Search results for ""Author MANUS"
Penguin Books Ltd Amerika
Karl Rossman has been banished by his parents to America, following a family scandal. There, with unquenchable optimism, he throws himself into the strange experiences that lie before him as he slowly makes his way into the interior of the great continent. Although Kafka's first novel (begun in 1911 and never finished), can be read as a menacing allegory of modern life, it is also infused with a quite un-Kafkaesque blitheness and sunniness, brought to life in this lyrical translation that returns to the original manuscript of the book.
£9.99
Royal Society of Chemistry Science and Art: The Painted Surface
Science and art are increasingly interconnected in the activities of the study and conservation of works of art. Science plays a key role in cultural heritage, from developing new analytical techniques for studying the art, to investigating new ways of preserving the materials for the future. For example, high resolution multispectral examination of paintings allows art historians to view underdrawings barely visible before, while the use of non-invasive and micro-sampling analytical techniques allow scientists to identify pigments and binders that help art conservators in their work. It also allows curators to understand more about how the artwork was originally painted. Through a series of case studies written by scientists together with art historians, archaeologists and conservators, Science and Art: The Painted Surface demonstrates how the cooperation between science and humanities can lead to an increased understanding of the history of art and to better techniques in conservation. The examples used in the book cover paintings from ancient history, Renaissance, modern, and contemporary art, belonging to the artistic expressions of world regions from the Far East to America and Europe. Topics covered include the study of polychrome surfaces from pre-Columbian and medieval manuscripts, the revelation of hidden images below the surface of Van Gogh paintings and conservation of acrylic paints in contemporary art. Presented in an easily readable form for a large audience, the book guides readers into new areas uncovered by the link between science and art. The book features contributions from leading institutions across the globe including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Art Institute of Chicago; Getty Conservation Institute; Opificio delle Pietre Dure, Firenze; National Gallery of London; Tate Britain; Warsaw Academy of Fine Art and the National Gallery of Denmark as well as a chapter covering the Thangka paintings by Nobel Prize winner Richard Ernst.
£49.99
University of Pittsburgh Press Exile in Amsterdam: Saul Levi Morteira's Sermons to a Congregation of “New Jews”
Exile in Amsterdam is based on a rich, extensive, and previously untapped source for one of the most important and fascinating Jewish communities in early modern Europe: the sermons of Saul Levi Morteira (ca. 1596-1660). Morteira, the leading rabbi of Amsterdam and a master of Jewish homiletical art, was known to have published only one book of fifty sermons in 1645, until a collection of 550 manuscript sermons in his own handwriting turned up in the Rabbinical Seminary of Budapest. After years of painstaking study from microfilms and three trips to Budapest to consult the actual manuscripts, Marc Saperstein has written the first comprehensive analysis of the historical significance of these texts, some of which were heard by the young Spinoza. Saperstein reviews the broad outlines of Morteira's biography, his treatment by scholars, and his image in literary works. He then reconstructs the process by which the preacher produced and delivered his sermons. Morteira’s sermons also provide a trove of information about individuals and institutions in Morteira's Amsterdam, enabling Saperstein to analyze the shortcomings of behavior and the lapses in faith criticized by the preacher. The sermons also presented an ongoing program of adult education that transmitted the Jewish tradition on a high yet accessible level to a congregation of new Jews-immigrants who had lived as Christians in Portugal and were now assuming a Jewish identity with minimal prior knowledge. Here Saperstein focuses on themes Morteira considered crucial: memories of the historical past, confrontations with Christianity, ideas of exile and messianic redemption, and attitudes toward the New Christians who remained in Portugal.These historical reflections on Amsterdam’s community of new Jews are illustrated by eight of Morteira’s sermons, which Saperstein presents in English and with full annotation for the first time. Exile in Amsterdam offers those interested in European Jewish history and homiletics access to primary source documents and the scholarship of one of the premier historians of Jewish preaching.
£36.04
WW Norton & Co C. G. Jung: A Biography in Books
In 1912, C. G. Jung wrote, “Should it happen that all traditions in the world were cut off with a single blow, the whole mythology and history of religion would start over again with the succeeding generation.”With this, Jung gave new understanding to the concept of world literature: that the history of human thought lay in the soul, passed from generation to generation, always ready to reemerge. This book shows how Jung’s theory evolved through classics of Western literature, annotated books from his library, manuscripts of his Black Books and The Red Book,other major works in which he attempted to translate insights from The Red Book for a scientific public, the Gnostic and alchemical texts he studied and presented as parallels to his psychology of the unconscious, and Eastern texts he presented in collaboration with leading scholars, establishing a cross-cultural psychology of the process of higher development.
£51.99
Uncivilized Books Unended
What prevents you from finishing your life's work?Josh Bayer finds a manuscript of an unfinished play inside his deceased father's desk. The play tells the story of Josh's mother's early death (age 37) and his father's struggle with single parenthood. When he attempts to adapt the play into comics, it triggers a series of personal crises. Bayer's limitations and futile ambitions are brought into sharp relief as he grapples with an estranged, unknowable parent and the play's frustrating lack of resolution.Humans worship lore, myth, and fables, but many people's creative dreams become abandoned. Why?Bayer's inky line, tangled textures, and kaleidoscopic color boldly fuse on the page into comic book semiotics, flights of grandeur, and tangents inside tangents. Josh Bayer stitches scattered memories into surrealistic episodes permeated with dream logic. Unended is a Promethean quest to excavate the creative fire hidden inside us.
£19.95
Stanford University Press Husserl’s Phenomenology
It is commonly believed that Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), well known as the founder of phenomenology and as the teacher of Heidegger, was unable to free himself from the framework of a classical metaphysics of subjectivity. Supposedly, he never abandoned the view that the world and the Other are constituted by a pure transcendental subject, and his thinking in consequence remains Cartesian, idealistic, and solipsistic. The continuing publication of Husserl's manuscripts has made it necessary to revise such an interpretation. Drawing upon both Husserl's published works and posthumous material, Husserl's Phenomenology incorporates the results of the most recent Husserl research. It is divided into three parts, roughly following the chronological development of Husserl's thought, from his early analyses of logic and intentionality, through his mature transcendental-philosophical analyses of reduction and constitution, to his late analyses of intersubjectivity and lifeworld. It can consequently serve as a concise and updated introduction to his thinking.
