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After Positivism: New Approaches to Comparison in Historical Sociology
by Wilson, Nicholas Hoover; Mayrl, DamonWhat is the value of comparison for research in historical sociology? Today, social scientists regularly express doubt about the positivist premises that have long justified comparison’s use: that cases can be unproblematically compared as though they are independent of one another, that comparison can reliably yield valid causal inference, and that comparative methods can grapple with questions of meaning, sequence, and process that are central to historical explanation. Yet they remain reluctant to abandon comparison altogether, not least because comparisons are still manifestly useful in the research process.After Positivism presents a bold new set of warrants and methodologies for comparison that takes these criticisms fully into account. The contributors to this book marshal a wide array of postpositivist approaches to knowledge to reconstruct the analytic potential of comparison for a new generation of social scientists. In addition to providing fresh answers to classic questions about case selection and causal inference, authors ponder the role comparison plays in a world where social phenomena are demonstrably time-, space-, and concept-dependent; where causation is typically conjunctural; where social structures and groups emerge and die; and where important objects of inquiry can be understood only in terms of relationships, emergent properties, or contingent and irregular effects. Engaging and timely, this book will be of interest to all those who seek to improve our explanations of historical change in social-scientific research.
Crisis in the Caribbean (Routledge Revivals)
by Fitzroy Ambursley Robin CohenOriginally published in 1983, this anthology was the first to integrate the political experiences of the Central American mainland and the Caribbean archipelago and provides analyses of some of the most explosive events of the 1970s and 80s in this region, including the Jonestown massacre, the failures of the Burnham regime in Guyana, the tumultuous elections in Jamaica in 1980, the army officers’ coup d’état in Suriname, the revolutions in Grenada and Nicaragua and the revolutionary upheaval in El Salvador. It also shows how the regional crisis affected such prosperous countries as Trinidad and Tobago and such politically stable regimes in St. Vincent and the French colonies of Martinique and Guadelope. It also discusses the development of the first Socialist regime in the region, Cuba
Consciousness-Based Evolution
by John S. TordayConsciousness is the key to understanding human existence. Many have attempted to determine the fundamental nature of consciousness based on deductive reasoning. In contrast to that, Consciousness-Based Evolution has exploited empiric evidence for the evolution of physiology from the unicell to man based on cell-cell communication as the origin of consciousness, each intermediary step representing an innate effort to maintain homeostasis by harnessing the energy flow initiated by The Big Bang. By tracing vertebrate evolution as development and phylogeny, focusing on specific emergent steps using a Bayesian approach, individual traits can be seen as exaptations of earlier ways in which existential threats were resolved over the course of evolution. You, the readers, are the beneficiary of those insights.
Human Security and Empowerment in Asia: Beyond the Pandemic (Politics in Asia)
by Mely Caballero-Anthony, Yoichi Mine, and Sachiko IshikawaIn the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, this edited volume revisits the framework of human security and development. It examines the protection-empowerment nexus as applied to various vulnerable groups and populations affected by the pandemic.While the conventional human security literature has focused on top-down protection, this book offers new perspectives on human security by exploring bottom-up empowerment from both theoretical and practical perspectives. It also encourages readers to rethink the agency of vulnerable people in addressing the challenges posed by the pandemic. Through eight case studies from Southeast Asia and Japan, the contributors to this book demonstrate the importance of empowerment in achieving human security. They focus on the responses of vulnerable groups and communities to multiple threats to their lives, livelihoods, and dignity. The chapters discuss key human security concerns, such as poverty, the environment, food, forced migration, gender, health, aging, peace, and justice – all of which have been compounded and exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.An essential resource for students and scholars of human security in the aftermath of COVID-19 and its wider impacts.The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license. Funded by JICA Ogata Sadako Research Institute for Peace and Development.
Presidential Election Update American Government: For the AP® Course
by Scott Abernathy Karen WaplesFinally, an AP® Gov textbook with support and practice!Written by an AP® U.S. Government and Politics teacher and exam reader, this book has been carefully built to meet the needs of AP® teachers and students. The text follows the course organization and focuses on course concepts, practices, reasoning skills, and required cases and documents. It also provides extensive practice for the AP® exam.
