Search results for ""University of Pennsylvania Press""
University of Pennsylvania Press Reports on the Vrokastro Area, Eastern Crete, Volume 3: The Vrokastro Regional Survey Project, Sites and Pottery
Volume 3 presents the supplementary materials that support the settlement history of the Vrokastro region, derived from intensive and systematic survey. The book presents brief summaries of regional pottery of the Bronze Age, Roman, and medieval to modern periods (with tables). Illustrations include maps, plans, pottery profiles, and photographs of sites, features, and pottery. The CD-ROM pottery catalogue is divided into four main units: Neolithic-Geometric, Orientalizing-Hellenistic, Early Roman-Late Roman, and Late Byzantine through Turkish-Modern. Content of the book's CD-ROM may be found online at this location: http://core.tdar.org/project/376591. Many of the sites have been damaged or destroyed by recent development, and this publication will remain their only record. University Museum Monograph, 123
£62.00
University of Pennsylvania Press The Sphinx That Traveled to Philadelphia: The Story of the Colossal Sphinx in the Penn Museum
Written to celebrate the centennial of the Sphinx's arrival in Philadelphia, The Sphinx That Traveled to Philadelphia tells the fascinating story of the colossal sphinx that is a highlight of the Penn Museum's Egyptian galleries and an iconic object for the Museum as a whole. The narrative covers the original excavations and archaeological history of the Sphinx, how it came to Philadelphia, and the unexpected ways in which the Sphinx's story intersects with the history of Philadelphia, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Museum just before World War I. The book features ample illustrations—photographs, letters, newspaper stories, postcards, maps, and drawings—drawn largely from the extensive materials in the Museum Archives. Images of related artifacts in the Penn Museum's Egyptian collection and other objects from the Egyptian, Near East, and Mediterranean Sections (many not on view and some never before published), as well as pieces in museums in the United States, Europe, and Egypt, place the story of the Penn Museum Sphinx in a wider context. The writing style is informal and text is woven around the graphics that form the backbone of the narrative. The book is designed to be of interest to a wide audience of adult readers but accessible and engaging to younger readers as well.
£26.24
University of Pennsylvania Press Experiencing Power, Generating Authority: Cosmos, Politics, and the Ideology of Kingship in Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia
For almost three thousand years, Egypt and Mesopotamia were each ruled by the single sacred office of kingship. Though geographically near, these ancient civilizations were culturally distinct, and scholars have historically contrasted their respective conceptualizations of the ultimate authority, imagining Egyptian kings as invested with cosmic power and Mesopotamian kings as primarily political leaders. In fact, both kingdoms depended on religious ideals and political resources to legitimate and exercise their authority. Cross-cultural comparison reveals the sophisticated and varied strategies that ancient kings used to unify and govern their growing kingdoms. Experiencing Power, Generating Authority draws on rich material records left behind by both kingdoms, from royal monuments and icons to the written deeds and commissions of kings. Thirteen essays provocatively juxtapose the relationships Egyptian and Mesopotamian kings had with their gods and religious mediators, as well as their subjects and court officials. They also explore the ideological significance of landscape in each kingdom, since the natural and built environment influenced the economy, security, and cosmology of these lands. The interplay of religion, politics, and territory is dramatized by the everyday details of economy, trade, and governance, as well as the social crises of war or the death of a king. Reexamining established notions of cosmic and political rule, Experiencing Power, Generating Authority challenges and deepens scholarly approaches to rulership in the ancient world. Contributors: Mehmet-Ali Ataç, Miroslav Bárta, Dominique Charpin, D. Bruce Dickson, Eckart Frahm, Alan B. Lloyd, Juan Carlos Moreno Garcia, Ludwig D. Morenz, Ellen Morris, Beate Pongratz-Leisten, Michael Roaf, Walther Sallaberger, JoAnn Scurlock. PMIRC, volume 6
£58.90
University of Pennsylvania Press Literacy in the Persianate World: Writing and the Social Order
Persian has been a written language since the sixth century B.C. Only Chinese, Greek, and Latin have comparable histories of literacy. Although Persian script changed—first from cuneiform to a modified Aramaic, then to Arabic—from the ninth to the nineteenth centuries it served a broader geographical area than any language in world history. It was the primary language of administration and belles lettres from the Balkans under the earlier Ottoman Empire to Central China under the Mongols, and from the northern branches of the Silk Road in Central Asia to southern India under the Mughal Empire. Its history is therefore crucial for understanding the function of writing in world history. Each of the chapters of Literacy in the Persianate World opens a window onto a particular stage of this history, starting from the reemergence of Persian in the Arabic script after the Arab-Islamic conquest in the seventh century A.D., through the establishment of its administrative vocabulary, its literary tradition, its expansion as the language of trade in the thirteenth century, and its adoption by the British imperial administration in India, before being reduced to the modern role of national language in three countries (Afghanistan, Iran, and Tajikistan) in the twentieth century. Two concluding chapters compare the history of written Persian with the parallel histories of Chinese and Latin, with special attention to the way its use was restricted and channeled by social practice. This is the first comparative study of the historical role of writing in three languages, including two in non-Roman scripts, over a period of two and a half millennia, providing an opportunity for reassessment of the work on literacy in English that has accumulated over the past half century. The editors take full advantage of this opportunity in their introductory essay. PMIRC, volume 4
£92.60
University of Pennsylvania Press Himalaya: Land of the Snow Lion
The Himalaya, Asia's jagged backbone, lured photographer Andrea Baldeck on four journeys covering thousands of miles from northern India to western China, the distillation of which is Himalaya: Land of the Snow Lion. This volume opens a window onto an ancient enduring culture, bound by shared ethnicity and religion and challenged by daunting geography. Portraits, landscapes, architecture, and still-life images convey the texture and rhythm of this mountain life, which is ever more threatened by the forces of geopolitics, migration, and modernization. In a series of succinct essays accompanying the images, the artist invites the viewer to imagine aspects of life and travel in a region where a remote, starkly beautiful environment test and tempers all who call it home.
£29.69
University of Pennsylvania Press The Sufi Journey of Baba Rexheb
Baba Rexheb, a Muslim mystic from the Balkans, founded the first Bektashi community in America. This is his life story and the story of his communities: the traditional Bektashi tekke in Albania where he first served, the displaced persons camps to which he escaped after the war, the centuries-old tekke in Cairo where he waited, and the Bektashi community that he founded in Michigan in 1954 and led until his passing in 1995. Baba Rexheb lived through the twentieth century, its wars, disruptions, and dislocations, but still at a profound level was never displaced. Through Bektashi stories, oral histories, and ethnographic experience, Frances Trix recounts the life and times of this modern Sufi leader. She studied with Baba Rexheb in his community for more than twenty years. As a linguistic anthropologist, she taped twelve years of their weekly meetings in Turkish, Albanian, and Arabic. She draws extensively on Baba's own words, as well as interactions at the Michigan Bektashi center, for a remarkable perspective on our times. You come to know Baba Rexheb and his gentle way of teaching through example and parable, poetry and humor. The book also documents the history of the 700-year-old Bektashi order in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the Balkans and Egypt and its transposition to America. It attests to the role of Sufi centers in Islamic community life and their interaction with people of other faiths.
