A Companion to Late Medieval and Early Modern Augsburg introduces readers to major political, social and economic developments in Augsburg from c. 1400 to c. 1800 as well as to those themes of social and cultural history that have made research on this imperial city especially fruitful and stimulating. The volume comprises contributions by an international team of 23 scholars, providing a range of the most significant scholarly approaches to Augsburg's past from a variety of perspectives, disciplines, and methodologies. Building on the impressive number of recent innovative studies on this large and prosperous early modern city, the contributions distill the extraordinary range and creativity of recent scholarship on Augsburg into a handbook format. Contributors are Victoria Bartels, Katy Bond, Christopher W. Close, Allyson Creasman, Regina Dauser, Dietrich Erben, Alexander J. Fisher, Andreas Flurschutz da Cruz, Helmut Graser, Mark Haberlein, Michele Zelinsky Hanson, Peter Kreutz, Hans-Joerg Kunast, Margaret Lewis, Andrew Morrall, Marjorie Elizabeth Plummer, Barbara Rajkay, Reinhold Reith, Gregor Rohmann, Claudia Stein, B. Ann Tlusty, Sabine Ullmann, Wolfgang E.J. Weber.

This volume offers a history of historiography, as Roumen Daskalov presents a critical analysis of Bulgarian historiographical views of the Middle Ages to reveal their embeddedness in their historical context and their adaptation to the contemporary circumstances. The study traces the establishment of a master narrative of the Bulgarian Middle Ages and its evolution over time to the present day, including the attempt at a Marxist counter-narrative. Daskalov uses categories of master national narratives, which typically are stories of origins and migrations, state foundations and rises ("golden ages"), and decline and fall, yet they also assert the continuity of the "people", present certain historical personalities (good or evil, "great" or "weak"), and describe certain actions or passivity to others' actions.

In its exploration of puppetry and animation as the performative media of choice for mastering the art of illusion, To Embody the Marvelous engages with early modern notions of wonder in religious, artistic, and social contexts. From jointed, wood-carved figures of Christ, saintly marionettes that performed hagiographical dramas, experimental puppets and automata in Cervantes' Don Quixote, and the mechanical sets around which playwright CalderOn de la Barca devised secular magic shows to deconstruct superstitions, these historical and fictional artifacts reenvisioned religious, artistic, and social notions that led early modern society to critically wrestle with enchantment and disenchantment. The use of animated performance objects in Spanish theatrical contexts during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries became one of the most effective pedagogical means to engage with civil society. Regardless of social strata, readers and spectators alike were caught up in a paradigm shift wherein belief systems were increasingly governed by reason-even though the discursive primacy of supernatural doxa and Christian wonder remained firmly entrenched. Thanks to their potential for motion, religious and profane puppets, automata, and mechanical stage props deployed a rationalized sense of wonder that illustrates the relationship between faith and reason, reevaluates the boundaries of fiction in art and entertainment cultures, acknowledges the rise of science and technology, and questions normative authority.

This book uses both succinct, informative essays and beautiful, detailed photography to reveal how recent archeological discoveries in the ancient country of Armenia have transformed our understanding of the origins of human civilization and humanity itself. It also tells the story of a heroic team of Armenian archeologists who have singlehandedly created a new golden age of archeology in their country. Their work demonstrates that Armenia has hosted a continuous human presence for at least 2 million years. They have succeeded in documenting the evolution of humanity and human culture across this vast span of time in minute detail. Their discoveries include the oldest known winemaking complex, the recreation of the first wines, the oldest known work of art, the oldest shoe yet discovered, and one of the oldest known religious documents. This book chronicles their achievements in a manner that lets the reader become part of the process of exploration and feel the excitement of discovery.

In Describing the City, Describing the State Sandra Toffolo presents a comprehensive analysis of descriptions of the city of Venice and the Venetian Terraferma in the Renaissance, when the Venetian mainland state was being created. Working with an extensive variety of descriptions, the book demonstrates that no one narrative of Venice prevailed in the early modern European imagination, and that authors continuously adapted geographical descriptions to changing political circumstances. This in turn illustrates the importance of studying geographical representation and early modern state formation together. Moreover, it challenges the long-standing concept of the myth of Venice, by showing that Renaissance observers never saw the city of Venice and the Venetian Terraferma in a monolithic way.

The open access publication of this book has been published with the support of the Swiss National Science Foundation. In Staging Holiness: The Case of Hospitaller Rhodes (ca. 1309-1522) Sofia Zoitou offers a study of the history of relic collections, devotional rituals, and sites invested with special meaning on Rhodes, during a time when the island became one of the most frequented ports of call for ships carrying pilgrims from Venice to the Holy Land. Scrutinizing late medieval travel reports by pilgrims from all over Europe along with extant historical, archaeological, visual, and material evidence, Sofia Zoitou traces the various forms of the Rhodian cultic sites' evolution and perception, ultimately considered as an overall artistic strategy for the staging of the sacred.

In the late seventeenth century, a team of scientists managed to free, for the first time, the soft tissues of the brain and nerves from the hard casing of the skull. In doing so, they not only engendered modern neuroscience, and with it the promise of knowing the mind through empirical study of the brain; they also unleashed a host of questions, problems, paradoxes, and--strangest of all--literary forms that are still with us today. Nervous Fictions is the first account of early neuroscience and of the peculiar literary forms it produced. Challenging the divide between science and literature, philosophy and fiction, Jess Keiser draws attention to a distinctive, but so far unacknowledged, mode of writing evident in a host of late seventeenth and eighteenth-century texts: the nervous fiction. Apparent not just in scientific work, but also in poetry (Barker, Blackmore, Thomson), narrative (Sterne, Smollett, ""it-narratives""), philosophy (Hobbes, Cavendish, Locke), satire (Swift, Pope, Arbuthnot), and medicine (Mandeville, Boswell), nervous fictions dissect the brain through metaphor, personification, and other figurative language. Nervous fictions stage a central Enlightenment problematic: the clash between mind and body, between our introspective sense of self as beings endowed with thinking, sensing, believing, willing minds and the scientific study of our brains as simply complex physical systems.