planning and prevention, acute responses, recovery and reconstruction, and learning about crisis. This collection is essential reading for academics, policy officials and practitioners with an interest in emergency management, risk management and issues of national/global security. In original introductory and concluding chapters to the volume, Legrand and McConnell provide a critical perspective on the challenges that globalisation presents to policymakers under crisis conditions and signposts some of the emerging challenges to the state and international community.

Read more less

Rights: Concepts and Contexts contains the central works of recent scholarship on the nature of rights, with contributions by some of the most prominent contemporary theorists in moral, legal, and political philosophy, including Joseph Raz, Robert Alexy, Jeremy Waldron, Morton Horwitz, Stephen Darwall, Margaret Gilbert, David Lyons, and Aharon Barak. With approaches ranging from the political to the historical, and from the analytical to the critical, this collection touches on the major conceptual and practical questions of this important field: what is the nature and grounding of human rights? How should conflicts of rights best be analyzed? Are rights best understood in terms of choice, benefits, or some hybrid of the two? What are the connections between rights and duties, and between rights and justice? The collection also offers useful introductions to emerging issues in rights theory such as the purported bipolarity of rights.

Read more less

The essays in this volume illuminate a central paradox in the post-colonial West: race remains a potent index of social, economic and political inequality even while racial discrimination has become unlawful, even anathema. The standard account of this paradox is that racial discrimination and inequality are unfortunate vestiges of the past, which an enlightened legal system is now engaged in extirpating. These essays reveal a different story: equality law preserves racial inequality even while denouncing it. The authors show how in country after country, legal rules define racism so narrowly and make racial discrimination so difficult to prove that inequality persists despite its symbolic extinction. This ground-breaking volume of English-language essays, aimed at academics and researchers, shows how critical race theory, an analytic approach developed in the United States, can shed light on the workings of race in political-legal systems as diverse as South Africa, New Zealand, France and Latin and South America.

Read more less

The essays selected for this volume address topics at the intersection of religion and equality law, including discrimination against religion, discrimination by religious actors and discrimination in favor of religious groups and traditions. The introduction provides a conceptual guide to these types of inequality - which are often misunderstood or conflated - and it offers an analysis of different species of discrimination within each broad category. Each section of the volume contains both theoretical essays, which set out frameworks for thinking about the relevant type of inequality, and essays that examine real-world disputes. For example, the articles address the conflicts over headscarf laws in France and Turkey, the place of so-called traditional religions in Africa, the display of Roman Catholic crucifixes in Italian classrooms, and the ability of American religious organizations to be free of employment laws in their treatment of clergy. This volume brings together classic articles which are otherwise difficult to access, enables students to study key articles side-by-side, and provides instructors with a valuable teaching resource.

Read more less

This book presents together a number of path-breaking essays on different aspects of medieval music in France written by Manuel Pedro Ferreira, who is well known for his work on the medieval cantigas and Iberian liturgical sources. The first essay is a tour-de-force of detective work: an odd E-flat in two 16th-century antiphoners leads to the identification of a Gregorian responsory as a Gallican version of a seventh-century Hispanic melody. The second rediscovers a long-forgotten hypothesis concerning the microtonal character of some French 11th-century neumes. In the paper "Is it polyphony?" an even riskier hypothesis is arrived at: Do the origins of Aquitanian free organum lie on the instrumental accompaniment of newly composed devotional versus? The Cistercian attitude towards polyphonic singing, mirrored in musical sources kept in peripheral nunneries, is the subject of the following essay. The intellectual and sociological nature of the Parisian motet is the central concern of the following two essays, which, after a survey of concepts of temporality in the trouvère and polyphonic repertories, establish it as the conceptual foundation of subsequent European schools of composition. It is possible then to assess the real originality of Philippe de Vitry and his Ars nova, which is dealt with in the following chapter. A century later, the role of Guillaume Dufay in establishing a chord-based alternative to contrapuntal writing is laboriously put into evidence. Finally, an informative synthesis is offered concerning the mathematical underpinnings of musical composition in the Middle Ages.