£46.30
University of Pennsylvania Press Dún Ailinne: Excavations at an Irish Royal Site, 1968-1975
The site of Dún Ailinne is one of four major ritual sites from the Irish Iron Age, each said to form the center of a political kingdom and thus described as "royal." Excavation has produced artifacts ranging from the Neolithic (about 5,000 years ago) through the later Iron Age (fourth century CE), when the site was the focus of repeated rituals, probably related to the creation and maintenance of political hegemony. A series of timber structures were built and replaced as each group of leaders sought to claim ancient descent from a deep past and still create something unique and lasting. Pam J. Crabtree and Ronald Hicks provide analyses on, respectively, biological remains and Dún Ailinne's role in folklore, myth, and the sacred landscape, while Katherine Moreau examines bronze and iron artifacts and Elizabeth Hamilton, slag. Content of this book's CD-ROM may be found online at this location: http://core.tdar.org/project/376584. University Museum Monograph, 129
£78.00
University of Pennsylvania Press Exploring Iran: The Photography of Erich F. Schmidt, 193-194
The Penn Museum's first archaeological expedition to Iran took place in 1931, when Erich F. Schmidt excavated the Bronze Age site of Tepe Hissar near the town of Damghan and the monumental buildings of the pre-Islamic Sasanian Palace. In this part of his adventurous and courageous life Schmidt, then a young German WWI veteran who had received his Ph.D. degree under Franz Boas at Columbia University, documented the project with nearly 2,600 culturally significant photos—many under far from ideal conditions—of desert and mountain tribes, the sites, government administrators, and a full panoply of the people he encountered from Fara (Iraq), Damghan, Tepe Hissar, Persepolis, including aerial reconnaissance. Gürsan-Salzmann has selected 64 memorable and instructive prints from the Museum's archives for the book's interior and has assembled dozens more from the Schmidt Collection, Chicago's Oriental Institute, and from family members for an accompanying CD-ROM. She helps readers interpret the cultural and physical landscapes of the Iran and Iraq of nearly 75 years ago as their ethnographic and historical treasures came to light. Content of the book's CD-ROM may be found online at this location: http://core.tdar.org/project/376583.
£26.24
University of Pennsylvania Press Etruscan Myth, Sacred History, and Legend
This volume is the first comprehensive account of Etruscan mythology, an elusive and difficult subject because no Etruscan textual narratives have survived from antiquity. In order to interpret the myths and make the Etruscans come alive for us today, Nancy Thomson de Grummond acts as an archaeological detective piecing together evidence from representations in art, from archaeological sites, and from indirect accounts of Etruscan lore in Greek and Roman texts. She starts with the purely Etruscan material, beginning with their stories of the prophets and ending with their very particular view of the underworld. She probes the relationship between myth and ritual, as well as what myth reveals of Etruscan attitudes about politics and in particular about their society, as well as statements about gender and the human body made through myth and art. Specific topics include an overview of the Etruscan geographical setting; a review of questions of origins and of general Etruscan chronology, especially as it relates to the development of myth; our written sources, with a short discussion about what is known of the Etruscan language (largely through inscriptions), and the media in art that are most useful for the study of Etruscan myth, especially engraved bronze mirrors. Annotated representations in art and of other evidence from archaeology illuminate Etruscan mythology, and an appendix essay on studying Etruscan mythology lays out the history of the study of Etruscan myth and the principal publications on the subject. Authorities and students involved with front-line research on the Etruscans, classicists who study and teach the mythology of ancient Greece and Italy, and scholars of world myth interested not only in the comparanda but also in the methodology for studying myth without the illumination of local written narrative will benefit from this book. Content of this book's CD-ROM may be found online at this location: http://core.tdar.org/project/376539.
£50.50
University of Pennsylvania Press Sinop Landscapes: Exploring Connection in a Black Sea Hinterland
The Black Sea coast is different from the rest of Turkey. For more than 5,000 years Sinop, the central point on the Turkish coast, has seemed more remote from the rest of the Anatolian land mass than from Greece, Italy, Africa, the Crimea, Istanbul, and Rome. How was Sinop connected to them? The Black Sea Trade Project explores the perception of connectedness: how connected did people feel to those in other upland villages, coastal villages, ports, the big port of Sinop, and to distant shores? How did economic, infrastructural, and political institutions bind local populations to larger systems, and how were various institutional processes situated in landscapes? In this first volume from the Sinop Regional Archaeological Project, Owen P. Doonan rigorously explores connection through Sinop and its hinterland, from precolonial Greek settlements through ages of empires, Roman, Russian, and Ottoman conquests to the present day.
£33.86
University of Pennsylvania Press Venice, a Personal View
Poised in delicate, often hazardous balance with the liquid natural world the fabric of the man-made city rises out of the water and is reflected in it. The earth of Venice, a tissue of alluvial silt, is upheld and given form by a vast subterranean endoskeleton of wooden pilings supporting buildings of splendor with their feet in the mud. The air of Venice carries both heat and swells from North Africa's deserts and envelops life like liquid gauze. And fire, the most volatile of the four elements, has both destroyed and redrawn swaths of the city and fed the industry and commerce of a trading nation.
£80.00
University of Pennsylvania Press Early Beth Shan (Strata XIX-XIII): G.M. Fitzgerald's Deep Cut on the Tell
G. M. FitzGerald's Deep Cut at Beth Shan, a large-scale research project in the southern Levant, is a window to the earliest civilization at this major tell, documenting human activity during the Neolithic and Bronze Age. In 1933, his last season excavating at Beth Shan, FitzGerald gave us a preliminary picture of a series of late prehistoric events that reflects the chronological progression of cultures within the region. His pioneering research effort left us with a tantalizing but incomplete story. In 1998, Eliot Braun researched FitzGerald's field notes at the University of Pennsylvania Museum and reveals in this final excavation report some of the mound's earliest secrets, including chrono-cultural and historical-stratigraphic phasing. He has integrated his work with FitzGerald's original publications, reinterpreting the data and synthetic studies of the site's major features for a more comprehensive story. Copious illustrations such as field photos and documents give the reader the aura of the 1933 excavation and a view of Beth Shan as its deepest levels were probed. Braun reviews architectural remains and stratigraphy and includes broad typological comparisons of material remains, with reference to those of other regional sites and ceramic sequences. Two appendices offer one of the earliest archaeobotanical studies in the Near East and raw data derived from FitzGerald's field notes. University Museum Monograph, 121
£54.70
University of Pennsylvania Press Guide to the North American Ethnographic Collection at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology
Totaling approximately 40,000 objects, the University Museum's ethnographic holdings represent native peoples from ten North American culture areas—the Arctic, Subarctic, Northwest Coast, California, Plateau, Great Basin, Southwest, Great Plains, Northeast, and the Southeast. This guide highlights the strength of the collections and demonstrates how objects are tied to history and people living within different cultural and social contexts. It also underscores that objects have different multiple meanings. Some objects illustrate intertribal relations; others best reflect collecting attitudes at the turn of the century when much of the Museum's collections was acquired. Visitors and off-site readers will learn about such related archival resources as documentation and photographs, past and present Museum exhibitions, current research, repatriation, and contemporary collections development.
