Search results for ""Author S. Ryan""

The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Northern Europe were characterized by enormous religious change. During this period new religious ideas and ideals gradually took shape and materialized in all aspects of religious life, both on a private level as well as in public and liturgical space. The fundamental question of how God could be experienced as present in the world, became – again – the center of lively debate. Lutheran, Calvinist, Roman Catholic and Anglican reformations – to mention just a selection of the different ideological movements in play during this period – challenged interpretations of the Bible, the sacraments, the communication of religious truth, the practice of devotion and the material expressions of faith. When looking at the European reformations from a transnational perspective, they stand forth as a bundle of fundamentally interwoven religious movements attempting to define their specific religious identity in terms of dissimilarity. Material Cultures of Devotion in the Age of Reformations explores how the visual and material cultures of Christian devotion were adapted, developed, transformed, and, in some cases, disappeared altogether, in the age of reformations, c.1500-1650 in Northern Europe.

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In Speculative Harvests, Clapp and Isakson investigate the evolving relationship between the agrifood and financial sectors, paying particular attention to how the contemporary process of financialization is reshaping agrarian development and food systems. Understood as the growing prevalence of financial actors, markets, motives and profits in an economy, financialization is a defining feature of modern-day capitalism that is reconfiguring the distribution of wealth and economic power in a variety of contexts across the globe. In a clear and accessible manner, Clapp and Isakson explain the character and ramifications of these changes for the world food economy and systematically detail how different elements of agrifood provisioning - including commodity trading, farmland tenure, the management of agricultural risk, and food trading, processing, and retailing - have been reconfigured for financial purposes.Clapp and Isakson highlight the importance of confronting the financialization of food and agriculture, identify the challenges of conventional approaches to food system reform and consider innovative alternatives. Speculative Harvests is essential reading for food scholars and activists who not only seek a better understanding of the problems inherent to the contemporary food system but also are also in search of effective interventions towards its positive transformation.

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