Philip II of Spain and the Architecture of Empire
by Laura Fernández-GonzálezPhilip II of Spain was a major patron of the arts, best known for his magnificent palace and royal mausoleum at the Monastery of San Lorenzo of El Escorial. However, neither the king’s monastery nor his collections fully convey the rich artistic landscape of early modern Iberia. In this book, Laura Fernández-González examines Philip’s architectural and artistic projects, placing them within the wider context of Europe and the transoceanic Iberian dominions.Philip II of Spain and the Architecture of Empire investigates ideas of empire and globalization in the art and architecture of the Iberian world during the sixteenth century, a time when the Spanish Empire was one of the largest in the world. Fernández-González illuminates Philip’s use of building regulations to construct an imperial city in Madrid and highlights the importance of his transformation of the Simancas fortress into an archive. She analyzes the refashioning of his imperial image upon his ascension to the Portuguese throne and uses the Hall of Battles in El Escorial as a lens through which to understand visual culture, history writing, and Philip’s kingly image as it was reflected in the funeral commemorations mourning his death across the Iberian world. Positioning Philip’s art and architectural programs within the wider cultural context of politics, legislation, religion, and theoretical trends, Fernández-González shows how design and images traveled across the Iberian world and provides a nuanced assessment of Philip’s role in influencing them. Original and important, this panoramic work will have a lasting impact on Philip II’s artistic legacy. Art historians and scholars of Iberia and sixteenth-century history will especially value Fernández-González’s research.
Electromagnetism and the Metonymic Imagination (AnthropoScene #4)
by Kieran M. MurphyHow does the imagination work? How can it lead to both reverie and scientific insight? In this book, Kieran M. Murphy sheds new light on these perennial questions by showing how they have been closely tied to the history of electromagnetism.The discovery in 1820 of a mysterious relationship between electricity and magnetism led not only to technological inventions—such as the dynamo and telegraph, which ushered in the “electric age”—but also to a profound reconceptualization of nature and the role the imagination plays in it. From the literary experiments of Edgar Allan Poe, Honoré de Balzac, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, and André Breton to the creative leaps of Michael Faraday and Albert Einstein, Murphy illuminates how electromagnetism legitimized imaginative modes of reasoning based on a more acute sense of interconnection and a renewed interest in how metonymic relations could reveal the order of things.Murphy organizes his study around real and imagined electromagnetic devices, ranging from Faraday’s world-changing induction experiment to new types of chains and automata, in order to demonstrate how they provided a material foundation for rethinking the nature of difference and relation in physical and metaphysical explorations of the world, human relationships, language, and binaries such as life and death. This overlooked exchange between science and literature brings a fresh perspective to the critical debates that shaped the nineteenth century.Extensively researched and convincingly argued, this pathbreaking book addresses a significant lacuna in modern literary criticism and deepens our understanding of both the history of literature and the history of scientific thinking.
Songs of the Lisu Hills: Practicing Christianity in Southwest China (World Christianity #2)
by Aminta ArringtonThe story of how the Lisu of southwest China were evangelized one hundred years ago by the China Inland Mission is a familiar one in mission circles. The subsequent history of the Lisu church, however, is much less well known. Songs of the Lisu Hills brings this history up to date, recounting the unlikely story of how the Lisu maintained their faith through twenty-two years of government persecution and illuminating how Lisu Christians transformed the text-based religion brought by the missionaries into a faith centered around an embodied set of Christian practices.Based on ethnographic fieldwork as well as archival research, this volume documents the development of Lisu Christianity, both through larger social forces and through the stories of individual believers. It explores how the Lisu, most of whom remain subsistence farmers, have oriented their faith less around cognitive notions of belief and more around participation in a rhythm of shared Christian practices, such as line dancing, attending church and festivals, evangelizing, working in one another’s fields, and singing translated Western hymns. These embodied practices demonstrate how Christianity developed in the mountainous margins of the world’s largest atheist state.A much-needed expansion of the Lisu story into a complex study of the evolution of a world Christian community, this book will appeal to scholars working at the intersections of World Christianity, anthropology of religion, ethnography, Chinese Christianity, and mission studies.