£14.82
University of Pennsylvania Press Ancestors for the Pigs: Pigs in Prehistory
This book brings together several new ways of thinking about pigs in the past, creating a dialogue by drawing on several kinds of approaches—from geography, ethnography, zoology, history, and archaeology—to enrich the way we all understand the evidence found in archaeological sites. MASCA Research Papers in Science and Archaeology 15
£41.77
University of Pennsylvania Press Current Research in Phytolith Analysis: Applications in Archaeology and Paleoecology
Paleobotanical studies are assuming an increasingly important role in archaeology, providing information on prehistoric social structures, environments, and economic concerns. This volume presents the latest applications of phytolith analysis in archaeology and paleoecology. It demonstrates the versatility of the discipline. MASCA Vol. 10
£30.13
University of Pennsylvania Press Two Lyres from Ur
During the 1928-29 season at Ur, in the Great Death Pit of the Royal Cemetery, C. Leonard Woolley discovered two spectacular musical instruments—a silver Boat-shaped Lyre and a magnificent lyre with the head of a bull made of gold sheet and a lapis lazuli beard. This book chronicles their history, conservation, and reconservation. While little was known about mid-third millennium Mesopotamian archaeology early last century, it was clear that the Sumerians had developed a vigorous trade in luxury goods, with an economy that necessitated a highly structured government whose leaders could command rich and elaborate graves that included a full panoply of musical instruments. In meticulous detail, using both traditional methods and new X-ray and electronic imaging investigative techniques, Maude de Schauensee probes and analyzes the construction of the two lyres held by the University Museum while providing an economic, historical, and sociological context in which to better understand them. She examines the decorative motifs along with the materials and the techniques of the builders of these instruments. The illustrations—10 pieces of line art, 25 photographs, 6 CAT-scans, 5 X-rays, and 24 color plates—supply additional details. This book presents new information and conservation descriptions for the first time. Musicologists, art historians, Near East scholars and archaeologists, and general readers will find this book's new analysis of the instruments of an ancient culture of significant interest.
£26.24
University of Pennsylvania Press Ayia Paraskevi Figurines in the University of Pennsylvania Museum
The 17 figurines published here are but a small sample of the objects excavated more than 100 years ago at the Bronze Age necropolis at the site of Ayia Paraskevi in Cyprus. Vassos Karageorghis introduces the volume with an insightful essay on the significance of the site and one of its early excavators, Max Ohnefalsch-Richter. Terence Brennan contributes information on the history of the Museum's acquisition of these pieces based on a 12-year correspondence between Sara Yorke Stevenson, one of the Museum's early founders, and Ohnefalsch-Richter. The volume contains a detailed catalogue of the 17 figurines, including bibliography and comparanda.
£16.08
University of Pennsylvania Press Roman Glass: Reflections on Cultural Change
Follow the way social attitudes and historical events—among them, slavery and materialism, wars and plagues—influenced how glassworking developed in the Roman world from the mid-first century B.C. to the late sixth century A.D. Woven into this story is the place of glassware in Roman everyday life, from the lady-of-the-house's cosmetic preparations each morning to the setting of table for the evening meal. Included are two special appendices: one considers the technology of ancient glassmaking, the other summarizes ancient opinions on the properties and merits of glass.
£46.30
University of Pennsylvania Press The Southern Caucasus in Prehistory: Stages of Cultural and Socioeconomic Development from the Eighth to the Second Millennium B.C.
The Southern Caucasus in Prehistory is a major contribution to the archaeological literature of this part of the world. Written by one of the most important figures in Russian archaeology and meticulously translated, it summarizes the findings of the extensive archaeological excavations of the late 1980s at the important sites that have illuminated the Transcaucasian cultures of the Neolithic, Eneolithic, Early and Middle Bronze Ages. Because the Transcaucasus was located at the crossroads between the Middle East and the Near East, the book will be of interest to scholars of the cultures of those regions, as well as to those pursuing research in the Transcaucasus proper. University Museum Monograph, 99
£54.70
University of Pennsylvania Press Excavating Voices: Listening to Photographs of Native Americans
Three authors from diverse backgrounds contribute essays to this volume of photographs of Native Americans from the archives of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Noted photographer and author Michael Katakis, Professor of Native American literature and American Book Award winner Gerald Vizenor, and Associate Curator of the American collection of the University of Pennsylvania Museum Robert Preucel have contributed very personal and sensitive essays inspired by the portraits in this volume. Listen closely as you look at these arresting images.
£22.43
University of Pennsylvania Press Excavating Voices: Listening to Photographs of Native Americans
Three authors from diverse backgrounds contribute essays to this volume of photographs of Native Americans from the archives of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Noted photographer and author Michael Katakis, Professor of Native American literature and American Book Award winner Gerald Vizenor, and Associate Curator of the American collection of the University of Pennsylvania Museum Robert Preucel have contributed very personal and sensitive essays inspired by the portraits in this volume. Listen closely as you look at these arresting images.
£33.31
University of Pennsylvania Press Roman Glass: Reflections of Everyday Life
This lavishly illustrated book places glass in its social setting within the Roman household. The volume was written to accompany the traveling exhibition Roman Glass: Reflections on Cultural Change. Through a series of vignettes, the author tells the story of the development of the glass industry in the Roman Empire and the role of glass in the daily routines of the ancient Romans. During the reign of Rome's first emperor, Augustus (27 B.C.-A.D. 14), as several well-established industries such as pottery- and textile-making were being expanded, the craft of glassmaking was adopted from the East, turned into an industry, and adapted to Roman taste. By the mid-first century A.D. glass rivaled pottery in the domestic marketplace. It was used for tableware and storage containers to hold everything from preserved fish to fine perfumes. Glass featured strongly in the Roman daily routine, from the early morning, when maids would apply perfumed lotions to their mistress in preparation for her social rounds, to the late afternoon, when slaves would bring platters of food, bowls of fruit, and jugs of wine—all of glass—to the supper table. And there was a place for glass even in Roman funerary ritual, because it was custom to include all manner of domestic items among the grave furnishings, to add comfort to the afterlife.