£21.99
University of California Press The Paper Road: Archive and Experience in the Botanical Exploration of West China and Tibet
This exhilarating book interweaves the stories of two early twentieth-century botanists to explore the collaborative relationships each formed with Yunnan villagers in gathering botanical specimens from the borderlands between China, Tibet, and Burma. Erik Mueggler introduces Scottish botanist George Forrest, who employed Naxi adventurers in his fieldwork from 1906 until his death in 1932. We also meet American Joseph Francis Charles Rock, who, in 1924, undertook a dangerous expedition to Gansu and Tibet with the sons and nephews of Forrest's workers. Mueggler describes how the Naxi workers and their Western employers rendered the earth into specimens, notes, maps, diaries, letters, books, photographs, and ritual manuscripts. Drawing on an ancient metaphor of the earth as a book, Mueggler provides a sustained meditation on what can be copied, translated, and revised and what can be folded back into the earth.
£27.00
Little, Brown Book Group Leonardo: The First Scientist
This book is both a revelatory biography and an accessible study of Leonardo's life and multi-faceted work as a scientist and engineer. It covers all aspects of the man's life but is also a re-interpretation of the voluminous evidence to paint an original picture of Leonardo da Vinci not only as the archetypal polymath, but as the first true scientist. Topics include:* A detailed investigation of how Leonardo's manuscripts and notebooks were lost to the world and kept secret during his own lifetime and how this altered the progress of science.* A thorough analysis of his work as a scientist and how he predated many of the great figures of the 16th and 17th centuries, including Galileo, Kepler, William Harvey, Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton.* Leonardo's legacy -- what did Leonardo leave in his notebooks and how may they be viewed in the light of modern scientific understanding? What did he achieve in science?
£12.99
Simon & Schuster The Woman Beyond the Attic: The V.C. Andrews Story
**Nominated for an Edgar Award for Best Critical/Biography**This celebration of the woman who took us to the heights of a secluded attic and the depths of our own dark psyches reveals an intimate portrait of the famously private V.C. Andrews—featuring family photos, personal letters, a partial manuscript for an unpublished novel, and more. Best known for her internationally, multi-million-copy bestselling novel Flowers in the Attic, Cleo Virginia Andrews lived a fascinating life. Born to modest means, she came of age in the American South during the Great Depression and faced a series of increasingly challenging health issues. Yet, once she rose to international literary fame, she prided herself on her intense privacy. Now, The Woman Beyond the Attic aims to connect her personal life with the public novels for which she was famous. Based on Virginia’s own letters, and interviews with her dearest family members, her long-term ghostwriter Andrew Neiderman tells Virginia’s full story for the first time.The Woman Beyond the Attic is perfect for V.C. Andrews fans who pick up every new novel or for fans hoping to return to the favorite novelist of their adolescence. Eye-opening and intimate, The Woman Beyond the Attic is for anyone hoping to learn more about the enigmatic woman behind one of the most important novels of the 20th century.
£18.00
Thames & Hudson Ltd Affinities: A Journey Through Images from The Public Domain Review
An exploration of echoes and resonances across two millennia of visual culture, celebrating ten years of The Public Domain Review. Gathering a remarkable collection of over 500 public domain images, Affinities is a carefully curated visual journey illuminating connections across more than two thousand years of image-making. Drawing on a decade of archival immersion at The Public Domain Review, the book has been assembled from a vast array of sources: from manuscripts to museum catalogues, ship logs to primers on Victorian magic. The images are arranged in a single captivating sequence which unfurls according to a dreamlike logic, through a play of visual echoes and evolving thematic threads – hatching eggs twin with early Burmese world maps, marbled endpapers meet tattooed stowaways, and fireworks explode beside deep-sea coral. At once an art book, a sourcebook, and a kaleidoscopic visual poem, Affinities is a unique and enthralling publication that will offer something different on each visit. Its playful and imaginative space invites the reader to transcend familiar categories of epoch, style, or historical theme, and to instead revel in a new world of creative possibilities played out between the images – opening up new connections, ways of seeing, and forms of knowledge. Praise for The Public Domain Review 'An Aladdin’s cave of curiosity ... the best thing on the web' Guardian 'A gold mine of fantastic images and stories' The New York Times
£40.50
Vintage Publishing The Siege of Loyalty House: A new history of the English Civil War
**A TIMES, GUARDIAN, TELEGRAPH, SPECTATOR, THE CRITIC, MAIL ON SUNDAY, ECONOMIST AND PROSPECT BOOK OF THE YEAR**'A gifted narrative historian, eloquent, graceful and witty; the stories she tells are the ones we all should know' Hilary MantelIt was a time of climate change and colonialism, puritans and populism, witch hunts and war . . .This is the story of a home that became a warzone. Basing House in Hampshire saw one of the longest and bloodiest sieges of the English Civil War. Defended for over two years by artists and aristocrats, actors and apothecaries, women and children, it became a symbol of royalist defiance and a microcosm of the wider conflict.Drawing on unpublished manuscripts and the voices of dozens of soldiers and civilians, award-winning historian Jessie Childs weaves a thrilling tale of war and peace, terror and faith, savagery and civilization.__________'Extraordinary, thrilling, immersive ... at times almost Tolstoyan in its emotional intelligence and literary power' Simon Schama'Compellingly readable... [a] beautifully written and lucid account' Mail on Sunday'Brilliant. Original. Gripping.' Antonia Fraser'Beautifully written and gripping from first page to last. A sparkling book by one of the UK's finest historians' Peter Frankopan'The Siege of Loyalty House is not only deeply researched. Childs has composed a wonderfully poetic narrative and adds a touch of the gothic' The Times'Successfully brings the ghastliness of the period to life, dramatically, vividly and with pathos' Charles Spencer, Spectator
£12.99
Orion Publishing Co Bosworth: The Birth of the Tudors
Richard III and Henry Tudor's legendary battle: one that changed the course of English history.On the morning of 22 August 1485, in fields several miles from Bosworth, two armies faced each other, ready for battle. The might of Richard III's army was pitted against the inferior forces of the upstart pretender to the crown, Henry Tudor, a 28-year-old Welshman who had just arrived back on British soil after 14 years in exile. Yet this was to be a fight to the death - only one man could survive; only one could claim the throne.It would become one of the most legendary battles in English history: the only successful invasion since Hastings, it was the last time a king died on the battlefield. But BOSWORTH is much more than the account of the dramatic events of that fateful day in August. It is a tale of brutal feuds and deadly civil wars, and the remarkable rise of the Tudor family from obscure Welsh gentry to the throne of England - a story that began 60 years earlier with Owen Tudor's affair with Henry V's widow, Katherine of Valois.Drawing on eyewitness reports, newly discovered manuscripts and the latest archaeological evidence, Chris Skidmore vividly recreates this battle-scarred world in an epic saga of treachery and ruthlessness, death and deception and the birth of the Tudor dynasty.