The Bonds of Humanity: Cicero’s Legacies in European Social and Political Thought, ca. 1100–ca. 1550
by Cary J. NedermanOf the great philosophers of pagan antiquity, Marcus Tullius Cicero is the only one whose ideas were continuously accessible to the Christian West following the collapse of the Roman Empire. Yet, in marked contrast with other ancient philosophers, Cicero has largely been written out of the historical narrative on early European political thought, and the reception of his ideas has barely been studied. The Bonds of Humanity corrects this glaring oversight, arguing that the influence of Cicero’s ideas in medieval and early modern Europe was far more pervasive than previously believed.In this book, Cary J. Nederman presents a persuasive counternarrative to the widely accepted belief in the dominance of Aristotelian thought. Surveying the work of a diverse range of thinkers from the twelfth to the sixteenth century, including John of Salisbury, Brunetto Latini, Marsiglio of Padua, Christine de Pizan, and Bartolomé de Las Casas, Nederman shows that these men and women inherited, deployed, and adapted key Ciceronian themes. He argues that the rise of scholastic Aristotelianism in the thirteenth century did not supplant but rather supplemented and bolstered Ciceronian ideas, and he identifies the character and limits of Ciceronianism that distinguish it from other schools of philosophy.Highly original and compelling, this paradigm-shifting book will be greeted enthusiastically by students and scholars of early European political thought and intellectual history, particularly those engaged in the conversation about the role played by ancient and early Christian ideas in shaping the theories of later times.
Reading Mennonite Writing: A Study in Minor Transnationalism
by Robert ZachariasMennonite literature has long been viewed as an expression of community identity. However, scholars in Mennonite literary studies have urged a reconsideration of the field’s past and a reconceptualization of its future. This is exactly what Reading Mennonite Writing does.Drawing on the transnational turn in literary studies, Robert Zacharias positions Mennonite literature in North America as “a mode of circulation and reading” rather than an expression of a distinct community. He tests this reframing with a series of methodological experiments that open new avenues of critical engagement with the field’s unique configuration of faith-based intercultural difference. These include cross-sectional readings in nonnarrative literary history; archival readings of transatlantic life writing; Canadian rewritings of Mexican film’s deployment of Mennonite theology as fantasy; an examination of the fetishistic structure of ethnicity as a “thing” that has enabled Mennonite identity to function in a post-identity age; and, finally, a tentative reinvestment in ideals of Mennonite community via the surprising routes of queerness and speculative fiction. In so doing, Zacharias reads Mennonite writing in North America as a useful case study in the shifting position of minor literatures in the wake of the transnational turn.Theoretically sophisticated, this study of minor transnationalism will appeal to specialists in Mennonite literature and to scholars working in the broader field of transnational literary studies.
Green Worlds of Renaissance Venice
by Jodi CranstonFrom celebrated gardens in private villas to the paintings and sculptures that adorned palace interiors, Venetians in the sixteenth century conceived of their marine city as dotted with actual and imaginary green spaces. This volume examines how and why this pastoral vision of Venice developed.Drawing on a variety of primary sources ranging from visual art to literary texts, performances, and urban plans, Jodi Cranston shows how Venetians lived the pastoral in urban Venice. She describes how they created green spaces and enacted pastoral situations through poetic conversations and theatrical performances in lagoon gardens; discusses the island utopias found, invented, and mapped in distant seas; and explores the visual art that facilitated the experience of inhabiting verdant landscapes. Though the greening of Venice was relatively short lived, Cranston shows how the phenomenon had a lasting impact on how other cities, including Paris and London, developed their self-images and how later writers and artists understood and adapted the pastoral mode.Incorporating approaches from eco-criticism and anthropology, Green Worlds of Renaissance Venice greatly informs our understanding of the origins and development of the pastoral in art history and literature as well as the culture of sixteenth-century Venice. It will appeal to scholars and enthusiasts of sixteenth-century history and culture, the history of urban landscapes, and Italian art.