£16.08
University of Pennsylvania Press Her Neighbor's Wife: A History of Lesbian Desire Within Marriage
At first glance, Barbara Kalish fit the stereotype of a 1950s wife and mother. Married at eighteen, Barbara lived with her husband and two daughters in a California suburb, where she was president of the Parent-Teacher Association. At a PTA training conference in San Francisco, Barbara met Pearl, another PTA president who also had two children and happened to live only a few blocks away from her. To Barbara, Pearl was "the most gorgeous woman in the world," and the two began an affair that lasted over a decade. Through interviews, diaries, memoirs, and letters, Her Neighbor's Wife traces the stories of hundreds of women, like Barbara Kalish, who struggled to balance marriage and same-sex desire in the postwar United States. In doing so, Lauren Jae Gutterman draws our attention away from the postwar landscape of urban gay bars and into the homes of married women, who tended to engage in affairs with wives and mothers they met in the context of their daily lives: through work, at church, or in their neighborhoods. In the late 1960s and 1970s, the lesbian feminist movement and the no-fault divorce revolution transformed the lives of wives who desired women. Women could now choose to divorce their husbands in order to lead openly lesbian or bisexual lives; increasingly, however, these women were confronted by hostile state discrimination, typically in legal battles over child custody. Well into the 1980s, many women remained ambivalent about divorce and resistant to labeling themselves as lesbian, therefore complicating a simple interpretation of their lives and relationship choices. By revealing the extent to which marriage has historically permitted space for wives' relationships with other women, Her Neighbor's Wife calls into question the presumed straightness of traditional American marriage.
£40.50
University of Pennsylvania Press The Difference Is Spreading: Fifty Contemporary Poets on Fifty Poems
Since its inception in 2012, the hugely successful online introduction to modern poetry known as ModPo has engaged some 415,000 readers, listeners, teachers, and poets with its focus on a modern and contemporary American tradition that runs from Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson up to some of today's freshest and most experimental written and spoken verse. In The Difference Is Spreading, ModPo's Al Filreis and Anna Strong Safford have handed the microphone over to the poets themselves, by inviting fifty of them to select and comment upon a poem by another writer. The approaches taken are various, confirming that there are as many ways for a poet to write about someone else's poem as there are poet-poem matches in this volume. Yet a straight-through reading of the fifty poems anthologized here, along with the fifty responses to them, emphatically demonstrates the importance to poetry of community, of socioaesthetic networks and lines of connection, and of expressions of affection and honor due to one's innovative colleagues and predecessors. Through the curation of these selections, Filreis and Safford express their belief that the poems that are most challenging and most dynamic are those that are open—the writings, that is, that ask their readers to participate in making their meaning. Poetry happens when a reader and a poet come in contact with one another, when the reader, whether celebrated poet or novice, is invited to do interpretive work—for without that convergence, poetry is inert.
£25.99
University of Pennsylvania Press The Gift of Spiderwoman: Southwestern Textiles
An introduction to the textile weavings of southwestern Native Americans, the narrative history and color illustrations trace the development of weaving among the Pueblo, Navajo, and Hopi, and the Spanish colonists who settled in the Rio Grande. The reproductions of sarapes, blankets, and clothing will delight anyone who appreciates fiber handcrafts.
£15.18
University of Pennsylvania Press Akhenaten and Tutankhamun: Revolution and Restoration
Egypt's eighteenth dynasty, a period of empire building, was also for a short time the focus of a religious revolution. Now called the Amarna Period (1353-1322 BCE), after the site of an innovative capital city that was the center of the new religion, it included the reigns of the heretic Pharaoh Akhenaten and his presumed son, the boy king Tutankhamun. Three Penn Egyptologists examine the concept of royal power and demonstrate how Akhenaten established, projected, and maintained his vision of it. They investigate how and why this unique pharaoh made fundamental changes in the social contract between himself and his subjects on one side, and between his new solar god, the Aten, and himself on the other. The authors also look at the radical religion, politics, and art, he introduced to Egypt as well as at the consequences of his actions after his death, including how his successors, most notably, Tutankhamun, Egypt's most famous pharaoh, dealt with the restoration of traditional ways. Why did this reversal take place? Could a youth effect such changes without significant help? In concise and readable form, this generously illustrated volume takes a fresh approach to a most fascinating period in Egyptian history. It deals with such topics as the evolution of Akhenaten's ideology and the concepts surrounding the foundation, construction, and use of his innovative city and its unique palaces, temples, and houses. Egypt's empire, the role of its women, its relations with other nations of the ancient world, and the remarkable place both Akhenaten and Tutankhmun hold in history are also among other issues discussed. An epilogue recaps how Amarna's modern discovery helped solve the mysteries surrounding this city, its unique founder, and the aftermath of his revolution.
£22.43
University of Pennsylvania Press Religious Freedom Under Scrutiny
Freedom of religion or belief is deeply entrenched in international human rights conventions and constitutional traditions around the world. Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights enshrines the right to freedom of thought, conscience, and religion as does the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which the United Nations General Assembly adopted in 1966. A rich jurisprudence on freedom of religion or belief is based on the European Convention on Human Rights, drafted in 1950 by the Council of Europe. Similar regional guarantees exist in the framework of the Organization of American States as well as within the African Union. Freedom of religion or belief has found recognition in numerous national constitutions, and some governments have shown a particularly strong commitment to the international promotion of this right. As Heiner Bielefeldt and Michael Wiener observe, however, freedom of religion or belief remains a source of political conflict, legal controversy, and intellectual debate. In Religious Freedom Under Scrutiny, Bielefeldt and Wiener explore various critiques leveled at this right. For example, does freedom of religion contribute to the spread of Western neoliberal values to the detriment of religious and cultural diversity? Can religious freedom serve as the entry point for antifeminist agendas within the human rights framework? Drawing on their considerable experience in the field, Bielefeldt and Wiener provide a typological overview and analysis of violations around the world that illustrate the underlying principles as well as the relationship between freedom of religion or belief and other human rights. Religious Freedom Under Scrutiny argues that without freedom of religion or belief, human rights cannot fully address our complex needs, yearnings, and vulnerabilities as human beings. Furthermore, ignoring or marginalizing freedom of religion or belief would weaken the plausibility, attractiveness, and legitimacy of the entire system of human rights.