£12.99
Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co KG From Most Ancient Sources: The Nature and Text-Critical Use of the Greek Old Testament Text of the Complutensian Polyglot Bible
The Complutenser Polyglotte was a monument not only to its editors, but also to the culture and time in which it was created. Séamus OConnells study provides a focused view of Spanish science and early modern intellectual culture, showing how the Hellenists of Alcalá edited and compiled their manuscripts. By placing the Greek text of the Old Testament of the Complutenser Polyglot in the historical framework of the Greek text editions of the Old Testament, he is embarking on a new research direction that provides valuable impulses for further research in this area.
£52.99
Oxford University Press Inc The Oxford Handbook of the Synoptic Gospels
The Oxford Handbook of the Synoptic Gospels presents essays that push the field beyond the Synoptic Problem and theological themes that ignore the particularities of each Gospel. The first section, "The Problem and Nature of the Synoptics," explores some of the traditional approaches of literary dependence, but primarily engages with alternative ways to understand Synoptic relations and the nature of each Gospel. Interesting questions are raised in these essays regarding the tools used to evaluate literary dependence beyond those of traditional source criticism and redaction criticism (such as performance, orality, rhetoric, ancient publication, literary structures, manuscript variety, and use by non-canonical literature). The second section, "Particular Features in Comparison," treats a variety of historical, literary, and cultural phenomena important to the study of these Gospels (such as gender, violence, power, body, history, sacred space, healing, food, gospel, suffering, sectarianism, itineracy, women, wealth). These essays indirectly reshape traditional theological themes like salvation, Christology, and discipleship, grounding them in the cultural dynamics of the period. The two main sections simultaneously express the current state of the field and push the field forward in unexplored directions.
£108.00
Pen & Sword Books Ltd The Book Lover's Guide to London
Many of the greatest names in literature have visited or made their home in the colourful and diverse metropolis of London. From Charles Dickens to George Orwell, Virginia Woolf to Bernadine Evaristo, London's writers have bought the city to life through some of the best known and loved stories and characters in fiction. This book takes you on an area-by-area journey through London to discover the stories behind the stories told in some of the most famous novels, plays and poems written in, or about, the city. * Find out which poet almost lost one of his most important manuscripts in a Soho pub. * Discover how Graham Greene managed to survive the German bomb that destroyed his Clapham home. * Climb down the dingy steps from London Bridge to Thames path below and imagine how it felt to be Nancy trying to save Oliver Twist, only to then meet her own violent death. * Drink in same pub Bram Stoker listened to the ghost stories that inspired Dracula, the plush drinking house where Noel Coward performed, and the bars and cafes frequented by modern writers. * Tour the locations where London's writers, and their characters lived, worked, played, loved, lost and died. This is the first literature guide to London to be fully illustrated with beautiful colour photographs throughout the book. This unique book can be used a guidebook on a physical journey through London, or as a treasury of fascinating, often obscure tales and information for book lovers to read wherever they are.
£12.99
SPCK Publishing New Testament Prayer for Everyone
This helpful and collection of Tom Wright's insights into the meaning and practice of prayer, gives you all the accessible wisdom of the various New Testament prayers explored in his individual 'For Everyone' commentaries. This convenient yet compact collection of explorations includes his own thoughtful translations and meditations on all the major prayers of the New Testament. Reasons to add 'New Testament Prayers for Everyone' to your collection: - Get Tom Wrights reliable, readable insights - Benefit from his own translation from the original manuscripts - Understand the key teachings of New Testament writers - Find how the hopes and fears of the early Church compare to today's - Make yourself an expert in the earliest written Christian prayers - Find the through line from the apostles to your prayers today Tom Wright on 'The Lord's Prayer': "References to Jesus' own practice of private prayer are scattered throughout the Gospels and clearly reflect an awareness on the part of his first followers that this kind of private prayer - not simply formulaic petitions, but wrestling with God over real issues and questions - formed the undercurrent of his life and public work. The prayer that Jesus gave his followers embodies his own prayer life and his wider kingdom ministry in every clause." There are many books about prayer, but this is the first by Tom Wright to cover all the key teachings and examples to be found in the New Testament.
£9.99
Everyman Hope Against Hope
A harrowing yet uplifting account of Stalin's persecution of the Russian intelligentsia in the 1930s, and of one man - Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938), whose poetry, in spite of the unfolding tragedy of his life, preserved its unique creative gaiety. Nadezhda and Osip Mandelstam married in 1922. Nadezhda's memoir covers their last four years together. She begins in Moscow in May 1934 with the knock on the door at one o'clock in the morning, and her husband's arrest by the secret police for composing a satire of Stalin. She tells of his imprisonment, interrogation and exile to the Urals, where she accompanied him, and where he wrote his last great poems; his release and return to Moscow, only to be entrapped, rearrested and sentenced to hard labour in Siberia; of her own efforts to secure his release and to save his manuscripts (and to memorize all his poems in case she could not); of her discovery of the truth about his death in a transit camp near Vladivostock. For all its grim subject matter, it is a story of courage in adversity, and even humour finds a place. Nadezhda means 'hope' in Russian, and Hope against Hope is one of the greatest testaments to the value of literature and imaginative freedom ever written. It is also a love story that relates the daily struggle to keep both love and art alive in the most desperate circumstances. After years of circulating secretly in the Soviet Union it was published in the West in 1970, and has since achieved the status of a classic.
£18.99
Museum Tusculanum Press Tocharian and Indo-European Studies vol. 11
Established in 1987, Tocharian and Indo-European Studies (TIES) is an international scholarly journal with contributions in English, German and French. The journal's central topic is formed by the two closely related languages Tocharian A and B, attested in Central Asian Buddhist manuscripts dating from the second half of the first millennium AD. It focuses on philological and linguistic aspects of Tocharian, and its relation with the other Indo-European languages.
£45.00
Jacana Media (Pty) Ltd Till we keep an animal
Till we can keep an animal is about a middle-aged woman who was attacked, raped and murdered in her home by armed robbers, Voysey-Briag says "I keep her alive so that her story continues. I invite her family members, those who are alive and dead, to tell their stories through her. She is the main protagonist and the narrator". She said the novel was written from the shame and sadness that exists in this country: 'I wanted to pose questions. We love our grandmothers and grandfathers, our families, but what did they perpetuate the system, to make apartheid work and flourish? That's what I explore in the manuscript, the cruelty that has always existed in South Africa, the violence over 400 years".
