Search results for ""Author Steven a Epstein""

Purity Lost investigates the porous nature of social, political, and religious boundaries prevalent in the eastern Mediterranean-from the Black Sea to Egypt-during the Middle Ages. In this intriguing study, Steven A. Epstein finds that people consistently defied, overlooked, or transcended restrictions designed to preserve racial and cultural purity in order to establish relationships with those different from themselves. These mixed relationships-among people who did not share language, creed, or skin color-undermined the pervasive claims of purity. They forced people to reflect on their own identities and the bonds-whether social, political, religious, or racial-that defined their lives. Drawing on examples from daily life and interstate politics, Epstein takes a close look at the renegades and rule-breakers of this era. He explores race, master/slave relationships, diplomatic relations between Christian Italians and Muslim Turks, religious conversions from Christian to Muslim and vice versa, and religious boundaries of the human and the angelic. Epstein reveals the modern view of cultural, ethnic, and religious purity in the early modern Mediterranean as a mirage, and he offers new insights into how present-day conceptions about creed, color, ethnicity, and language originated.

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In this highly original work, Steven A. Epstein shows that the ways Italians employ words and think about race and labor are profoundly affected by the language used in medieval Italy to sustain a system of slavery. The author's findings about the surprising persistence of the "language of slavery" demonstrate the difficulty of escaping the legacy of a shameful past. For Epstein, language is crucial to understanding slavery, for it preserves the hidden conditions of that institution. He begins his book by discussing the words used to conduct and describe slavery in Italy, from pertinent definitions given in early dictionaries, to the naming of slaves by their masters, to the ways in which bondage has been depicted by Italian writers from Dante to Primo Levi and Antonio Gramsci. Epstein then probes Italian legal history, tracing the evolution of contracts for buying, selling, renting, and freeing people. Next he considers the behaviors of slaves and slave owners as a means of exploring how concepts of liberty and morality changed over time. He concludes by analyzing the language of the market, where medieval Italians used words to fix the prices of people they bought and sold. The first history of slavery in Italy ever published, Epstein's work has important implications for other societies, particularly America's. "For too long," Epstein notes, "Americans have studied their own slavery as it if were the only one ever to have existed, as if it were the archetype of all others." His book allows citizens of the United States and other former slave-holding nations a richer understanding of their past and present.

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Medieval Money explores the ways art reflected and reinforced the complex ethical discussions that developed from the widespread role of money in everyday life in the Middle Ages. It traces the origins of global money, and surveys economic history, focusing on the environment, the plague, Jews, and institutions, using a wealth of imagery including illuminated manuscripts, coins, artworks, money chests, and account books. The iconography, minting, and foreign exchange of coins are examined, and the choice that Christians faced is investigated: should they save their money or their soul? The authors explore images of Avarice, the greedy punished in hell, and immoral ways to earn and spend money, and analyse representations of charity and voluntary poverty. Final chapters examine the material culture of the monetary economy (from an illuminated oath for minters to purses and lockboxes) and images of medieval money management. AUTHORS: Diane Wolfthal specializes in late medieval and early modern European art. Founding Co-editor of Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal, she is David and Caroline Minter Chair Emerita in the Humanities and professor emerita of Art History, Rice University. She is the co-author, with Elisabeth Hollander, of a volume on the fourteenth-century Ma?zor in the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Deirdre Jackson is assistant curator of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts, the Morgan Library Steven A. Epstein is professor emeritus, department of history at the University of Kansas. He was educated at Swarthmore College, St. John's College (Cambridge University), and Harvard College, where he developed his interests in medieval social and economic history. David Yoon is Mark Salton Associate Curator of Medieval, Renaissance and Early European Numismatics, American Numismatic Society SELLING POINTS: . A richly illustrated interdisciplinary volume, with chapters written by social historian Steven Epstein, numismatist David Yoon, and art historians Deirdre Jackson and Diane Wolfthal . Vibrantly illustrated with illuminated manuscripts, panel paintings, prints, stained glass, sculpture, and all sorts of material objects 150 colour illustrations

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