£56.70
University of Pennsylvania Press Indigenous Language Politics in the Schoolroom: Cultural Survival in Mexico and the United States
Public school classrooms around the world have the power to shape and transform youth culture and identity. In this book, Mneesha Gellman examines how Indigenous high school students resist assimilation and assert their identities through access to Indigenous language classes in public schools. Drawing on ethnographic accounts, qualitative interviews, focus groups, and surveys, Gellman’s fieldwork examines and compares the experiences of students in Yurok language courses in Northern California and Zapotec courses in Oaxaca, Mexico. She contends that this access to Indigenous language instruction in secondary schooling serves as an arena for Indigenous students to develop their sense of identity and agency, and provides them tools and strategies for civic, social, and political participation, sometimes in unexpected ways. Showcasing young people’s voices, and those of their teachers and community members, in the fight for culturally relevant curricula and educational success, Gellman demonstrates how the Indigenous language classroom enables students to understand, articulate, and resist the systemic erasure and destruction of their culture embedded in state agendas and educational curricula. Access to Indigenous language education, she shows, has positive effects not only for Indigenous students, but for their non-Indigenous peers as well, enabling them to become allies in the struggle for Indigenous cultural survival. Through collaborative methodology that engages in research with, not on, Indigenous communities, Indigenous Language Politics in the Schoolroom explores what it means to be young, Indigenous, and working for social change in the twenty-first century.
£29.99
University of Pennsylvania Press Intimate Bonds: Family and Slavery in the French Atlantic
Following the stories of families who built their lives and fortunes across the Atlantic Ocean, Intimate Bonds explores how households anchored the French empire and shaped the meanings of race, slavery, and gender in the early modern period. As race-based slavery became entrenched in French laws, all household members in the French Atlantic world —regardless of their status, gender, or race—negotiated increasingly stratified legal understandings of race and gender. Through her focus on household relationships, Jennifer L. Palmer reveals how intimacy not only led to the seemingly immutable hierarchies of the plantation system but also caused these hierarchies to collapse even before the age of Atlantic revolutions. Placing families at the center of the French Atlantic world, Palmer uses the concept of intimacy to illustrate how race, gender, and the law intersected to form a new worldview. Through analysis of personal, mercantile, and legal relationships, Intimate Bonds demonstrates that even in an era of intensifying racial stratification, slave owners and slaves, whites and people of color, men and women all adapted creatively to growing barriers, thus challenging the emerging paradigm of the nuclear family. This engagingly written history reveals that personal choices and family strategies shaped larger cultural and legal shifts in the meanings of race, slavery, family, patriarchy, and colonialism itself.
£25.99
University of Pennsylvania Press How Real Estate Developers Think: Design, Profits, and Community
Cities are always changing: streets, infrastructure, public spaces, and buildings are constantly being built, improved, demolished, and replaced. But even when a new project is designed to improve a community, neighborhood residents often find themselves at odds with the real estate developer who proposes it. Savvy developers are willing to work with residents to allay their concerns and gain public support, but at the same time, a real estate development is a business venture financed by private investors who take significant risks. In How Real Estate Developers Think, Peter Hendee Brown explains the interests, motives, and actions of real estate developers, using case studies to show how the basic principles of development remain the same everywhere even as practices vary based on climate, local culture, and geography. An understanding of what developers do and why they do it will help community members, elected officials, and others participate more productively in the development process in their own communities. Based on interviews with over a hundred people involved in the real estate development business in Chicago, Miami, Portland (Oregon), and the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, How Real Estate Developers Think considers developers from three different perspectives. Brown profiles the careers of individual developers to illustrate the character of the entrepreneur, considers the roles played by innovation, design, marketing, and sales in the production of real estate, and examines the risks and rewards that motivate developers as people. Ultimately, How Real Estate Developers Think portrays developers as creative visionaries who are able to imagine future possibilities for our cities and communities and shows that understanding them will lead to better outcomes for neighbors, communities, and cities.
£36.00
University of Pennsylvania Press Clan Cleansing in Somalia: The Ruinous Legacy of 1991
In 1991, certain political and military leaders in Somalia, wishing to gain exclusive control over the state, mobilized their followers to use terror—wounding, raping, and killing—to expel a vast number of Somalis from the capital city of Mogadishu and south-central and southern Somalia. Manipulating clan sentiment, they succeeded in turning ordinary civilians against neighbors, friends, and coworkers. Although this episode of organized communal violence is common knowledge among Somalis, its real nature has not been publicly acknowledged and has been ignored, concealed, or misrepresented in scholarly works and political memoirs—until now. Marshaling a vast amount of source material, including Somali poetry and survivor accounts, Clan Cleansing in Somalia analyzes this campaign of clan cleansing against the historical background of a violent and divisive military dictatorship, in the contemporary context of regime collapse, and in relationship to the rampant militia warfare that followed in its wake. Clan Cleansing in Somalia also reflects on the relationship between history, truth, and postconflict reconstruction in Somalia. Documenting the organization and intent behind the campaign of clan cleansing, Lidwien Kapteijns traces the emergence of the hate narratives and code words that came to serve as rationales and triggers for the violence. However, it was not clans that killed, she insists, but people who killed in the name of clan. Kapteijns argues that the mutual forgiveness for which politicians often so lightly call is not a feasible proposition as long as the violent acts for which Somalis should forgive each other remain suppressed and undiscussed. Clan Cleansing in Somalia establishes that public acknowledgment of the ruinous turn to communal violence is indispensable to social and moral repair, and can provide a gateway for the critical memory work required from Somalis on all sides of this multifaceted conflict.
£29.99
University of Pennsylvania Press The Master of Game
The Master of Game is the oldest and most important work on the chase in the English language. Based primarily on Gaston de Foix's Livre de chasse, originally composed in 1387, The Master of Game was written by Edward of Norwich at his leisure between 1406 and 1413, mostly while being held prisoner for having treasonous designs against his cousin, Henry IV. While much of the book is almost an exact translation of de Foix, Edward added five chapters of his own to form the major source for our knowledge of the medieval hunt. The book begins with a description of the nature of popular quarry, such as the hare, deer, and badger, including their behavior, characteristics, and even smells, and then moves to a discussion of various hunting dog breeds and how to train them. The medieval chase was a ritual event, so the book continues with an explanation of the various rules and techniques for a successful hunt, including how food was to be distributed among the hunters, the support persons, and the dogs. Weapons and traps of choice are also described, as well as the different horn calls used for communication. The Master of Game is a unique text for naturalists, hunters, and persons interested in social history. Although hunting is nowadays far removed from most people's experience, it was of major interest in the time of Edward of Norwich for ritual, sport, and, of course, food. Some knowledge of the chase was essential for all persons of medieval times. This edition, the first paperback ever of the original version edited in 1909, includes a hearty foreword by Theodore Roosevelt, who adds some important contextual information about the chase and draws on his own vast hunting experience. A delight to read, even for those who are not keen on the sport, The Master of Game has, as one review exclaimed," all Chaucer's freshness, love of the open sky and fragrant woodland."