£11.99
Yale University Press Yale French Studies, Number 142: Lesbian Materialism: The Life and Work of Monique Wittig
Yale French Studies 142 explores the contemporary relevance of an alternative strand of feminism as theorized by Monique Wittig This volume of Yale French Studies foregrounds Monique Wittig (1935–2003), a writer who left France to live and teach in the United States, in a diverse range of multidisciplinary conversations—in literary studies, history, and gender and sexuality studies—to demonstrate how Wittig’s theoretical and literary work remains an indispensable resource for thinking and creating in the twenty-first century. Editors Morgane Cadieu and Annabel L. Kim flip the “materialist lesbianism” that Wittig’s collection of essays, The Straight Mind, centers and describes as being the core of Wittig’s work to deal instead with “lesbian materialism,” thereby making "lesbian" the method and "materialism" the object and allowing Wittig’s work to realize its full range. The volume reinterrogates the official historiography of French materialist feminism; expands the intellectual framework within which Wittig’s work is usually considered; insists on the language-centric materialism that emerges from Wittig’s writing as a way of joining the political with the literary; and attends to the way this literary material inspires material responses and creations within the plastic arts. Underlying the entire volume is a keen sense of the materiality of Wittig’s archives, housed at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, as a site of lesbian thought in Wittig’s radical sense of the term: a fugitive positionality.
£55.00
Huia Publishers Ancestry
Albert Wendt’s new collection of short stories explores the nature of family, tradition and culture through the eyes of those seemingly caught between the realities of modern contemporary life and the ancestral ties of their heritage. With a deft touch, he draws us into his characters’ lives and with equal parts wisdom and wit, he exposes them to us. This is a masterful meditation on the ties that bind people together across time and place.The unpublished manuscript of Ancestry was overall winner of the University of the South Pacific Press Literature Prize in 2011.
£31.27
Rowman & Littlefield Hollywood Behind the Lens
Los Angeles is a city that runs from its own past explains historian and Bison Archives owner Marc Wanamaker.Many of Hollywood's legendary sets and props, mansions, theaters, restaurants, nightclubs, hotels, and even the studios and the films they produced are now either gone or have been redeveloped, repurposed, or remade beyond recognition. Even more disarmingly, the physical ephemera associated with such items is often MIA as well. Photographs, files, maps, documents, menus, production paperwork, records, manuscripts, everything from matchbooks to movie magazines and entire movie backlots have now been lost in the backwash of dubious progress, short-sighted corporate mindsets, and civic indifference. Fortunately, for the last fifty years, in the very epicenter of Hollywood, thanks to Wanamaker, there has existed a haven where over 70,000 of these items, physically or photographically, have been collected and protected. These artifacts tell the story of Hollywood's glorious past,
£41.40
Manchester University Press Riches of the Rylands: The Special Collections of the University of Manchester Library
Riches of the Rylands explores and celebrates the outstanding Special Collections of The University of Manchester Library. These collections of rare books, manuscripts, archives, maps and visual materials are extraordinarily rich and diverse. They span 5,000 years and six continents, and include almost every format ever used for written communication. Many derive from the superlative collections purchased by Enriqueta Rylands for the magnificent library she founded as a memorial to her husband John.The book features over 150 key items from across the collections. Thirteen thematic chapters contain short essays on individual items by over sixty contributors – curators and experts in particular fields. Every item is beautifully illustrated in full colour and an extended introduction charts the history and context of the collections. Riches of the Rylands will appeal to a broad readership – lovers of books and libraries, and anyone interested in literature, art, history, the history of ideas and collecting.
£25.16
Pennsylvania State University Press Visualizing Household Health
In 1256, the countess of Provence, Beatrice of Savoy, enlisted her personal physician to create a health handbook to share with her daughters. Written in French and known as the Régime du corps, this health guide would become popular and influential, with nearly seventy surviving copies made over the next two hundred years and translations in at least four other languages. In Visualizing Household Health, art historian Jennifer Borland uses the Régime to show how gender and health care converged within the medieval household. Visualizing Household Health explores the nature of the households portrayed in the Régime and how their members interacted with professionalized medicine. Borland focuses on several illustrated versions of the manuscript that contain historiated initials depicting simple scenes related to health care, such as patients' consultations with physicians, procedures like bloodletting, and foods and beverages recommended for good health. Borland argues that these imag
£41.95
Schiffer Publishing Ltd Astrology's Hidden Aspects: Quintiles and Sesquiquintiles
Presented for the first time, full interpretations of the astrological quintiles and the sesquiquintiles using the ten traditional planets and the Ascendant. In this groundbreaking book, astrologer Dusty Bunker reveals the importance of the 72° quintile and the 108° sesquiquintile, two previously ignored astrological aspects, which the Egyptians called the “sacred golden bowls.” With information gathered over thirty years through studying esoteric numbers, sacred geometry, Masonic manuscripts, religious texts, Egyptian symbols, and much more, Dusty shows why these aspects should be considered among the most important in the lexicon of astrologers because they reveal your hidden talents and your legacy, your path to fame! With a dusty map in hand, travel from the cosmic birth of the quintiles and the sesquiquintiles to the sand-covered site where these golden-bowl aspects have remained hidden all these years. This important reference book should be part of every astrologer’s library.
£17.09
Faber & Faber Watt
Written in Roussillon during World War Two, while Samuel Beckett was hiding from the Gestapo, Watt was first published in 1953. Beckett acknowledged that this comic novel unlike any other 'has its place in the series' - those masterpieces running from Murphy to the Trilogy, Waiting for Godot and beyond. It shares their sense of a world in crisis, their profound awareness of the paradoxes of being, and their distrust of the rational universe. Watt tells the tale of Mr Knott's servant and his attempts to get to know his master. Watt's mistake is to derive the essence of his master from the accidentals of his being, and his painstakingly logical attempts to 'know' ultimately consign him to the asylum. Itself a critique of error, Watt has previously appeared in editions that are littered with mistakes, both major and minor. The new Faber edition offers for the first time a corrected text based on a scholarly appraisal of the manuscripts and textual history.
£9.99
Faber & Faber Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Preserved on a single surviving manuscript dating from around 1400, composed by an anonymous master, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was rediscovered only 200 years ago, and published for the first time in 1839. One of the earliest great stories of English literature, after Beowulf, the poem narrates the strange tale of a green knight on a green horse, who rudely interrupts the Round Table festivities one Yuletide, casting a pall of unease over the company and challenging one of their number to a wager. The virtuous Gawain accepts, and decapitates the intruder with his own axe. Gushing blood, the knight reclaims his head, orders Gawain to seek him out a year hence, and departs. Next Yuletide Gawain dutifully sets forth... His quest for the Green Knight involves a winter journey, a seduction scene in a dream-like castle, a dire challenge answered - and a drama of enigmatic reward disguised as psychic undoing.