The Female Secession: Art and the Decorative at the Viennese Women’s Academy
by Megan Brandow-FallerDecorative handcrafts are commonly associated with traditional femininity and unthreatening docility. However, the artists connected with interwar Vienna’s “female Secession” created craft-based artworks that may be understood as sites of feminist resistance. In this book, historian Megan Brandow-Faller tells the story of how these artists disrupted long-established boundaries by working to dislodge fixed oppositions between “art” and “craft,” “decorative” and “profound,” and “masculine” and “feminine” in art.Tracing the history of the women’s art movement in Secessionist Vienna—from its origins in 1897, at the Women’s Academy, to the Association of Austrian Women Artists and its radical offshoot, the Wiener Frauenkunst—Brandow-Faller tells the compelling story of a movement that reclaimed the stereotypes attached to the idea of Frauenkunst, or women’s art. She shows how generational struggles and diverging artistic philosophies of art, craft, and design drove the conservative and radical wings of Austria’s women’s art movement apart and explores the ways female artists and craftswomen reinterpreted and extended the Klimt Group’s ideas in the interwar years. Brandow-Faller draws a direct connection to the themes that impelled the better-known explosion of feminist art in 1970s America. In this provocative story of a Viennese modernism that never disavowed its ornamental, decorative roots, she gives careful attention to key primary sources, including photographs and reviews of early twentieth-century exhibitions and archival records of school curricula and personnel. Engagingly written and featuring more than eighty representative illustrations, The Female Secession recaptures the radical potential of what Fanny Harlfinger-Zakucka referred to as “works from women’s hands.” It will appeal to art historians working in the decorative arts and modernism as well as historians of Secession-era Vienna and gender history.
The Spanish Element in Our Nationality”: Spain and America at the World’s Fairs and Centennial Celebrations, 1876–1915
by M. Elizabeth Boone“The Spanish Element in Our Nationality” delves beneath the traditional “English-only” narrative of U.S. history, using Spain’s participation in a series of international exhibitions to illuminate more fully the close and contested relationship between these two countries.Written histories invariably record the Spanish financing of Columbus’s historic voyage of 1492, but few consider Spain’s continuing influence on the development of U.S. national identity. In this book, M. Elizabeth Boone investigates the reasons for this problematic memory gap by chronicling a series of Spanish displays at international fairs. Studying the exhibition of paintings, the construction of ephemeral architectural space, and other manifestations of visual culture, Boone examines how Spain sought to position itself as a contributor to U.S. national identity, and how the United States—in comparison to other nations in North and South America—subverted and ignored Spain’s messages, making it possible to marginalize and ultimately obscure Spain’s relevance to the history of the United States.Bringing attention to the rich and understudied history of Spanish artistic production in the United States, “The Spanish Element in Our Nationality” recovers the “Spanishness” of U.S. national identity and explores the means by which Americans from Santiago to San Diego used exhibitions of Spanish art and history to mold their own modern self-image.
Mexican Costumbrismo: Race, Society, and Identity in Nineteenth-Century Art
by Mey-Yen MoriuchiThe years following Mexican independence in 1821 were critical to the development of social, racial, and national identities. The visual arts played a decisive role in this process of self-definition. Mexican Costumbrismo reorients current understanding of this key period in the history of Mexican art by focusing on a distinctive genre of painting that emerged between 1821 and 1890: costumbrismo.In contrast to the neoclassical work favored by the Mexican academy, costumbrista artists portrayed the quotidian lives of the lower to middle classes, their clothes, food, dwellings, and occupations. Based on observations of similitude and difference, costumbrista imagery constructed stereotypes of behavioral and biological traits associated with distinct racial and social classes. In doing so, Mey-Yen Moriuchi argues, these works engaged with notions of universality and difference, contributed to the documentation and reification of social and racial types, and transformed the way Mexicans saw themselves, as well as how other nations saw them, during a time of rapid change for all aspects of national identity.Carefully researched and featuring more than thirty full-color exemplary reproductions of period work, Moriuchi’s study is a provocative art-historical examination of costumbrismo’s lasting impact on Mexican identity and history.E-book editions have been made possible through support of the Art History Publication Initiative (AHPI), a collaborative grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
To Heaven or to Hell: Bartolomé de Las Casas’s Confesionario (Latin American Originals)
by David Thomas Orique, O.P.This volume is the first complete English translation and annotated study of Bartolomé de Las Casas’s important and provocative 1552 treatise commonly known as the Confesionario or Avisos y reglas. A text that generated controversy, like Las Casas’s more famous Brevísima relación, the Confesionario outlined a strikingly novel and arguably harsh use of confession for those administering the sacrament to conquistadores, encomenderos, slaveholders, settlers, and others who had harmed the indigenous people, thus using magisterial authority and jurisdictional power to promote restitution.David Orique addresses how, from 1516 to 1547, Las Casas subscribed to and wrote about the theory and practice of the doctrine of restitution. He then presents the specific historical context of the development of the initial manuscript of the Confesionario in 1547 as Doce reglas (Twelve Rules), which later became the augmented Confesionario manuscript. Orique’s commentary on the 1552 Confesionario treatise highlights how Las Casas’s Argumento, and its approval by theologians, legitimates his work. Orique outlines the various guidelines proposed to confessors to identify, investigate, and seek restitution from offending Spaniards based on their possessions and circumstances. He also explores Las Casas’s use of the Thomistic tripartite scheme of divine, natural, and human law.With insightful analysis and commentary accompanied by an eminently readable translation, To Heaven or to Hell will be especially useful to students and scholars of Latin American colonial history, early modern religion, and Catholic studies.