£29.99
University of Pennsylvania Press Human Rights: A Political and Cultural Critique
In 1948 the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and with it a profusion of norms, processes, and institutions to define, promote, and protect human rights. Today virtually every cause seeks to cloak itself in the righteous language of rights. But even so, this universal reliance on the rights idiom has not succeeded in creating common ground and deep agreement as to the scope, content, and philosophical bases for human rights. Makau Mutua argues that the human rights enterprise inappropriately presents itself as a guarantor of eternal truths without which human civilization is impossible. Mutua contends that in fact the human rights corpus, though well meaning, is a Eurocentric construct for the reconstitution of non-Western societies and peoples with a set of culturally biased norms and practices. Mutua maintains that if the human rights movement is to succeed, it must move away from Eurocentrism as a civilizing crusade and attack on non-European peoples. Only a genuine multicultural approach to human rights can make it truly universal. Indigenous, non-European traditions of Asia, Africa, the Pacific, and the Americas must be deployed to deconstruct—and to reconstruct—a universal bundle of rights that all human societies can claim as theirs.
£29.99
University of Pennsylvania Press Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity
The historical separation between Judaism and Christianity is often figured as a clearly defined break of a single entity into two separate religions. Following this model, there would have been one religion known as Judaism before the birth of Christ, which then took on a hybrid identity. Even before its subsequent division, certain beliefs and practices of this composite would have been identifiable as Christian or Jewish.In Border Lines, however, Daniel Boyarin makes a striking case for a very different way of thinking about the historical development that is the partition of Judaeo-Christianity. There were no characteristics or features that could be described as uniquely Jewish or Christian in late antiquity, Boyarin argues. Rather, Jesus-following Jews and Jews who did not follow Jesus lived on a cultural map in which beliefs, such as that in a second divine being, and practices, such as keeping kosher or maintaining the Sabbath, were widely and variably distributed. The ultimate distinctions between Judaism and Christianity were imposed from above by "border-makers," heresiologists anxious to construct a discrete identity for Christianity. By defining some beliefs and practices as Christian and others as Jewish or heretical, they moved ideas, behaviors, and people to one side or another of an artificial border—and, Boyarin significantly contends, invented the very notion of religion.
£29.99
University of Pennsylvania Press Gentile Tales: The Narrative Assault on Late Medieval Jews
Beginning in Paris in the year 1290, Jews were accused of abusing Christ by desecrating the eucharist—the manifestation of Christ's body in the communion service. Over the next two centuries this tale of desecration spread throughout Europe and led to violent anti-Jewish activity in areas from Catalonia to Bohemia, particularly in some German-speaking regions, where at times it produced regionwide massacres and "cleansings." Drawing on sources ranging from religious tales and poems to Jews' confessions made under torture, Miri Rubin explores the frightening power of one of the most persistent anti-Jewish stories of the Middle Ages and the violence that it bred. She looks not just at the occasions on which massacres occurred but also at those times when the story failed to set off violence. She investigates as well the ways these tales were commemorated in rituals, altarpieces, and legends and were enshrined in local traditions. In exploring the character, nature, development, and eventual decay of this fantasy of host desecration, Rubin presents a vivid picture of the mental world of late medieval Europe and of the culture of anti-Judaism.
£29.99
University of Pennsylvania Press The Trotula: An English Translation of the Medieval Compendium of Women's Medicine
The Trotula was the most influential compendium of women's medicine in medieval Europe. Scholarly debate has long focused on the traditional attribution of the work to the mysterious Trotula, said to have been the first female professor of medicine in eleventh- or twelfth-century Salerno, just south of Naples, then the leading center of medical learning in Europe. Yet as Monica H. Green reveals in her introduction to the first English translation ever based upon a medieval form of the text, the Trotula is not a single treatise but an ensemble of three independent works, each by a different author. To varying degrees, these three works reflect the synthesis of indigenous practices of southern Italians with the new theories, practices, and medicinal substances coming out of the Arabic world. Green here presents a complete English translation of the so-called standardized Trotula ensemble, a composite form of the texts that was produced in the midthirteenth century and circulated widely in learned circles. The work is now accessible to a broad audience of readers interested in medieval history, women's studies, and premodern systems of medical thought and practice.
£25.99
University of Pennsylvania Press Garden and Grove: The Italian Renaissance Garden in the English Imagination, 16-175
Garden and Grove is a pioneering study of the English fascination with Italian Renaissance gardens. John Dixon Hunt studies reactions of English visitors in their journals and travel books to the exciting world of Italian gardens: its links with classical villas, with Virgil and farming, with Ovid and metamorphosis, its association with theater, its variety, its staged debates between art and nature. Then he looks at what English visitors made of these Italian garden experiences upon their return home and at how they created Italianate gardens on their estates, on their stages, and in their poems. With a wealth of literary and visual materials previously untapped, Hunt provides a new history of an intriguing and vital phase of English garden history. Not only does he suggest the centrality of the garden as a focus for many social, aesthetic, political, and philosophical ideas but he argues that the so-called English landscape garden before "Capability" Brown, in the late eighteenth century, owed much to a long and continuing emulation of Italian Renaissance models.
£29.99
University of Pennsylvania Press The Israeli Radical Left: An Ethics of Complicity
In The Israeli Radical Left, Fiona Wright traces the dramatic as well as the mundane paths taken by radical Jewish Israeli leftwing activists, whose critique of the Israeli state has left them uneasily navigating an increasingly polarized public atmosphere. This activism is manifested in direct action solidarity movements, the critical stances of some Israeli human rights and humanitarian NGOs, and less well-known initiatives that promote social justice within Jewish Israel as a means of undermining the overwhelming support for militarism and nationalism that characterizes Israeli domestic politics. In chronicling these attempts at solidarity with those most injured by Israeli policy, Wright reveals dissent to be a fraught negotiation of activists' own citizenship in which they feel simultaneously repulsed and responsible. Based on eighteen months of fieldwork, The Israeli Radical Left provides a nuanced account of various kinds of Jewish Israeli antioccupation and antiracist activism as both spaces of subversion and articulations of complicity. Wright does not level complicity as an accusation, but rather recasts the concept as an analysis of the impurity of ethical and political relations and the often uncomfortable ways in which this makes itself felt during moments of attempted solidarity. She imparts how activists persistently underline their own feelings of complicity and the impossibility of reconciling their principles with the realities of their everyday lives, despite the fact that the activism in which they engage specifically aims to challenge Jewish Israeli citizens' participation in state violence. The first full ethnographic account of the Israeli radical left, Wright's book explores the ethics and politics of Jewish Israeli activists who challenge the violence perpetrated by their state and in their name.