£10.99
Little, Brown Book Group Death In The Latin Quarter
Early one morning among the magnificent honey-coloured buildings of the Sorbonne, the tranquillity of the university is shattered by a death. But why would Albert Cadas, a quiet, crumpled professor of medieval literature, have any reason to kill himself? Meanwhile in another part of Paris, Valentine Savi, a talented young restorer, receives a visit in her studio from an enigmatic elderly gentleman with a unique commission: to restore a priceless medieval palimpsest whose timeworn pages promise to reveal the truth of a mystery that has fascinated scholars and writers for hundreds of years. Valentine soon learns that the shadowy figures who seek to possess the secrets of the manuscript are far darker and more ruthless than she could ever have imagined...Together with her friend Hugo Vermeer -- aristocrat, epicure and incorrigible wheeler-dealer -- and David Scotto, Cadas's doctoral student, Valentine finds herself on a terrifying and thrilling adventure through the narrow streets and gloomily palatial mansions of the Latin Quarter.
£9.89
FreeLance Academy Press The Twelve of England
In the waning years of the fourteenth century, the household of John of Gaunt, the Duke of Lancaster was scandalized when twelve petulant English knights publicly mocked the twelve ladies-in-waiting to the Duke's wife, calling them ugly to their faces. Outraged, the ladies sought immediate redress, but so fearsome were the knights' reputations that none would step forward. Desperate for help, the Duke appealed to his son-in-law King Joao I of Portugal to find champions ready to fight for the ladies' honor. Enter the 'Twelve of England,' a band of battle-hardened Portuguese knights. Led by the redoubtable Alvaro Gonçalves Coutinho, known as 'Magriço,' or 'The Lean One,' these twelve fearless men set out for England to fight the English knights in judicial combat, prepared to shed their blood to save the honour of ladies they had never met. Such tales of valour and derring-do, which often hinge on the notion of a team of warriors venturing into hostile territory on a quest for vengeance or redress set against a sweeping historical backdrop, have captured the imagination of audiences through the ages, from Jason and the Argonauts to Lieutenant Aldo Raine and the 'Inglorious Basterds.' Although undoubtedly a fictional tale inserted into historical reality, the action does not end at the household of the Duke of Lancaster, and other adventures ensue in France, Germany and Burgundy, as the twelve heroes spread the fame of Portuguese chivalry throughout the great courts of Europe. The third volume of the Deeds of Arms series presents a complete translation of the earliest known version of the Twelve of England, which has survived in only one manuscript. Professor Fallows presents the text in both the medieval Portuguese and an accompanying English translation. A facsimile of the original manuscript and an extensive introduction covering the historical context of both the text and the deeds it discusses are also included. An overview of the arms and armour used by the combatants, colour illustrations, genealogical tables, maps and a comprehensive bibliography further complement the text.
£23.78
Anness Publishing Illustrated History of Islam
This is the story of Islamic religion, culture and civilization, from the time of the Prophet to the modern day, shown in over 180 photographs. It offers an overview of Islamic history from the time of the Prophet to the present day, featuring the successors to the Prophet, the power of the Umayyads, the golden age of the Abbasids, the Shiah empire of the Fatimids, the rise of the Ottomans, and the Muwahiddum movement. It explores the history of Islam in many different parts of the world, such as Iraq, Iran, Spain, North Africa, Turkey, India and China. It includes a timeline listing the major events in Islam's rich and culturally diverse history, and a glossary of frequently used Arabic terms. It is beautifully illustrated throughout with over 180 images of manuscripts, angelic visitations, scholars, rulers, mosques, battles, shrines, palaces, and modern pilgrims and leaders. With Muslims statistically representing around a quarter of the global population - some 1.4 billion people - Islam is a powerful force in today's world. This book offers a chronological history of the main events that have shaped the Islamic religion since the year of Muhammad's birth in 570. Topics include the preservation of the Prophet's sayings; laws and scholars; mathematics, medicine and astronomy; the Islamic Renaissance in Spain; Islam in Asia; and radical Islam. A useful glossary of Arabic terms is also included. With over 180 paintings and photographs, this sumptuously illustrated book is a valuable introduction to the history of Muslim civilization.
£8.42
John Wiley and Sons Ltd Gutenberg's Europe: The Book and the Invention of Western Modernity
Major transformations in society are always accompanied by parallel transformations in systems of social communication what we call the media. In this book, historian Frédéric Barbier provides an important new economic, political and social analysis of the first great 'media revolution' in the West: Gutenberg�s invention of the printing press in the mid fifteenth century. In great detail and with a wealth of historical evidence, Barbier charts the developments in manuscript culture in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and shows how the steadily increasing need for written documents initiated the processes of change which culminated with Gutenberg. The fifteenth century is presented as the 'age of start-ups' when investment and research into technologies that were new at the time, including the printing press, flourished. Tracing the developments through the sixteenth century, Barbier analyses the principal features of this first media revolution: the growth of technology, the organization of the modern literary sector, the development of surveillance and censorship and the invention of the process of 'mediatization'. He offers a rich variety of examples from cities all over Europe, as well as looking at the evolution of print media in China and Korea. This insightful re-interpretation of the Gutenberg revolution also looks beyond the specific historical context to draw connections between the advent of print in the Rhine Valley (�paper valley�) and our own modern digital revolution. It will be of great interest to students and scholars of early modern history, of literature and the media, and will appeal to anyone interested in what remains one of the greatest cultural revolutions of all time.
£18.99
Cornell University Press Saving Faith: Making Religious Pluralism an American Value at the Dawn of the Secular Age
In Saving Faith, David Mislin chronicles the transformative historical moment when Americans began to reimagine their nation as one strengthened by the diverse faiths of its peoples. Between 1875 and 1925, liberal Protestant leaders abandoned religious exclusivism and leveraged their considerable cultural influence to push others to do the same. This reorientation came about as an ever-growing group of Americans found their religious faith under attack on social, intellectual, and political fronts. A new generation of outspoken agnostics assailed the very foundation of belief, while noted intellectuals embraced novel spiritual practices and claimed that Protestant Christianity had outlived its usefulness.Faced with these grave challenges, Protestant clergy and their allies realized that the successful defense of religion against secularism required a defense of all religious traditions. They affirmed the social value—and ultimately the religious truth—of Catholicism, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam. They also came to view doubt and uncertainty as expressions of faith. Ultimately, the reexamination of religious difference paved the way for Protestant elites to reconsider ethnic, racial, and cultural difference. Using the manuscript collections and correspondence of leading American Protestants, as well the institutional records of various churches and religious organizations, Mislin offers insight into the historical constructions of faith and doubt, the interconnected relationship of secularism and pluralism, and the enormous influence of liberal Protestant thought on the political, cultural, and spiritual values of the twentieth-century United States.