Religion Around Bono: Evangelical Enchantment and Neoliberal Capitalism (Religion Around)
by Chad E. SealesFor many, U2’s Bono is an icon of both evangelical spirituality and secular moral activism. In this book, Chad E. Seales examines the religious and spiritual culture that has built up around the rock star over the course of his career and considers how Bono engages with that religion in his music and in his activism.Looking at Bono and his work within a wider critique of white American evangelicalism, Seales traces Bono’s career, from his background in religious groups in the 1970s to his rise to stardom in the 1980s and his relationship with political and economic figures, such as Jeffrey Sachs, Bill Clinton, and Jesse Helms. In doing so, Seales shows us a different Bono, one who uses the spiritual meaning of church tradition to advocate for the promise that free markets and for-profits will bring justice and freedom to the world’s poor. Engaging with scholarship in popular culture, music, religious studies, race, and economic development, Seales makes the compelling case that neoliberal capitalism is a religion and that Bono is its best-known celebrity revivalist.Engagingly written and bitingly critical, Religion Around Bono promises to transform our understanding of the rock star’s career and advocacy. Those interested in the intersection of rock music, religion, and activism will find Seales’s study provocative and enlightening.
Temperance and Cosmopolitanism: African American Reformers in the Atlantic World (Africana Religions)
by Carole Lynn StewartTemperance and Cosmopolitanism explores the nature and meaning of cosmopolitan freedom in the nineteenth century through a study of selected African American authors and reformers: William Wells Brown, Martin Delany, George Moses Horton, Frances E. W. Harper, and Amanda Berry Smith. Their voluntary travels, a reversal of the involuntary movement of enslavement, form the basis for a critical mode of cosmopolitan freedom rooted in temperance. Both before and after the Civil War, white Americans often associated alcohol and drugs with blackness and enslavement. Carole Lynn Stewart traces how African American reformers mobilized the discourses of cosmopolitanism and restraint to expand the meaning of freedom—a freedom that draws on themes of abolitionism and temperance not only as principles and practices for the inner life but simultaneously as the ordering structures for forms of culture and society. While investigating traditional meanings of temperance consistent with the ethos of the Protestant work ethic, Enlightenment rationality, or asceticism, Stewart shows how temperance informed the founding of diasporic communities and civil societies to heal those who had been affected by the pursuit of excess in the transatlantic slave trade and the individualist pursuit of happiness. By elucidating the concept of the “black Atlantic” through the lenses of literary reformers, Temperance and Cosmopolitanism challenges the narrative of Atlantic history, empire, and European elite cosmopolitanism. Its interdisciplinary approach will be of particular value to scholars of African American literature and history as well as scholars of nineteenth-century cultural, political, and religious studies.
Baroque Seville: Sacred Art in a Century of Crisis
by Amanda WunderBaroque art flourished in seventeenth-century Seville during a tumultuous period of economic decline, social conflict, and natural disasters. This volume explores the patronage that fueled this frenzy of religious artistic and architectural activity and the lasting effects it had on the city and its citizens.Amanda Wunder investigates the great public projects of sacred artwork that were originally conceived as medios divinos—divine solutions to the problems that plagued Seville. These commissions included new polychromed wooden sculptures and richly embroidered clothing for venerable old images, gilded altarpieces and monumental paintings for church interiors, elaborate ephemeral decorations and festival books by which to remember them, and the gut renovation or rebuilding of major churches that had stood for hundreds of years. Meant to revive the city spiritually, these works also had a profound real-world impact. Participation in the production of sacred artworks elevated the social standing of the artists who made them and the devout benefactors who commissioned them, and encouraged laypeople to rally around pious causes. Using a diverse range of textual and visual sources, Wunder provides a compelling look at the complex visual world of seventeenth-century Seville and the artistic collaborations that involved all levels of society in the attempt at its revitalization.Vibrantly detailed and thoroughly researched, Baroque Seville is a fascinating account of Seville’s hard-won transformation into one of the foremost centers of Baroque art in Spain during a period of crisis.