Read more less

Amongst recent contemporary art and museological publications, there have been relatively few which direct attention to the distinct contributions that twentieth and twenty-first century artists have made to gallery and museum interpretation practices. There are fewer still that recognise the pedagogic potential of interventionist artworks in galleries and museums. This book fills that gap and demonstrates how artists have been making curious but, none-the-less, useful contributions to museum education and curation for some time. Claire Robins investigates in depth the phenomenon of artists' interventions in museums and examines their pedagogic implications. She also brings to light and seeks to resolve many of the contradictions surrounding artists' interventions, where on the one hand contemporary artists have been accused of alienating audiences and, on the other, appear to have played a significant role in orchestrating positive developments to the way that learning is defined and configured in museums. She examines the disruptive and parodic strategies that artists have employed, and argues for that they can be understood as part of a move to re-establish the museum as a discursive forum. This valuable book will be essential reading for students and scholars of museum studies, as well as art and cultural studies.

Read more less

The face of the divine feminine can be found everywhere in Mexico. One of the most striking features of Mexican religious life is the prevalence of images of the Virgin Mother of God. This is partly because the divine feminine played such a prominent role in pre-Hispanic Mexican religion. Goddess images were central to the devotional life of the Aztecs, especially peasants and those living in villages outside the central city of Tenochtitlan (present day Mexico City). In these rural communities fertility and fecundity, more than war rituals and sacrificial tribute, were the main focus of cultic activity. Both Aztec goddesses and the Christian Madonnas who replaced them were associated, and sometimes identified, with nature and the environment: the earth, water, trees and other sources of creativity and vitality. This book uncovers the myths and images of 22 Aztec Goddesses and 28 Christian Madonnas of Mexico. Their rich and symbolic meaning is revealed by placing them in the context of the religious worldviews in which they appear and by situating them within the devotional life of the faithful for whom they function as powerful mediators of divine grace and terror.

Read more less

Sexual rules and regulations are among society’s oldest yet it is only in recent decades that this once-stigmatized field has become the focus of scholarly attention. This volume, which includes some of the most thought-provoking and hard-to-find essays in the field, covers a diverse range of topics from sexual orientation and gender identity to intersexuality and commercial sex, and from HIV/AIDS and trafficking to polygamy. Through historical, political and critical-theoretical lenses, and through a global focus, the selections ask how we conceptualize the groups and acts subjected to sexual regulation and how regulations in the field implicate and produce understandings of sexuality and identity. By placing this variety of works together, Sexuality and Equality Law invites fresh insights into commonalities and synergies across regulatory arenas that are often isolated from one another. The volume’s introduction situates all of these works in the broader field and offers readers an extensive bibliography.

Read more less

Angeliki Laiou (1941-2008), one of the leading Byzantinists of her generation, broke new ground in the study of the social and economic history of the Byzantine Empire. Byzantium and the Other: Relations and Exchanges, the second of three volumes to be published posthumously in the Variorum Collected Studies Series, brings together fourteen articles published between 1982 and 2012 that reflect her enduring interest in Byzantium's political, ideological, and commercial relations with its neighbours. The first three articles examine Byzantine attitudes and institutional responses to foreigners and strangers within the empire, while the next four concern Byzantium's response to the Crusades and, more generally, to questions of justice in the spheres of conflict and colonisation. The final seven articles investigate Byzantium's political and commercial relations with other regional and Mediterranean powers; particular emphasis is placed on Venice and Genoa, whose increasing involvement in the Byzantine economy so marked the final centuries of the empire's existence.

Read more less

Analysing the decorative programmes of the most opulent European palaces of the time, Margaretha Rossholm Lagerlöf investigates how meaning was conveyed through display and visual effects. She explores the visual meaning inherent in the scheme of spatial relations; in effects of scale, perspective, lighting, figures' positions and postures; and in relations among image types. The analysis concerns the interrelations of various kinds of images in the ensembles; the relations between images and physical site; and the address to the beholder. Lagerlöf considers the visual impact of the imagery in conjunction with 'readable' or symbolically 'coded' meanings; thus, the study does not merely subject these decorations to formalist aesthetic principles. She shows the visual meaning generally to sustain the verbal or readable messages, but often in subtle ways, extending or elaborating the meaning. Occasionally, the visual meaning comes forth as an undercurrent or complication, deviating from the proclaimed and symbolic meaning. Fate, Glory, and Love in Early Modern Gallery Decoration contributes to the body of scholarship on visual rhetoric and on how images 'act' out their messages.

Read more less

This volume collects some of the best recent writings on St. Thomas’s philosophy of law and includes a critical examination of Aquinas’s theory of the relation between law and morality, his natural law theory, as well as the modern reformulation of his approach to natural rights. The volume shows how Aquinas understood the importance of positive law and demonstrates the modern relevance of his writings by including Thomistic critiques of modern jurisprudence and examples of applications of Thomistic jurisprudence to specific modern legal problems such as federalism, environmental policy, abortion and euthanasia. The volume also features an introduction which places Aquinas’s writings in the context of modern jurisprudence as well as an extensive bibliography. The volume is suited to the needs of jurisprudence scholars, teachers and students and is an essential resource for all law libraries.