£47.00
Penguin Books Ltd News of the Dead
WINNER OF THE WALTER SCOTT PRIZE FOR HISTORICAL FICTION'To tell the story of a country or a continent is surely a great and complex undertaking; but the story of a quiet, unnoticed place where there are few people, fewer memories and almost no reliable records - a place such as Glen Conach - may actually be harder to piece together. The hazier everything becomes, the more whatever facts there are become entangled with myth and legend. . .'Deep in the mountains of north-east Scotland lies Glen Conach, a place of secrets and memories, fable and history. In particular, it holds the stories of three different eras, separated by centuries yet linked by location, by an ancient manuscript and by echoes that travel across time.In ancient Pictland, the Christian hermit Conach contemplates God and nature, performs miracles and prepares himself for sacrifice. Long after his death, legends about him are set down by an unknown hand in the Book of Conach.Generations later, in the early nineteenth century, self-promoting antiquarian Charles Kirkliston Gibb is drawn to the Glen, and into the big house at the heart of its fragile community.In the present day, young Lachie whispers to Maja of a ghost he thinks he has seen. Reflecting on her long life, Maja believes him, for she is haunted by ghosts of her own.News of the Dead is a captivating exploration of refuge, retreat and the reception of strangers. It measures the space between the stories people tell of themselves - what they forget and what they invent - and the stories through which they may, or may not, be remembered.
£9.99
Batsford Ltd King Arthur - German
What is the origin of the stories of the Round Table, of Excalibur and the Holy Grail, of Sir Launcelot and Guinevere? And where was Camelot? King Arthur’s name has echoed down the centuries, conjuring up rich images of mystery and power, chivalry and romance. But did he exist at all? There is no evidence to prove he reigned in the fifth and sixth centuries; no eye-witness accounts of his coronation and no reliable manuscripts outlining his deeds. This full-colour guide examines the facts of the legends in the tantalising puzzle of King Arthur and his knights. Learn about the origins of the Round Table, the cult of chivalry and conflict between knights, and Arthur's shape-shifting half-sister Moran le Fay. From the origins of Arthurian legend to the new phase in the Arthurian cyce in the romantic revival of the early nineteenth century, read about the tantalizing puzzle that is King Arthur. Look out for more Pitkin guides on the very best of British history, heritage and travel. This title is also available in English & French
£6.64
HarperCollins Publishers Beren and Lúthien
Painstakingly restored from Tolkien’s manuscripts and presented for the first time as a continuous and standalone story, the epic tale of Beren and Lúthien will reunite fans of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings with Elves and Men, Dwarves and Orcs and the rich landscape and creatures unique to Tolkien’s Middle-earth. The tale of Beren and Lúthien was, or became, an essential element in the evolution of The Silmarillion, the myths and legends of the First Age of the World conceived by J.R.R. Tolkien. Returning from France and the battle of the Somme at the end of 1916, he wrote the tale in the following year. Essential to the story, and never changed, is the fate that shadowed the love of Beren and Lúthien: for Beren was a mortal man, but Lúthien was an immortal Elf. Her father, a great Elvish lord, in deep opposition to Beren, imposed on him an impossible task that he must perform before he might wed Lúthien. This is the kernel of the legend; and it leads to the supremely heroic attempt of Beren and Lúthien together to rob the greatest of all evil beings, Melkor, called Morgoth, the Black Enemy, of a Silmaril. In this book Christopher Tolkien has attempted to extract the story of Beren and Lúthien from the comprehensive work in which it was embedded; but that story was itself changing as it developed new associations within the larger history. To show something of the process whereby this legend of Middle-earth evolved over the years, he has told the story in his father's own words by giving, first, its original form, and then passages in prose and verse from later texts that illustrate the narrative as it changed. Presented together for the first time, they reveal aspects of the story, both in event and in narrative immediacy, that were afterwards lost.
£67.50
HarperCollins Publishers Beren and Lúthien
Painstakingly restored from Tolkien’s manuscripts and presented for the first time as a continuous and standalone story, the epic tale of Beren and Lúthien will reunite fans of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings with Elves and Men, Dwarves and Orcs and the rich landscape and creatures unique to Tolkien’s Middle-earth. The tale of Beren and Lúthien was, or became, an essential element in the evolution of The Silmarillion, the myths and legends of the First Age of the World conceived by J.R.R. Tolkien. Returning from France and the battle of the Somme at the end of 1916, he wrote the tale in the following year. Essential to the story, and never changed, is the fate that shadowed the love of Beren and Lúthien: for Beren was a mortal man, but Lúthien was an immortal Elf. Her father, a great Elvish lord, in deep opposition to Beren, imposed on him an impossible task that he must perform before he might wed Lúthien. This is the kernel of the legend; and it leads to the supremely heroic attempt of Beren and Lúthien together to rob the greatest of all evil beings, Melkor, called Morgoth, the Black Enemy, of a Silmaril. In this book Christopher Tolkien has attempted to extract the story of Beren and Lúthien from the comprehensive work in which it was embedded; but that story was itself changing as it developed new associations within the larger history. To show something of the process whereby this legend of Middle-earth evolved over the years, he has told the story in his father's own words by giving, first, its original form, and then passages in prose and verse from later texts that illustrate the narrative as it changed. Presented together for the first time, they reveal aspects of the story, both in event and in narrative immediacy, that were afterwards lost.
£22.50
Archaeopress En Tierras de Hércules. Torregorda - Camposoto - Sancti Petri: Una Revisión del Patrimonio
En tierras de Hércules explores the history and archaeological heritage of the southwest coast of the Isla Gaditana – the territory where the Temple of Hercules and the Idol of Cádiz are said to have stood for more than twelve centuries: Torregorda, Camposoto and Sancti Petri. The text examines the occupation sequence of Palaeolithic, Neolithic, Bronze-Age and historic societies in the area. In addition, it analyses the shaping of the landscape by geological, sedimentary and human action since the Phoenician settlement. The historical region of the Strait of Gibraltar, considered the end of the ‘known world’ until the modern age, is studied as an intercontinental and cultural bridge. The core of the work is an examination of 32 groups of remains, classified according to communicational, strategic and environmental factors. This includes those relating to the underwater site of the Sancti Petri Castle, which are usually associated with the Temple of Hercules. Using manuscripts from local archives, the book documents elements such as the emergence of the underwater remains of the Temple of Hercules or the construction of canals and defensive architecture. And by means of prehistoric rock art, it examines the origins of sailing in the vicinity of Gibraltar. A final chapter recommends the investigation of the millenary intersection between the Rio Arillo channel and the Calzada de La Alcantarilla road.