£60.30
University of Pennsylvania Press Mexico's Human Rights Crisis
Lawless elements are ascendant in Mexico, as evidenced by the operations of criminal cartels engaged in human and drug trafficking, often with the active support or acquiescence of government actors. The sharp increase in the number of victims of homicide, disappearances and torture over the past decade is unparalleled in the country's recent history. According to editors Alejandro Anaya-Muñoz and Barbara Frey, the "war on drugs" launched in 2006 by President Felipe Calderón and the corrupting influence criminal organizations have on public institutions have empowered both state and nonstate actors to operate with impunity. Impunity, they argue, is the root cause that has enabled a human-rights crisis to flourish, creating a climate of generalized violence that is carried out, condoned, or ignored by the state and precluding any hope for justice. Mexico's Human Rights Crisis offers a broad survey of the current human rights issues that plague Mexico. Essays focus on the human rights consequences that flow directly from the ongoing "war on drugs" in the country, including violence aimed specifically at women, and the impunity that characterizes the government's activities. Contributors address the violation of the human rights of migrants, in both Mexico and the United States, and cover the domestic and transnational elements and processes that shape the current human rights crisis, from the state of Mexico's democracy to the influence of rulings by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights on the decisions of Mexico's National Supreme Court of Justice. Given the scope, the contemporaneity, and the gravity of Mexico's human rights crisis, the recommendations made in the book by the editors and contributors to curb the violence could not be more urgent. Contributors: Alejandro Anaya-Muñoz, Karina Ansolabehere, Ariadna Estévez, Barbara Frey, Janice Gallagher, Rodrigo Gutiérrez Rivas, Susan Gzesh, Sandra Hincapié, Catalina Pérez Correa, Laura Rubio Díaz-Leal, Natalia Saltalamacchia, Carlos Silva Forné, Regina Tamés, Javier Treviño-Rangel, Daniel Vázquez, Benjamin James Waddell.
£60.30
University of Pennsylvania Press Borderlands of Slavery: The Struggle over Captivity and Peonage in the American Southwest
It is often taken as a simple truth that the Civil War and the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution ended slavery in the United States. In the Southwest, however, two coercive labor systems, debt peonage—in which a debtor negotiated a relationship of servitude, often lifelong, to a creditor—and Indian captivity, not only outlived the Civil War but prompted a new struggle to define freedom and bondage in the United States. In Borderlands of Slavery, William S. Kiser presents a comprehensive history of debt peonage and Indian captivity in the territory of New Mexico after the Civil War. It begins in the early 1700s with the development of Indian slavery through slave raiding and fictive kinship. By the early 1800s, debt peonage had emerged as a secondary form of coerced servitude in the Southwest, augmenting Indian slavery to meet increasing demand for labor. While indigenous captivity has received considerable scholarly attention, the widespread practice of debt peonage has been largely ignored. Kiser makes the case that these two intertwined systems were of not just regional but also national importance and must be understood within the context of antebellum slavery, the Civil War, emancipation, and Reconstruction. Kiser argues that the struggle over Indian captivity and debt peonage in the Southwest helped both to broaden the public understanding of forced servitude in post-Civil War America and to expand political and judicial philosophy regarding free labor in the reunified republic. Borderlands of Slavery emphasizes the lasting legacies of captivity and peonage in Southwestern culture and society as well as in the coercive African American labor regimes in the Jim Crow South that persevered into the early twentieth century.
£81.00
University of Pennsylvania Press The Opened Letter: Networking in the Early Modern British World
By the early eighteenth century, the rapid expansion of the British empire had created a technological problem: communication and networking became increasingly vital yet harder to maintain. As colonial possessions and populations grew and more individuals moved around the globe, Britons both at home and abroad required a constant and reliable means of communication to conduct business, plumb intellectual concerns, discuss family matters, run distant estates, and exchange news. As face-to-face communication became more intermittent, men and women across the early modern British world relied on letters. In The Opened Letter, historian Lindsay O'Neill explores the importance and impact of networking via letter-writing among the members of the elite from England, Ireland, and the colonies. Combining extensive archival research with social network digital technology, The Opened Letter captures the dynamic associations that created a vibrant, expansive, and elaborate web of communication. The author examined more than 10,000 letters produced by such figures as Virginia planters William Byrd I and his son William Byrd II; the Anglo-Irish nobleman John Perceval; the newly minted Duke of Chandos, James Brydges, and his wife Cassandra Brydges; and Sir Hans Sloane, the president of the Royal Society, and his colleague Peter Collinson. She also mined letters from the likes of Nicholas Blundell, a Catholic member of the Lancashire gentry, and James Eliot, a London merchant and ardent Quaker. The Opened Letter reassembles and presents the vital individual and interlocking epistolary webs constructed by disparate groups of letter writers. These early social networks illuminate the structural, social, and geographic workings of the British world as the nation was becoming a dominant global power.
£44.10
University of Pennsylvania Press Animals and Other People: Literary Forms and Living Beings in the Long Eighteenth Century
In Animals and Other People, Heather Keenleyside argues for the central role of literary modes of knowledge in apprehending animal life. Keenleyside focuses on writers who populate their poetry, novels, and children's stories with conspicuously figurative animals, experiment with conventional genres like the beast fable, and write the "lives" of mice as well as men. From such writers—including James Thomson, Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, Laurence Sterne, Anna Letitia Barbauld, and others—she recovers a key insight about the representation of living beings: when we think and write about animals, we are never in the territory of strictly literal description, relying solely on the evidence of our senses. Indeed, any description of animals involves personification of a sort, if we understand personification not as a rhetorical ornament but as a fundamental part of our descriptive and conceptual repertoire, essential for distinguishing living beings from things. Throughout the book, animals are characterized by a distinctive mode of agency and generality; they are at once moving and being moved, at once individual beings and generic or species figures (every cat is also "The Cat"). Animals thus become figures with which to think about key philosophical questions about the nature of human agency and of social and political community. They also come into view as potential participants in that community, as one sort of "people" among others. Demonstrating the centrality of animals to an eighteenth-century literary and philosophical tradition, Animals and Other People also argues for the importance of this tradition to current discussions of what life is and how we might live together.
