front cover of “I have always loved the Holy Tongue”
“I have always loved the Holy Tongue”
Isaac Casaubon, the Jews, and a Forgotten Chapter in Renaissance Scholarship
Anthony Grafton and Joanna Weinberg
Harvard University Press, 2011

“[An] extraordinary book.” —New Republic

Fusing high scholarship with high drama, Anthony Grafton and Joanna Weinberg uncover a secret and extraordinary aspect of a legendary Renaissance scholar’s already celebrated achievement. The French Protestant Isaac Casaubon (1559–1614) is known to us through his pedantic namesake in George Eliot’s Middlemarch. But in this book, the real Casaubon emerges as a genuine literary hero, an intrepid explorer in the world of books. With a flair for storytelling reminiscent of Umberto Eco, Grafton and Weinberg follow Casaubon as he unearths the lost continent of Hebrew learning—and adds this ancient lore to the well-known Renaissance revival of Latin and Greek.

The mystery begins with Mark Pattison’s nineteenth-century biography of Casaubon. Here we encounter the Protestant Casaubon embroiled in intellectual quarrels with the Italian and Catholic orator Cesare Baronio. Setting out to understand the nature of this imbroglio, Grafton and Weinberg discover Casaubon’s knowledge of Hebrew. Close reading and sedulous inquiry were Casaubon’s tools in recapturing the lost learning of the ancients—and these are the tools that serve Grafton and Weinberg as they pore through pre-1600 books in Hebrew, and through Casaubon’s own manuscript notebooks. Their search takes them from Oxford to Cambridge, from Dublin to Cambridge, Massachusetts, as they reveal how the scholar discovered the learning of the Hebrews—and at what cost.

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front cover of I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance, volume 24 number 2 (Fall 2021)
I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance, volume 24 number 2 (Fall 2021)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2021
This is volume 24 issue 2 of I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance. Published twice a year, I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance features groundbreaking work written in Italian and in English on every aspect of the literary, religious, artistic, historical, and scientific dimensions of Renaissance Italy. Articles offer pioneering work in a number of areas, ranging from Botticelli’s illustrations for Dante’s Commedia to Florentine sermons on the Dives and Lazarus story to images of Ottoman culture in Mantua. The journal regularly publishes clusters of essays and other special sections.
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front cover of I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance, volume 25 number 1 (Spring 2022)
I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance, volume 25 number 1 (Spring 2022)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2022
This is volume 25 issue 1 of I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance. Published twice a year, I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance features groundbreaking work written in Italian and in English on every aspect of the literary, religious, artistic, historical, and scientific dimensions of Renaissance Italy. Articles offer pioneering work in a number of areas, ranging from Botticelli’s illustrations for Dante’s Commedia to Florentine sermons on the Dives and Lazarus story to images of Ottoman culture in Mantua. The journal regularly publishes clusters of essays and other special sections.
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front cover of I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance, volume 25 number 2 (Fall 2022)
I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance, volume 25 number 2 (Fall 2022)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2022
This is volume 25 issue 2 of I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance. Published twice a year, I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance features groundbreaking work written in Italian and in English on every aspect of the literary, religious, artistic, historical, and scientific dimensions of Renaissance Italy. Articles offer pioneering work in a number of areas, ranging from Botticelli’s illustrations for Dante’s Commedia to Florentine sermons on the Dives and Lazarus story to images of Ottoman culture in Mantua. The journal regularly publishes clusters of essays and other special sections.
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front cover of I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance, volume 26 number 1 (Spring 2023)
I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance, volume 26 number 1 (Spring 2023)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2023
This is volume 26 issue 1 of I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance. Published twice a year, I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance features groundbreaking work written in Italian and in English on every aspect of the literary, religious, artistic, historical, and scientific dimensions of Renaissance Italy. Articles offer pioneering work in a number of areas, ranging from Botticelli’s illustrations for Dante’s Commedia to Florentine sermons on the Dives and Lazarus story to images of Ottoman culture in Mantua. The journal regularly publishes clusters of essays and other special sections.
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front cover of I Tatti Studies, volume 26 number 2 (Fall 2023)
I Tatti Studies, volume 26 number 2 (Fall 2023)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2023
This is volume 26 issue 2 of I Tatti Studies. Published twice a year, I Tatti Studies features groundbreaking work written in Italian and in English on every aspect of the literary, religious, artistic, historical, and scientific dimensions of Renaissance Italy. Articles offer pioneering work in a number of areas, ranging from Botticelli’s illustrations for Dante’s Commedia to Florentine sermons on the Dives and Lazarus story to images of Ottoman culture in Mantua. The journal regularly publishes clusters of essays and other special sections.
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front cover of The Iberian Peninsula between 300 and 850
The Iberian Peninsula between 300 and 850
An Archaeological Perspective
Javier Martínez Jiménez, Isaac Sastre de Diego, and Carlos Tejerizo García
Amsterdam University Press, 2017
The vast transformation of the Roman world at the end of antiquity has been a subject of broad scholarly interest for decades, but until now no book has focused specifically on the Iberian Peninsula in the period as seen through an archaeological lens. Given the sparse documentary evidence available, archaeology holds the key to a richer understanding of the developments of the period, and this book addresses a number of issues that arise from analysis of the available material culture, including questions of the process of Christianisation and Islamisation, continuity and abandonment of Roman urban patterns and forms, the end of villas and the growth of villages, and the adaptation of the population and the elites to the changing political circumstances.
[more]