The Moving Statues of Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam: Automata, Waxworks, Fountains, Labyrinths
by Angela VanhaelenThis book opens a window onto a fascinating and understudied aspect of the visual, material, intellectual, and cultural history of seventeenth-century Amsterdam: the role played by its inns and taverns, specifically the doolhoven.Doolhoven were a type of labyrinth unique to early modern Amsterdam. Offering guest lodgings, these licensed public houses also housed remarkable displays of artwork in their gardens and galleries. The main attractions were inventive displays of moving mechanical figures (automata) and a famed set of waxwork portraits of the rulers of Protestant Europe. Publicized as the most innovative artworks on display in Amsterdam, the doolhoven exhibits presented the mercantile city as a global center of artistic and technological advancement. This evocative tour through the doolhoven pub gardens—where drinking, entertainment, and the acquisition of knowledge mingled in encounters with lively displays of animated artifacts—shows that the exhibits had a forceful and transformative impact on visitors, one that moved them toward Protestant reform.Deeply researched and decidedly original, The Moving Statues of Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam uncovers a wealth of information about these nearly forgotten public pleasure parks, situating them within popular culture, religious controversies, global trade relations, and intellectual debates of the seventeenth century. It will appeal in particular to scholars in art history and early modern studies.
Making Magic in Elizabethan England: Two Early Modern Vernacular Books of Magic (Magic in History)
by Frank KlaassenThis volume presents editions of two fascinating anonymous and untitled manuscripts of magic produced in Elizabethan England: the Antiphoner Notebook and the Boxgrove Manual. Frank Klaassen uses these texts, which he argues are representative of the overwhelming majority of magical practitioners, to explain how magic changed during this period and why these developments were crucial to the formation of modern magic.The Boxgrove Manual is a work of learned ritual magic that synthesizes material from Henry Cornelius Agrippa, the Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy, Heptameron, and various medieval conjuring works. The Antiphoner Notebook concerns the common magic of treasure hunting, healing, and protection, blending medieval conjuring and charm literature with materials drawn from Reginald Scot’s famous anti-magic work, Discoverie of Witchcraft. Klaassen painstakingly traces how the scribes who created these two manuscripts adapted and transformed their original sources. In so doing, he demonstrates the varied and subtle ways in which the Renaissance, the Reformation, new currents in science, the birth of printing, and vernacularization changed the practice of magic.Illuminating the processes by which two sixteenth-century English scribes went about making a book of magic, this volume provides insight into the wider intellectual culture surrounding the practice of magic in the early modern period.
Jules Michelet: Writing Art and History in Nineteenth-Century France
by Michèle HannooshJules Michelet, one of France’s most influential historians and a founder of modern historical practice, was a passionate viewer and relentless interpreter of the visual arts. In this book, Michèle Hannoosh examines the crucial role that art writing played in Michelet’s work and shows how it decisively influenced his theory of history and his view of the practice of the historian.The visual arts were at the very center of Michelet’s conception of historiography. He filled his private notes, public lectures, and printed books with discussions of artworks, which, for him, embodied the character of particular historical moments. Michelet believed that painting, sculpture, architecture, and engraving bore witness to histories that frequently went untold; that they expressed key ideas standing behind events; and that they articulated concepts that would come to fruition only later.This groundbreaking reevaluation of Michelet’s approach to history elucidates how writing about art provided a model for the historian’s relation to, and interpretation of, the past, and thus for a new type of historiography—one that acknowledges and enacts the historian’s own implication in the history he or she tells.