£64.80
University of Pennsylvania Press Gandhi's Body: Sex, Diet, and the Politics of Nationalism
No single person is more directly associated with India and India's struggle for independence than Mahatma Gandhi. His name has equally become synonymous with the highest principles of global equality, human dignity, and freedom. Joseph Alter argues, however, that Gandhi has not been completely understood by biographers and political scholars, and in Gandhi's Body he undertakes a reevaluation of the Mahatma's life and thought. In his revisionist and iconoclastic approach, Alter moves away from the usual focus on nonviolence, peace, and social reform and takes seriously what most scholars who have studied Gandhi tend to ignore: Gandhi's preoccupation with sex, his obsession with diet reform, and his vehement advocacy for naturopathy. Alter concludes that a distinction cannot be made between Gandhi's concern with health, faith in nonviolence, and his sociopolitical agenda. In this original and provocative study, Joseph Alter demonstrates that these seemingly idiosyncratic aspects of Gandhi's personal life are of central importance to understanding his politics—and not only Gandhi's politics but Indian nationalism in general. Using the Mahatma's own writings, Alter places Gandhi's bodily practices in the context of his philosophy; for example, he explores the relationship between Gandhi's fasting and his ideas about the metaphysics of emptiness and that between his celibacy and his beliefs about nonviolence. Alter also places Gandhi's ideas and practices in their national and transnational contexts. He discusses how and why nature cure became extremely popular in India during the early part of the twentieth century, tracing the influence of two German naturopaths on Gandhi's thinking and on the practice of yoga in India. More important, he argues that the reconstruction of yoga in terms of European naturopathy was brought about deliberately by a number of activists in India—of whom Gandhi was only the most visible—interested in creating a "scientific" health regimen, distinct from Western precedents, that would make the Indian people fit for self-rule. Gandhi's Body counters established arguments that Indian nationalism was either a completely indigenous Hindu-based movement or simply a derivative of Western ideals.
£58.00
University of Pennsylvania Press The Quest for the Christ Child in the Later Middle Ages
Beginning in the twelfth century, clergy and laity alike started wondering with intensity about the historical and developmental details of Jesus' early life. Was the Christ Child like other children, whose characteristics and capabilities depended on their age? Was he sweet and tender, or formidable and powerful? Not finding sufficient information in the Gospels, which are almost completely silent about Jesus' childhood, medieval Christians turned to centuries-old apocryphal texts for answers. In The Quest for the Christ Child in the Later Middle Ages, Mary Dzon demonstrates how these apocryphal legends fostered a vibrant and creative medieval piety. Popular tales about the Christ Child entertained the laity and at the same time were reviled by some members of the intellectual elite of the church. In either case, such legends, so persistent, left their mark on theological, devotional, and literary texts. The Cistercian abbot Aelred of Rievaulx urged his monastic readers to imitate the Christ Child's development through spiritual growth; Francis of Assisi encouraged his followers to emulate the Christ Child's poverty and rusticity; Thomas Aquinas, for his part, believed that apocryphal stories about the Christ Child would encourage youths to be presumptuous, while Birgitta of Sweden provided pious alternatives in her many Marian revelations. Through close readings of such writings, Dzon explores the continued transmission and appeal of apocryphal legends throughout the Middle Ages and demonstrates the significant impact that the Christ Child had in shaping the medieval religious imagination.
£72.00
University of Pennsylvania Press A Sixth-Century Monastery at Beth-Shan (Scythopolis)
The book examines the building, mosaics, objects, and mosaic inscriptions found at the site of a sixth-century monastery at Beth-Shan. The mosaic floors are described in particular detail, with reference to comparable mosaics elsewhere in Palestine. Translations are given of the inscriptions within the mosaics. Publications of the Palestine Section of the University Museum, University of Pennsylvania Vol. IV
£27.40
University of Pennsylvania Press Witchcraft and Magic in the Nordic Middle Ages
Stephen A. Mitchell here offers the fullest examination available of witchcraft in late medieval Scandinavia. He focuses on those people believed to be able—and who in some instances thought themselves able—to manipulate the world around them through magical practices, and on the responses to these beliefs in the legal, literary, and popular cultures of the Nordic Middle Ages. His sources range from the Icelandic sagas to cultural monuments much less familiar to the nonspecialist, including legal cases, church art, law codes, ecclesiastical records, and runic spells. Mitchell's starting point is the year 1100, by which time Christianity was well established in elite circles throughout Scandinavia, even as some pre-Christian practices and beliefs persisted in various forms. The book's endpoint coincides with the coming of the Reformation and the onset of the early modern Scandinavian witch hunts. The terrain covered is complex, home to the Germanic Scandinavians as well as their non-Indo-European neighbors, the Sámi and Finns, and it encompasses such diverse areas as the important trade cities of Copenhagen, Bergen, and Stockholm, with their large foreign populations; the rural hinterlands; and the insular outposts of Iceland and Greenland. By examining witches, wizards, and seeresses in literature, lore, and law, as well as surviving charm magic directed toward love, prophecy, health, and weather, Mitchell provides a portrait of both the practitioners of medieval Nordic magic and its performance. With an understanding of mythology as a living system of cultural signs (not just ancient sacred narratives), this study also focuses on such powerful evolving myths as those of "the milk-stealing witch," the diabolical pact, and the witches' journey to Blåkulla. Court cases involving witchcraft, charm magic, and apostasy demonstrate that witchcraft ideologies played a key role in conceptualizing gender and were themselves an important means of exercising social control.
£40.00
University of Pennsylvania Press Miscellaneous Investigations in Central Tikal--Great Temples III, IV, V, and VI: Tikal Report 23B
The Maya center of Tikal, in Guatemala, is famous for its well-preserved architecture. This book presents detailed descriptions of four of the six Great Temples that dominate Tikal's city center. Whereas Great Temples I and II were published in 1990 in Tikal Report 14, the four structures presented here are Great Temples III, IV, V, and VI. All but Great Temple V represent Late Classic construction and can be associated with known rulers. It is tempting to think of these structures as funerary monuments, but this is only a supposition. Their relationship with rulers may have been much more complex. This report is the primary record of these important buildings in Tikal's urban landscape. It provides clear, precise, and usable architectural analyses for Mayanists, archaeologists, art historians, architectural historians, urbanists, and those interested in construction techniques and in the uses of Maya buildings. University Museum Monograph, 146
£50.50
University of Pennsylvania Press Miscellaneous Investigations in Central Tikal--The Plaza of the Seven Temples: Tikal Report 23C
The Great Maya center of Tikal, in Guatemala, is famous for its well-preserved architecture. This book presents descriptions of nine structures that line the Plaza of the Seven Temples, which sits immediately west of the South Acropolis of Central Tikal. These structures were surveyed with little or no excavation as part of the Tikal Project Standing Architecture Survey. This report is the primary record of these structures in Tikal's urban landscape, and it provides clear, precise, and usable architectural analyses for Mayanists, archaeologists, art historians, architectural historians, urbanists, and those interested in construction techniques and in the uses of Maya buildings. University Museum monograph, 147
£50.50