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Books > History > European history > General
Martin Luther was the architect and engineer of the Protestant
Reformation, which transformed Germany five hundred years ago. In
Martin Luther and the Arts, Andreas Loewe and Katherine Firth
elucidate Luther's theory and practice, demonstrating the breadth,
flexibility and rigour of Luther's use of the arts to reach
audiences and convince them of his Reformation message using a
range of strategies, including music, images and drama alongside
sermons, polemical tracts, and his new translation of the Bible
into German. Extensively based on German and English sources,
including often neglected aspects of Luther's own writings, Loewe
and Firth offer a valuable survey for theologians, historians, art
historians, musicologists and literary studies scholars interested
in interdisciplinary comparisons of Luther's work across the arts.
Many of the wars of the Late Republic were largely civil conflicts.
There was, therefore, a tension between the traditional expectation
that triumphs should be celebrated for victories over foreign
enemies and the need of the great commanders to give full
expression to their prestige and charisma, and to legitimize their
power. Triumphs in the Age of Civil War rethinks the nature and the
character of the phenomenon of civil war during the Late Republic.
At the same time it focuses on a key feature of the Roman
socio-political order, the triumph, and argues that a commander
could in practice expect to triumph after a civil war victory if it
could also be represented as being over a foreign enemy, even if
the principal opponent was clearly Roman. Significantly, the civil
aspect of the war did not have to be denied. Carsten Hjort Lange
provides the first study to consider the Roman triumph during the
age of civil war, and argues that the idea of civil war as "normal"
reflects the way civil war permeated the politics and society of
the Late Roman Republic.
At the end of the 19th century, German historical scholarship had
grown to great prominence. Academics around the world imitated
their German colleagues. Intellectuals described historical
scholarship as a foundation of the modern worldview. To many, the
modern age was an 'age of history'. This book investigates how
German historical scholarship acquired this status. Modern
Historiography in the Making begins with the early Enlightenment,
when scholars embraced the study of the past as a modernizing
project, undermining dogmatic systems of belief and promoting
progressive ideals, such a tolerance, open mindedness and
reform-readiness. Kasper Risbjerg Eskildsen looks at how this
modernizing project remained an important motivation and
justification for historical scholarship until the 20th century.
Eskildsen successfully argues that German historical scholarship
was not, as we have been told since the early 20th century, a
product of historicism, but rather of Enlightenment ideals. The
book offers this radical revision of the history of scholarship by
focusing on practices of research and education. It examines how
scholars worked and why they cared. It shows how their efforts
forever changed our relationship not only to the past, but also to
the world we live in.
(The open access version of this book has been published with the
support of the Swiss National Science Foundation.) The book
proposes a reassessment of royal portraiture and its function in
the Middle Ages via a comparative analysis of works from different
areas of the Mediterranean world, where images are seen as only one
outcome of wider and multifarious strategies for the public
mise-en-scene of the rulers' bodies. Its emphasis is on the ways in
which medieval monarchs in different areas of the Mediterranean
constructed their outward appearance and communicated it by means
of a variety of rituals, object-types, and media. Contributors are
Michele Bacci, Nicolas Bock, Gerardo Boto Varela, Branislav
Cvetkovic, Sofia Fernandez Pozzo, Gohar Grigoryan Savary, Elodie
Leschot, Vinni Lucherini, Ioanna Rapti, Juan Carlos Ruiz Souza,
Marta Serrano-Coll, Lucinia Speciale, Manuela Studer-Karlen, Mirko
Vagnoni, and Edda Vardanyan.
Richard Kaeuper's career has examined three salient concerns of
medieval society - knightly prowess and violence, lay and religious
piety, and public order and government - most directly in three of
his monographs: War, Justice, and Public Order (Oxford, 1988),
Chivalry and Violence in Medieval Europe (Oxford, 1999), and Holy
Warriors (Penn, 2009). Kaeuper approaches historical questions with
an eye towards illuminating the inherent complexities in human
ideas and ideals, and he has worked to untangle the various threads
holding together cultural constructs such as chivalry, licit
violence, and lay piety. The present festschrift in his honor
brings together scholars from across disciplines to engage with
those same concerns in medieval society from a variety of
perspectives. Contributors are: Bernard S. Bachrach, Elizabeth A.R.
Brown, Samuel A. Claussen, David Crouch, Thomas Devaney, Paul
Dingman, Daniel P. Franke, Richard Firth Green, Christopher Guyol,
John D. Hosler, William Chester Jordan, Craig M. Nakashian, W. Mark
Ormrod, Russell A. Peck, Anthony J. Pollard, Michael Prestwich,
Sebastian Rider-Bezerra, Leah Shopkow, and Peter W. Sposato.