£35.00
Peepal Tree Press Ltd Difficult Fruit
Difficult Fruit grapples with personal experience - with naming and claiming the 'fruits' of a specific journey into womanhood. This journey is one which includes coming to terms with violence and loss, celebrating love and connection, and standing witness in the world that shaped that journey. It is a collection of poems about coming into self-knowledge - of fighting for and winning personhood as a woman in the world. The central poem, 'Eighteen', chronicles the aftermath of sexual assault. In it the speaker is reborn from the shadow of the experience as a 'miracle scream' and a 'dark voice', and vows to 'learn the language that will allow [her] to summon [her] own angels'. By the poem 'Thirty', the speaker understands 'maybe older and wiser is just learning/ how to put yourself in your own good hands'. The poems of age scattered throughout the manuscript both chronicle and disrupt time - they look back into the speaker's past as a way to understand the present, as well as to find something that the speaker needs in order to move forward. The many elegies in the collection consider the ultimate price of life, which is death, and as the poem 'How It Touches Us' comes to realise, 'all laws of matter must hold true'. The poems are a movement through fracture - both necessary and unwarranted - toward wholeness and transformation.
£8.99
Harvard University Press The Greek Anthology, Volume IV: Book 10: The Hortatory and Admonitory Epigrams. Book 11: The Convivial and Satirical Epigrams. Book 12: Strato's Musa Puerilis
A gathering of poetic blossoms.The Greek Anthology (literally, “Gathering of Flowers”) is the name given to a collection of about 4500 short Greek poems (called epigrams but usually not epigrammatic) by about 300 composers. To the collection (called Stephanus, literally, “wreath” or “garland”) made and contributed to by Meleager of Gadara (1st century BC) was added another by Philippus of Thessalonica (late 1st century AD), a third by Diogenianus (2nd century), and much later a fourth, called the Circle, by Agathias of Myrina. These (lost) and others (also lost) were partly incorporated, arranged according to contents, by Constantinus Cephalas (early 10th century?) into fifteen books now preserved in a single manuscript of the Palatine Library at Heidelberg. The grand collection was rearranged and revised by the monk Maximus Planudes (14th century) who also added epigrams lost from Cephalas’ compilation.The fifteen books of the Palatine Anthology are: I, Christian Epigrams; II, Descriptions of Statues; III, Inscriptions in a temple at Cyzicus; IV, Prefaces of Meleager, Philippus, and Agathias; V, Amatory Epigrams; VI, Dedicatory; VII, Sepulchral; VIII, Epigrams of St. Gregory; IX, Declamatory; X, Hortatory and Admonitory; XI, Convivial and Satirical; XII, Strato’s “Musa Puerilis”; XIII, Metrical curiosities; XIV, Problems, Riddles, and Oracles; XV, Miscellanies. Book XVI is the Planudean Appendix: Epigrams on works of art.Outstanding among the poets are Meleager, Antipater of Sidon, Crinagoras, Palladas, Agathias, Paulus Silentiarius.
£24.95
Coffee House Press The Revolutionaries Try Again
Extravagant, absurd, and self-aware, The Revolutionaries Try Again plays out against the lost decade of Ecuador's austerity and the stymied idealism of three childhood friends--an expat, a bureaucrat, and a playwright--who are as sure about the evils of dictatorship as they are unsure of everything else, including each other. Everyone thinks they're the chosen ones, Masha wrote on Antonio's manuscript. See About Schmidt with Jack Nicholson. Then she quoted from Hope Against Hope by Nadezhda Mandelstam, because she was sure Antonio hadn't read her yet: Can a man really be held accountable for his own actions? His behavior, even his character, is always in the merciless grip of the age, which squeezes out of him the drop of good or evil that it needs from him. In San Francisco, besides the accumulation of wealth, what does the age ask of your so called protagonist? No wonder he never returns to Ecuador. Mauro Javier Cardenas grew up in Guayaquil, Ecuador, and graduated with a degree in Economics from Stanford University. Excerpts from his first novel, The Revolutionaries Try Again, have appeared in Conjunctions, the Antioch Review, Guernica, Witness, and BOMB. His interviews and essays on/with Laszlo Krasznahorkai, Javier Marias, Horacio Castellanos Moya, Juan Villoro, and Antonio Lobo Antunes have appeared in Music & Literature, San Francisco Chronicle, BOMB, and the Quarterly Conversation.
£12.99
Harvard University, Asia Center The Chinese Dreamscape, 300 BCE–800 CE
Winner of the Stanislas Julien PrizeWinner of the Joseph Levenson Prize for Scholarship on Pre-1900 ChinaDreaming is a near-universal human experience, but there is no consensus on why we dream or what dreams should be taken to mean. In this book, Robert Ford Campany investigates what people in late classical and early medieval China thought of dreams. He maps a common dreamscape—an array of ideas about what dreams are and what responses they should provoke—that underlies texts of diverse persuasions and genres over several centuries. These writings include manuals of dream interpretation, scriptural instructions, essays, treatises, poems, recovered manuscripts, histories, and anecdotes of successful dream-based predictions.In these many sources, we find culturally distinctive answers to questions peoples the world over have asked for millennia: What happens when we dream? Do dreams foretell future events? If so, how might their imagistic code be unlocked to yield predictions? Could dreams enable direct communication between the living and the dead, or between humans and nonhuman animals? The Chinese Dreamscape, 300 BCE–800 CE sheds light on how people in a distant age negotiated these mysteries and brings Chinese notions of dreaming into conversation with studies of dreams in other cultures, ancient and contemporary. Taking stock of how Chinese people wrestled with—and celebrated—the strangeness of dreams, Campany asks us to reflect on how we might reconsider our own notions of dreaming.
£41.36
University of Wales Press Treasures: The Special Collections of the University of Wales Trinity Saint David
The University of Wales Trinity Saint David was originally founded in 1822 as St David’s College, Lampeter. It is now the oldest higher education collegiate institution in Wales, and in its two hundred years of history has been the recipient of many fascinating and rare manuscripts, early printed books, beautifully illustrated volumes, and rare publications from broadsheets to journals. These were largely received through the generous donations of many benefactors, including the institution’s founder Bishop Thomas Burgess of St Davids, with the collection housed today in the Roderic Bowen Library on the Lampeter campus. This fully illustrated volume contains a selection from the many thousands of works spanning more than seven hundred years, with short essays by scholars whose knowledge and appreciation of the works are unrivalled, revealing the riches of what was once known as ‘the greatest little library in Wales’.