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Iceland
The First New Society
Richard F. Tomasson
University of Minnesota Press, 1980

Iceland was first published in 1980. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

"Iceland, as described by Tomasson, has a fascinating, often contradictory culture," writes Seymour Martin Lipset in his forward to this book, the first sociological account in English of modern Icelandic society and the forces that have shaped it. Richard F. Tomasson argues that Iceland can best be understood as an example of "a new society"—the first such pioneer community to be founded in historical times. To the author the most significant influences upon Icelandic culture and social structure are the continuities that have persisted in this island society for eleven centuries, since its origins as an isolated Viking colony.

Tomasson traces the ways in which Icelandic culture developed out of the medieval pre- Christian society—in its language, relations between the sexes, egalitarianism, and the high frequency of illegitimate births. He also points out areas of contradiction and discontinuity, noting that Iceland has been transformed in the twentieth century by modernization of the society and international influences upon the culture.

Among the topics Tomasson examines are the Icelanders' involvement in their history and national literary tradition; their social, political, and economic life; the high level of literacy; the pervasive tolerance of Icelanders in moral and religious matters; their values; and the use of alcohol. Readers interested in the Scandinavian countries and in the comparative study of societies will find Iceland a useful analysis of a significant and little known national culture.

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The Icon Curtain
The Cold War's Quiet Border
Yuliya Komska
University of Chicago Press, 2015
The Iron Curtain did not exist—at least not as we usually imagine it. Rather than a stark, unbroken line dividing East and West in Cold War Europe, the Iron Curtain was instead made up of distinct landscapes, many in the grip of divergent historical and cultural forces for decades, if not centuries. This book traces a genealogy of one such landscape—the woods between Czechoslovakia and West Germany—to debunk our misconceptions about the iconic partition.

Yuliya Komska transports readers to the western edge of the Bohemian Forest, one of Europe’s oldest borderlands, where in the 1950s civilians set out to shape the so-called prayer wall. A chain of new and repurposed pilgrimage sites, lookout towers, and monuments, the prayer wall placed two long-standing German obsessions, forest and border, at the heart of the century’s most protracted conflict. Komska illustrates how civilians used the prayer wall to engage with and contribute to the new political and religious landscape. In the process, she relates West Germany’s quiet sylvan periphery to the tragic pitch prevalent along the Iron Curtain’s better-known segments.

Steeped in archival research and rooted in nuanced interpretations of wide-ranging cultural artifacts, from vandalized religious images and tourist snapshots to poems and travelogues, The Icon Curtain pushes disciplinary boundaries and opens new perspectives on the study of borders and the Cold War alike.
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Iconoclasm
David Freedberg
University of Chicago Press, 2021
With new surges of activity from religious, political, and military extremists, the destruction of images has become increasingly relevant on a global scale. A founder of the study of early modern and contemporary iconoclasm, David Freedberg has addressed this topic for five decades. His work has brought this subject to a central place in art history, critical to the understanding not only of art but of all images in society.  This volume collects the most significant of Freedberg’s texts on iconoclasm and censorship, bringing five key works back into print alongside new assessments of contemporary iconoclasm in places ranging from the Near and Middle East to the United States, as well as a fresh survey of the entire subject. The writings in this compact volume explore the dynamics and history of iconoclasm, from the furious battles over images in the Reformation to government repression in modern South Africa, the American culture wars of the early 1990s, and today’s cancel culture. 