Odious Praise: Rhetoric, Religion, and Social Thought
by Eric MacPhailThis book reveals a tradition of thought overlooked in our intellectual history but enormously influential even now: the tradition of odious praise. Distinct from more conventional rhetorical exercises, such as panegyric or the funeral oration, odious praise uses acclaim to censure or to critique. This book reassesses the genre of praise-and-blame rhetoric by considering the potential of odious praise to undermine consensus and to challenge a society’s normative values.Surveying literature from ancient Greece to Renaissance Europe, Eric MacPhail identifies a tradition of epideictic rhetoric that began with the sophists but was cultivated and employed most vigorously by Renaissance political thinkers. Presenting examples from the writings of Lorenzo Valla, Niccolò Machiavelli, Desiderius Erasmus, Michel de Montaigne, Joachim du Bellay, and Jean Bodin, among others, MacPhail shows that by inscribing a positive value to an object worthy of blame, cultural values are turned on their head. MacPhail traces the use of this technique to critique the values of the classical and scholastic traditions. Recognizing and engaging with this tradition, MacPhail argues, can reinvigorate our study of the history of social thought and reveal further the roots of modern social science.Rigorous and lucid, Odious Praise presents a rhetoric capable of suspending and thus critiquing the values of a culture, and in doing so, it uncovers the first serious attempts at social thought and the seedbed of modern social science. It will be welcomed by scholars of Renaissance literature and culture, the history of rhetoric, and political thought.
War and Memory at the Time of the Fifth Crusade
by Megan Cassidy-WelchIn this book, Megan Cassidy-Welch challenges the notion that using memories of war to articulate and communicate collective identity is exclusively a modern phenomenon. War and Memory at the Time of the Fifth Crusade explores how and why remembering war came to be culturally meaningful during the early thirteenth century.By the 1200s, discourses of crusading were deeply steeped in the language of memory: crusaders understood themselves to be acting in remembrance of Christ’s sacrifice and following in the footsteps of their ancestors. At the same time, the foundational narratives of the First Crusade began to be transformed by vernacular histories and the advent of crusading romance. Examining how the Fifth Crusade was remembered and commemorated during its triumphs and immediately after its disastrous conclusion, Cassidy-Welch brings a nuanced perspective to the prevailing historiography on war memory, showing that remembering war was significant and meaningful centuries before the advent of the nation-state.This thoughtful and novel study of the Fifth Crusade shows it to be a key moment in the history of remembering war and provides new insights into medieval communication. It will be invaluable reading for scholars interested in the Fifth Crusade, medieval war memory, and the use of war memory.
Under the Literary Microscope: Science and Society in the Contemporary Novel (AnthropoScene #7)
by Sina Farzin Susan M. Gaines Roslynn D. Haynes“Science in fiction,” “geek novels,” “lab-lit”—whatever one calls them, a new generation of science novels has opened a space in which the reading public can experience and think about the powers of science to illuminate nature as well as to generate and mitigate social change and risks. Under the Literary Microscope examines the implications of the discourse taking place in and around this creative space.Exploring works by authors as disparate as Barbara Kingsolver, Richard Powers, Ian McEwan, Ann Patchett, Margaret Atwood, and Michael Crichton, these essays address the economization of scientific institutions; ethics, risk, and gender disparity in scientific work; the reshaping of old stereotypes of scientists; science in an evolving sci-fi genre; and reader reception and potential contributions of the novels to public understandings of science.Under the Literary Microscope illuminates the new ways in which fiction has been grappling with scientific issues—from climate change and pandemics to artificial intelligence and genomics—and makes a valuable addition to both contemporary literature and science studies courses.In addition to the editors, the contributors include Anna Auguscik, Jay Clayton, Carol Colatrella, Sonja Fücker, Raymond Haynes, Luz María Hernández Nieto, Emanuel Herold, Karin Hoepker, Anton Kirchhofer, Antje Kley, Natalie Roxburgh, Uwe Schimank, Sherryl Vint, and Peter Weingart.
Ecological Solidarities: Mobilizing Faith and Justice for an Entangled World (World Christianity)
by Krista E. HughesOperating on the premise that our failure to recognize our interconnected relationship to the rest of the cosmos is the origin of planetary peril, this volume presents academic, activist, and artistic perspectives on how to inspire reflection and motivate action in order to construct alternative frameworks and establish novel solidarities for the sake of our planetary home.The selections in this volume explore ecologies of interdependence as a frame for religious, theological, and philosophical analysis and practice. Contributors examine questions of justice, climate change, race, class, gender, and coloniality and discuss alternative ways of engaging the world in all its biodiversity. Each essay, poem, reflection, and piece of art contributes to and reflects upon how to live out entangled differences toward positive global change.Constructive and practical, global and local, communal and personal, Ecological Solidarities is an innovative contribution to the discourses on relational and liberative thought and practice in religion, philosophy, and theology. It will be welcomed by scholars of World Christianity and theology as well as seminary students, activists, and laity interested in issues of justice and ecology.