Jews and Crime in Medieval Europe is a topic laced by prejudice on
one hand and apologetics on the other. Beginning in the Middle
Ages, Jews were often portrayed as criminals driven by greed. While
these accusations were, for the most part, unfounded, in other
cases criminal accusations against Jews were not altogether
baseless. Drawing on a variety of legal, liturgical, literary, and
archival sources, Ephraim Shoham-Steiner examines the reasons for
the involvement in crime, the social profile of Jews who performed
crimes, and the ways and mechanisms employed by the legal and
communal body to deal with Jewish criminals and with crimes
committed by Jews. A society's attitude toward individuals
identified as criminals - by others or themselves - can serve as a
window into that society's mores and provide insight into how
transgressors understood themselves and society's atttudes toward
them. The book is divided into three main sections. In the first
section, Shoham-Steiner examines theft and crimes of a financial
nature. In the second section, he discusses physical violence and
murder, most importantly among Jews but also incidents when Jews
attacked others and cases in which Jews asked non-Jews to commit
violence against fellow Jews. In the third section, Shoham-Steiner
approaches the role of women in crime and explores the gender
differences, surveying the nature of the crimes involving women
both as perpetrators and as victims, as well as the reaction to
their involvement in criminal activities among medieval European
Jews. While the study of crime and social attitudes toward
criminals is firmly established in the social sciences, the history
of crime and of social attitudes toward crime and criminals is
relatively new, especially in the field of medieval studies and all
the more so in medieval Jewish studies. Jews and Crime in Medieval
Europe blazes a new path for unearthing daily life history from
extremely recalcitrant sources. The intended readership goes beyond
scholars and students of medieval Jewish studies, medieval European
history, and crime in pre-modern society.
Irena Veisaite is held in deep esteem throughout her country. This
volume is an attempt to relate the difficult journey of her
remarkable life against the backdrop of the complex history of
Lithuania and its Litvaks (Lithuanian Jews). After being rescued by
Christian Lithuanian families and having survived the Holocaust
Irena Veisaite devoted herself to study and creative work. She was
a memorable lecturer, respected theatre critic, associate film
director, and also founder and chairman of the Open Society Fund
(Soros Foundation) which made an invaluable contribution to the
process of democratisation in Lithuania. Irena Veisaite made it her
life's work to speak up for dialogue and mutual understanding and
believes that even in the most difficult circumstances it is
possible to preserve one's humanity. Having lived through some of
the major atrocities of the twentieth century, her insistence on
the need for tolerance has inspired many.
How did print spread through France to become a major force during
the eighteenth century? This question has remained unanswered
because we know surprisingly little about the infrastructure of the
book trade. Between state and market: printing and bookselling in
eighteenth-century France explores the networks of printers and
booksellers that covered eighteenth-century France, situating these
key cultural intermediaries within their political and
socio-economic environments. To draw an overview of printing and
bookselling, and to chart their evolution across the century, the
author analyzes a series of administrative surveys conducted
between 1700 and 1777 by the Direction de la librairie. The
hundreds of reports the central administration gathered on every
printing shop and bookseller in the kingdom reveal not only where
book professionals could be found and who they were, but what
materials they were printing and what books they were selling.
Survey responses also show that book policing was deficient in most
of the provinces, allowing pirated and forbidden books to pour into
the kingdom from nearby foreign presses. Unable to control the
circulation of books, the administration resorted to an austere
Colbertist policy to restrict the number of printing shops. State
intervention brought a decline in provincial book publishing, but
printers could still thrive on job printing, local-interest
publications and pirating. By contrast, the central administration
let booksellers of all kinds proliferate, particularly in the
second half of the century. Better suited than traditional
printer-booksellers to supply whatever books readers wanted, retail
booksellers cashed in on a booming market demand. Examining the
booktrade from each provincial city upwards, the author tracks the
intricate web of relations between state, market, local
institutions and book professionals that shaped the diffusion of
print, and thereby the development of French literature and the
experience of everyday readers.
In the face of an outpouring of research on Holocaust history,
Holocaust Angst takes an innovative approach. It explores how
Germans perceived and reacted to how Americans publicly
commemorated the Holocaust. It argues that a network of mostly
conservative West German officials and their associates in private
organizations and foundations, with Chancellor Kohl located at its
center, perceived themselves as the "victims" of the afterlife of
the Holocaust in America. They were concerned that public
manifestations of Holocaust memory, such as museums, monuments, and
movies, could severely damage the Federal Republic's reputation and
even cause Americans to question the Federal Republic's status as
an ally. From their perspective, American Holocaust memorial
culture constituted a stumbling block for (West) German-American
relations since the late 1970s. Providing the first comprehensive,
archival study of German efforts to cope with the Nazi past
vis-a-vis the United States up to the 1990s, this book uncovers the
fears of German officials - some of whom were former Nazis or World
War II veterans - about the impact of Holocaust memory on the
reputation of the Federal Republic and reveals their at times
negative perceptions of American Jews. Focusing on a variety of
fields of interaction, ranging from the diplomatic to the scholarly
and public spheres, the book unearths the complicated and often
contradictory process of managing the legacies of genocide on an
international stage. West German decision makers realized that
American Holocaust memory was not an "anti-German plot" by American
Jews and acknowledged that they could not significantly change
American Holocaust discourse. In the end, German confrontation with
American Holocaust memory contributed to a more open engagement on
the part of the West German government with this memory and
eventually rendered it a "positive resource" for German
self-representation abroad. Holocaust Angst offers new perspectives
on postwar Germany's place in the world system as well as the
Holocaust culture in the United States and the role of
transnational organizations.
Rather than being properties of the individual self, emotions are
socially produced and deployed in specific cultural contexts, as
this collection documents with unusual richness. All the essays
show emotions to be a form of thought and knowledge, and a major
component of social life - including in the nineteenth century,
which attempted to relegate them to a feminine intimate sphere. The
collection ranges across topics such as eighteenth-century
sensibility, nineteenth-century concerns with the transmission of
emotions, early twentieth-century cinematic affect, and the
contemporary mobilization of political emotions including those
regarding nonstate national identities. The complexities and
effects of emotions are explored in a variety of forms - political
rhetoric, literature, personal letters, medical writing, cinema,
graphic art, soap opera, journalism, popular music, digital media -
with attention paid to broader European and transatlantic
implications.
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