Read more less

Looking past the apparent lack of a sustainable Irish display culture, this book demonstrates that there is a very full story to tell of the way Ireland displayed its art from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century. Ireland on Show analyzes the impact of the display of art as a significant political and cultural feature in the make-up of nineteenth-century Ireland - and in how Ireland was viewed beyond its own shores, in particular in Great Britain and the United States. Fintan Cullen directs much-needed critical attention and analysis to a subject that has been largely overlooked from an Irish perspective. This study moves beyond museums, to address the range of art institutions in Irish cities that displayed art, from the Royal Hibernian Academy, founded in the 1820s, to Hugh Lane's Municipal Art Gallery, opened in Dublin in 1908. Throughout, the book explores the battle between the display of a unionist ethos and a nationalist point of view, a constant that resurfaces over the period. By highlighting the tension between unionist and nationalist viewpoints, Cullen uses the display of art to investigate the complexities of Irish cultural life before the founding of the Free State.

Read more less

Through the analysis of several commemorative acts in space, matter and image, namely museums and memorials, this book reflects on the ways in which architecture as a discipline, a practice and a discourse represents the Holocaust. In doing so, it problematises how one presents an extreme historical case in a contemporary context and integrates the historical into actuality. By examining several cases, the book defines the issues faced by various architects who dealt with this topic and discusses their separate and distinctive approaches. In each case, it analyses the ways in which the cultural and political contexts of commemoration led to a different interpretation of the condition. Focusing on the Ghetto Fighters’ House, the world’s first Holocaust museum; Yad Vashem, Israel’s national Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem; the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington; and the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, the book discusses how the representation of history by architecture creates a dialectic process in which architecture mediates the past to the present, while at the same time creating a present saturated with historical contexts. It shows how, together, they are incorporated into one another and create a new reality: past and present intertwined.

Read more less

'Eye hEar The Visual in Music' employs the concept of the visual in proximate relation to music, producing a tension: 'is it not the case that there is a gulf between painting and music, between the visible and the audible? One is full of colour and light yet silent; one is invisible and marvellously noisy.' Such a belief, this book argues, betrays an ideological constraint on music, desiccating it to sound, and art to vision. The starting point of this study is more hybrid (and hydrating): that music is never employed without numerous and complex intersections with the visual. By involving the concept of synaesthesia, the book evokes music’s multi-sensory nature, stops it from sounding alone, and offers music as a subject for art historians. Music bleeds into art and visuality, in its graphic depiction in notation, in the theatre of performance, its sights and sites. This book looks at music in its absolute guise as a model for art; at notation and the conductor as the silent visual fulcra around which music circulates; at the music and image of Erik Satie; at the concert hall as white cube; at the symphonic film '2001: A Space Odyssey'; and at the liminality of John Cage and Andy Warhol.

Read more less

This important volume brings together a range of material in different areas of law and the social sciences that address questions concerning the rights of minorities. The discipline is arguably one of the oldest branches of public international law, and owes its heritage to those who struggled to create standards to protect the numerically inferior and non-dominant communities from the excesses of the majority. While reflecting this rich heritage, the works contained in this volume show the extent to which policy constructs (especially in law) have begun to pay heed to the need to include minorities in different domestic settings across the globe. To provide readers with a structured approach to understanding global minority rights law the editor divides the issues into six main headings, namely: Historical Development; Conceptual Development; Contemporary Challenges; Fundamental Norms of Minority Protection; Specific Rights of Minorities; Human Rights and Minority Rights.

Read more less

Kraanerg by Iannis Xenakis is one of the most important works of the post-1950 era. James Harley, a leading Xenakis scholar, presents the genesis of Kraanerg, from the granting of the commission to the choreographer, to the selection of Xenakis as composer, to the premiere, recording, and subsequent presentations. The book is written with the benefit of access to sketches and recordings in the Xenakis Archives, allowing Harley to delve into the details of how this particular work came about. An overview of Xenakis's life is provided, looking at his major works and important compositional techniques and accomplishments, as well as looking at the presenters of the work and other principles in the performance history. Harley presents analytical and critical discussions of Kraanerg's music and reception, including the relationship of the score to the recorded parts. James Harley is a composer with first-hand experience of the interlocking fields of acoustic and electronic music that Xenakis made his own. The book is accompanied by a CD, which helps to conceptualize the extremely complex score.