Freedberg combines fresh thinking with deep expertise to address the renewed significance of iconoclasm, its ideologies, and its impact.  This volume also provides a supplement to Freedberg’s essay on idolatry and iconoclasm from his pathbreaking book, The Power of Images. Freedberg’s writings are of foundational importance to this discussion, and this volume will be a welcome resource for historians, museum professionals, international law specialists, preservationists, and students.
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The Idea of Rome in Late Antiquity
From Eternal City to Imagined Utopia
Ioannis Papadopoulos
Amsterdam University Press, 2021
The aim of this book is to approach the manifestation and evolution of the idea of Rome as an expression of Roman patriotism and as an (urban) archetype of utopia in late Roman thought in a period extending from AD 357 to 417. Within this period of about a human lifetime, the concepts of Rome and Romanitas were reshaped and used for various ideological causes. This monograph is unfolding through a selection of sources that represent the patterns and diversity of this ideological process. The theme of Rome as a personified and anthropomorphic figure and as an epitomized notion ‘applied’ on the urban landscape of the city would become part of the identity of the Romans of Rome highlighting a sense of cultural uniqueness in comparison to the inhabitants of other cities. Towards the end of the chronological limits set in this thesis various versions of Romanitas would emerge indicating new physical and spiritual potentials.
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The Idea of the Sciences in the French Enlightenment
A Reinterpretation
G. Matthew Adkins
University of Delaware Press, 2014
This book traces the development of the idea that the sciences were morally enlightening through an intellectual history of the secrétaires perpétuels of the French Royal Academy of Sciences and their associates from the mid-seventeenth century to the end of the eighteenth century. Academy secretaries such as Fontenelle and Condorcet were critical to the emergence of a central feature of the narrative of Enlightenment in that they encouraged the notion that the “philosophical spirit” of the Scientific Revolution, already present among the educated classes, should guide the necessary reformation of society and government according to the ideals of scientific reasoning. The Idea of the Sciences also tells an intellectual history of political radicalization, explaining especially how the marquis de Condorcet came to believe that the sciences could play central a role in guiding the outcome of the Revolution of 1789.

Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
 
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front cover of The Idea of the Theater in Latin Christian Thought
The Idea of the Theater in Latin Christian Thought
Augustine to the Fourteenth Century
Donnalee Dox
University of Michigan Press, 2004
"Through well-informed and nuanced readings of key documents from the fourth through fourteenth centuries, this book challenges historians' long-held beliefs about how concepts of Greco-Roman theater survived the fall of Rome and the Middle Ages, and contributed to the dramatic triumphs of the Renaissance. Dox's work is a significant contribution to the history of ideas that will change forever the standard narrative of the birth and development of theatrical activity in medieval Europe."
---Margaret Knapp, Arizona State University

"...an elegantly concise survey of the way classical notions of theater have been interpreted in the Latin Middle Ages. Dox convincingly demonstrates that far from there being a single 'medieval' attitude towards theater, there was in fact much debate about how theater could be understood to function within Christian tradition, even in the so-called 'dark ages' of Western culture. This book makes an innovative contribution to studies of the history of the theater, seen in terms of the history of ideas, rather than of practice."
---Constant Mews, Director, Centre for the Study of Religion & Theology, University of Monash, Australia

"In the centuries between St. Augustine and Bartholomew of Bruges, Christian thought gradually moved from a brusque rejection of classical theater to a progressively nuanced and positive assessment of its value. In this lucidly written study, Donnalee Dox adds an important facet to our understanding of the Christian reaction to, and adaptation of, classical culture in the centuries between the Church Fathers and the rediscovery of Aristotle."
---Philipp W. Rosemann, University of Dallas


This book considers medieval texts that deal with ancient theater as documents of Latin Christianity's intellectual history. As an exercise in medieval historiography, this study also examines biases in modern scholarship that seek links between these texts and performance practices. The effort to bring these texts together and place them in their intellectual contexts reveals a much more nuanced and contested discourse on Greco-Roman theater and medieval theatrical practice than has been acknowledged. The book is arranged chronologically and shows the medieval foundations for the Early Modern integration of dramatic theory and theatrical performance.