£16.99
Archaeopress A Catalogue of the Sculpture Collection at Wilton House
The Wilton House sculptures constituted one of the largest and most celebrated collections of ancient art in Europe. Originally comprising some 340 works, the collection was formed around the late 1710s and 1720s by Thomas Herbert, the eccentric 8th Earl of Pembroke, who stubbornly ‘re-baptized’ his busts and statues with names of his own choosing. His sources included the famous collection of Cardinal Mazarin, assembled in Paris in the 1640s and 1650s, and recent discoveries on the Via Appia outside Rome. Earl Thomas regarded the sculptures as ancient – some of them among the oldest works of art in existence – but in fact much of the collection is modern and represents the neglected talents of sixteenth-and seventeenth-century artists, restorers and copyists who were inspired by Greek and Roman sculpture. About half of the original collection remains intact today, adorning the Gothic Cloisters that were built for it two centuries ago. After a long decline, accelerated by the impact of the Second World War, the sculptures have been rehabilitated in recent years. They include masterpieces of Roman and early modern art, which cast fresh light on Graeco-Roman antiquity, the classical tradition, and the history of collecting. Illustrated with specially commissioned photographs, this catalogue offers the first comprehensive publication of the 8th Earl’s collection, including an inventory of works dispersed from Wilton. It re-presents his personal vision of the collection recorded in contemporary manuscripts. At the same time, it dismantles some of the myths about it which originated with the earl himself, and provides an authoritative archaeological and art-historical analysis of the artefacts.
£90.00
Medieval Institute Publications The Towneley Plays
The Towneley plays are a collection of biblical plays in the Huntington Library's MS HM 1, a manuscript once owned by the Towneley family of Towneley Hall, Lancashire. Once thought to constitute a cycle of plays from the town of Wakefield in Yorkshire's West Riding, the collection includes some of the best-known examples of medieval English drama, including the much-anthologized Second Shepherds Play.
£87.00
Sydney University Press The Life of Such is Life: A Cultural History of an Australian Classic
Shortlisted for the AUHE Prize in Literary Scholarship 2022 Winner of the Walter McRae Russell Award 2023Since its publication in 1903, Joseph Furphy’s Such is Life has become established as an Australian classic. But which version of the novel is the authoritative text, and what does its history reveal about Australian cultural life?From Furphy’s handwritten manuscript through numerous editions, a controversial abridgement for the British market (condemned by A.D. Hope as a “mutilation”), and periods of obscurity and rediscovery, the text has been reshaped and repackaged by many hands. Furphy’s first editors at the Bulletin diluted his socialist message and “corrected” his Australian slang to create a more marketable book. Later, literary players including Vance and Nettie Palmer, Miles Franklin, Kate Baker and Angus & Robertson all took an interest in how Furphy’s work should be published.In a fascinating piece of literary detective work, Osborne traces the book’s journey and shows how economic and cultural forces helped to shape the novel we read today.
£27.00
John Murray Press Foreign Devils on the Silk Road: The Search for the Lost Treasures of Central Asia
The Silk Road, which linked imperial Rome and distant China, was once the greatest thoroughfare on earth. Along it travelled precious cargoes of silk, gold and ivory, as well as revolutionary new ideas. Its oasis towns blossomed into thriving centres of Buddhist art and learning. In time it began to decline. The traffic slowed, the merchants left and finally its towns vanished beneath the desert sands to be forgotten for a thousand years. But legends grew up of lost cities filled with treasures and guarded by demons. In the early years of the last century foreign explorers began to investigate these legends, and very soon an international race began for the art treasures of the Silk Road. Huge wall paintings, sculptures and priceless manuscripts were carried away, literally by the ton, and are today scattered through the museums of a dozen countries. Peter Hopkirk tells the story of the intrepid men who, at great personal risk, led these long-range archaeological raids, incurring the undying wrath of the Chinese.
£10.99
Ad Ilissum The McCarthy Collection: French Miniatures
This substantial catalogue is the final of a three-volume set exploring a remarkable collection of leaves and miniatures from medieval manuscripts. Richly detailed with plentiful illustrations, this notable contribution to medieval scholarship describes French material from c. 1100 to the 15th century, with particular strength in the 13th and 14th centuries.The McCarthy collection is arguably the largest and most important private collection of illuminated cuttings, miniatures, and leaves in the world. Following the publication in 2018 of Italian and Byzantine Miniatures and in 2019 Spanish, English, Flemish and Central European Miniatures, the third volume covers illumination from France.Volume I (published 2018) has eighty Italian and eight Byzantine entries; Volume II (published 2019) is the smallest, with sixty-three entries, divided between eight Spanish (and perhaps Portuguese) entries, eleven English ones, ten from the southern Netherlands, and finally thirty-four from across Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Bohemia; the present volume is the largest, with approximately ninety-five French entries. The fact that the French material is the largest group overall is partly a reflection of Robert McCarthy’s early interest in French Gothic art, inspired by youthful visits to Chartres and other Gothic cathedrals.In many cases the recto and verso of each item is reproduced, as the verso often provides vital textual, palaeographical or art historical clues to the date and place of origin, or traces of a later provenance and lists parent volumes, sister leaves and cuttings, some of which are also reproduced.
£100.00
The University of Chicago Press Birth Figures: Early Modern Prints and the Pregnant Body
The first full study of “birth figures” and their place in early modern knowledge-making. Birth figures are printed images of the pregnant womb, always shown in series, that depict the variety of ways in which a fetus can present for birth. Historian Rebecca Whiteley coined the term and here offers the first systematic analysis of the images’ creation, use, and impact. Whiteley reveals their origins in ancient medicine and explores their inclusion in many medieval gynecological manuscripts, focusing on their explosion in printed midwifery and surgical books in Western Europe from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth century. During this period, birth figures formed a key part of the visual culture of medicine and midwifery and were widely produced. They reflected and shaped how the pregnant body was known and treated. And by providing crucial bodily knowledge to midwives and surgeons, birth figures were also deeply entangled with wider cultural preoccupations with generation and creativity, female power and agency, knowledge and its dissemination, and even the condition of the human in the universe. Birth Figures studies how different kinds of people understood childbirth and engaged with midwifery manuals, from learned physicians to midwives to illiterate listeners. Rich and detailed, this vital history reveals the importance of birth figures in how midwifery was practiced and in how people, both medical professionals and lay readers, envisioned and understood the mysterious state of pregnancy.
£40.00