Read more less

This volume brings together a set of key studies on the history of medieval Central Europe (Bohemia, Hungary, Poland), along with others specially commissioned for the book or translated, and a new introduction. This region was both an area of immigration, and one of polities in expansion. Such expansion included the settlement and exploitation of previously empty lands as well as rulers' attempts to incorporate new territories under their rule, although these attempts did not always succeed. Often, German immigration has been prioritized in scholarship, and the medieval expansion of Central Europe has been equated with the expansion of Germans. Debates then focused on the positive or negative contribution of Germans to local life, and the consequences of their settlement. This perspective, however, distorts our understanding of medieval processes. On the one hand, Central Europe was not a passive recipient of immigrants. Local rulers and eventually nobles benefited from and encouraged immigration; they played an active role. On the other hand, German immigration was not a unified movement, and cannot be equated with a drang nach osten. Finally, not just Germans, but also various Romance-speaking and other immigrant groups settled in Central Europe. This volume, therefore, seeks to present a more complex picture of medieval expansion in Central Europe.

Read more less

This volume presents foundational and representative essays of the last half century on theatre performance practice during the period 1580 to 1750. The particular focus is on the nature of playing spaces, staging, acting and audience response in professional theatre and the selection of previously published research articles and book chapters includes significant works on topics such as Shakespearean staging, French and Spanish theatre audiences, the challenging aspects of the evolution of Italian renaissance acting practice, and the ’hidden’ dimensions of performance. The essays provide coherent transnational coverage as well as detailed treatments of their individual topics. Considerations of theatre practice in Italy, Spain and France, as well as England, place Shakespeare’s theatre in its European context to reveal surprising commonalities and salient differences in the performance practice of early modern Europe’s major professional theatres. This volume is an indispensable reference work for university libraries, lecturers, researchers and practitioners and offers a coherent overview of early modern comparative performance practice, and a deeper understanding of the field’s major topics and developments.

Read more less

This volume captures the rich diversity of European performance practice evident in the twentieth and early part of the twenty-first century. Written by leading directors, actors, dancers, scenographers and academics from across Europe, the collection spans a broad range of subject areas including dance, theatre, live art, multimedia performance and street protest. The essays are divided into three sections on: performers and performing; staging performance; representation and reception, and document innovations in acting, performance and stagecraft by key practitioners. Articles also explore the ways that performance has been used to stage debates around major preoccupations of the age such as war, the human condition, globalization, the impact of new technologies and identity politics. This volume, which features previously published performance manifestoes, articles, and book chapters on the most frequently discussed and debated topics in the field, is an indispensable reference work for both academics and students.

Read more less

Decorated by Giovanni Buonconsiglio, Jacopo Tintoretto, Palma il Giovane, Sebastiano Ricci and Giambattista Tiepolo, the church of the former Benedictine female monastery Santi Cosma e Damiano occupies an outstanding position in Venice. The author of this study argues that from its foundation in 1481 to its dissolution in 1805, Santi Cosma e Damiano was a reform convent, and that its nuns employed art and architecture as a means to actively express their specific religious concerns. While on the one hand focusing, on the basis of extensive archival research, on the reconstruction of the history and construction of the convent, this study's larger concern is with the religious reform movement, its ideas concerning art and architecture, and with the convent as a space for female self-realization in early modern Venice.

Read more less

Protected areas, such as nature reserves, national parks and marine conservation areas, are the main tool of nature conservation policies and are increasing on a worldwide scale. They are one of the main forms of environmental planning, and conservation institutions have increasing means at their disposal. At the same time, the goals of protected areas have become more diverse, with the involvement of more stakeholders and complex institutional frameworks. Giving an account of the extension and diversification of protected areas, this book determines whether these two processes constitute a breakdown in conservation policies. Economists, ecologists, lawyers, anthropologists and geographers analyse the various trends which are fundamental to the future of protected areas to reveal a conflicting scene where narrative around cooperation and integration hides competition between different interests. This book shows how protected areas are emerging as zones of divergent experimentations of sustainable development rather than lasting forms of integrative environmental management.

Read more less

Global health has emerged as a distinct field of academic research and professional activity. Over the last decade, health has become an important element of many nations' foreign policies, a routine agenda item for the G8 and a rapidly expanding focus of bilateral and multilateral development assistance. Some aspects of health, like the spread of easily transmitted communicable diseases, are self-evidently global in an age of rapid, low-cost air travel. Many more reflect the influence of transnational economic integration ('globalization') and its effects on national economies, societies and health systems. In still other cases, like non-communicable diseases in most low- and middle-income countries, the lack of impact on the interests of more powerful actors outside the borders of the affected areas makes it difficult to generate the concern and action on the part of the global community that may be imperative for ethical reasons. This multinational volume of original contributed papers simultaneously provides an overview of the state of current global health scholarship, reflects the multidisciplinary nature of the field, and highlights the most significant issues for research and policy.

Read more less

This volume offers snapshots of how rights are debated and employed in public discourse to reshape legal and political relations at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It explores how rights are used to challenge the state of affairs by individuals and groups who seek justice, and the strategies devised to defy the existing rights by those who wish to recast the social and political order. This volume discusses rights, firstly, in relation to actual events and issues faced by policy-makers, courts, international agencies, or ordinary people. These range from the demands of minority groups living in the West to freely practice their culture and/or religion, to the threat of terrorism, the regulation of asylum rights, the investor's rights to disclosure and the rights of artists to freedom of expression. Secondly, rights discourse is examined in relation to attempts to redefine the form and content of rights, for example, by banning the right to wear religious symbols in public institutions or detaining terrorism suspects without trial. Thirdly, rights discourse is explored in connection with the attempts to develop new notions of rights, such as 'human security', which can more effectively respond to the challenges of late modern societies. Finally, the statuses of rights in sociological theory and socio-legal research are briefly discussed and analysed.

Read more less

Capturing Japan in Nineteenth-Century New England Photography Collections examines the evidence left behind from a famous first encounter-that of prominent New England Americans with the remnants of feudal Japan in the 1870s and 1880s. The study reveals that, despite these Americans' varied reasons for traveling to Japan and studying its culture, a common desire united all of their collecting activities: to gather photographic documentation of a Japan they believed was disappearing under the pressures of trade and industrialization. Eleanor Hight focuses on the case studies of six New Englanders, whose travel and photograph collecting influenced the flowering of Japonism in the late nineteenth-century Boston area-still visible today in institutions such as the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Peabody Essex Museum, and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. The book also explores the history of Japanese photography and its main themes, from images of travel and historic sites, to exotic subjects such as geisha and samurai. The first history of its kind, this study makes fundamental points about the ways photographs, seeming conveyors of fact, imprint mental images and suppositions on their viewers.

Read more less

Focusing on three celebrated northern European still life painters”Jan Brueghel, Daniel Seghers, and Jan Davidsz. de Heem”this book examines the emergence of the first garland painting in 1607-1608, and its subsequent transformation into a widely collected type of devotional image, curiosity, and decorative form. The first sustained study of the garland paintings, the book uses contextual and formal analysis to achieve two goals. One, it demonstrates how and why the paintings flourished in a number of contexts, ranging from an ecclesiastical center in Milan, to a Jesuit chapter house and private collections in Antwerp, to the Habsburg court in Vienna. Two, the book shows that when viewed over the course of the century, the images produced by Brueghel, Seghers and de Heem share important similarities, including an interest in self-referentiality and the exploration of pictorial form and materials. Using a range of evidence (inventories, period response, the paintings themselves), Susan Merriam shows how the pictures reconfigured the terms in which the devotional image was understood, and asked the viewer to consider in new ways how pictures are made and experienced.

Read more less

William A Graham, a leading international scholar in the field of Islamic Studies, gathers together his selected writings under three sections: 1.History and Interpretation of Islamic Religion; 2.The Qur'an as Scripture, and 3. Scripture in the History of Religion. Each section opens with a new introduction by Graham, and a bibliography of his works is included. Graham's work in Islamic studies focuses largely on the analysis and interpretation of the religious dimensions of ritual action, scriptural piety, textual authority/revelation, tradition, and major concepts, such as grace and transcendence. His work in the comparative history of religion has focused in particular on the 'problem' of scripture as a cross-cultural religious phenomenon that is more complex than simply 'sacred text'. This invaluable resource will be of primary interest to students of the Islamic tradition, especially as regards Qur'anic piety, Muslim 'ritual' practice, and fundamental structures of Islamic thought, and to students of the comparative history of religion, especially as regards the phenomenon of 'scripture' and its analogs.

Read more less