The Idea of the Theater in Latin Christian Thought will be of interest to theater historians, intellectual historians, and those who work on points of contact between the European Middle Ages and Renaissance. The broad range of documents discussed (liturgical treatises, scholastic commentaries, philosophical tracts, and letters spanning many centuries) renders individual chapters useful to philosophers, aestheticians, and liturgists as well as to historians and historiographers. For theater historians, this study offers an alternative reading of familiar texts which may alter our understanding of the emergence of dramatic and theatrical traditions in the West. Because theater is rarely considered as a component of intellectual projects in the Middle Ages, this study opens a new topic in the writing of medieval intellectual history.
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Ideals of the Body
Architecture, Urbanism, and Hygiene in Postrevolutionary Paris
Sun-Young Park
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018
Modern hygienic urbanism originated in the airy boulevards, public parks, and sewer system that transformed the Parisian cityscape in the mid-nineteenth century. Yet these well-known developments in public health built on a previous moment of anxiety about the hygiene of modern city dwellers. Amid fears of national decline that accompanied the collapse of the Napoleonic Empire, efforts to modernize Paris between 1800 and 1850 focused not on grand and comprehensive structural reforms, but rather on improving the bodily and mental fitness of the individual citizen. These forgotten efforts to renew and reform the physical and moral health of the urban subject found expression in the built environment of the city—in the gymnasiums, swimming pools, and green spaces of private and public institutions, from the pedagogical to the recreational. Sun-Young Park reveals how these anxieties about health and social order, which manifested in emerging ideals of the body, created a uniquely spatial and urban experience of modernity in the postrevolutionary capital, one profoundly impacted by hygiene, mobility, productivity, leisure, spectacle, and technology.
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Identity in the Middle Ages
Approaches from Southwestern Europe
Flocel Sabaté
Arc Humanities Press, 2021
This book places identity at the centre of a project to better understand medieval society. By exploring the multiplicity of personal identities, the ways in which these were expressed within particular social structures (such as feudalism), and their evolution into formal expressions of collective identity (municipalities, guilds, nations, and so on) we can shed new light on the Middle Ages. A specific legacy of such developments was that by the end of the Middle Ages, a sense of national identity, supported by the late medieval socio-economic structure, backed in law and by theological, philosophical, and political thought, defined society. What is more, social structures coalesced across diverse elements, including language, group solidarities, and a set of assumed values.
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Identity Papers
Contested Nationhood in Twentieth-Century France
Steven Ungar and Tom Conley, Editors
University of Minnesota Press, 1996

Identity Papers was first published in 1996. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

What does citizenship mean? What is the process of "naturalization" one goes through in becoming a citizen, and what is its connection to assimilation? How do the issues of identity raised by this process manifest themselves in culture? These questions, and the way they arise in contemporary France, are the focus of this diverse collection.

The essays in this volume range in subject from fiction and essay to architecture and film. Among the topics discussed are the 1937 Exposition Universelle; films dealing with Vichy France; François Truffaut's Histoire d'Adèle H.; the war of Algerian independence; and nation building under François Mitterrand.

Contributors: Anne Donadey, Elizabeth Ezra, Richard J. Golsan, Lynn A. Higgins, T. Jefferson Kline, Panivong Norindr, Shanny Peer, Rosemarie Scullion, David H. Slavin, Philip H. Solomon; Florianne Wild, .

Steven Ungar is professor of cinema and comparative literature at the University of Iowa and author of Scandal and Aftereffect: Blanchot and France since 1930 (Minnesota, 1995). Tom Conley is professor of French at Harvard University.

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front cover of Ideology and Holy Landscape in the Baltic Crusades
Ideology and Holy Landscape in the Baltic Crusades
Gregory Leighton
Arc Humanities Press, 2022
This book examines how the military orders and the ideology of crusading gave rise to a new sacred landscape in the medieval Baltic region, an outpost of Latin Christianity. Drawing on a wide variety of sources and international scholarship, the book discusses the paganism of the landscape in written sources pre-dating the crusades, in addition to the narrative, legal, and visual evidence of the crusade period. It draws out the key sacralizing elements as expressed in those sources, which structure the definition of sacred landscape, particularly martyrdom, the manifestation of the sacred, and use of relics in battle. By analyzing these aspects with Geographical Information Systems (GIS), a map of the Baltic campaigns emerges that provides a fresh approach to studying contemporary views of holy war in a region with no initial links to the loca sancta of Jerusalem or Europe.
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Ideology in the Middle Ages
Approaches from Southwestern Europe
Flocel Sabaté
Arc Humanities Press, 2019
<div>This interdisciplinary volume sets out to illuminate medieval thought, and to consider how the underlying values of the Middle Ages exerted significant influence in medieval society in the West.</div><div>The book situates the Christian Church in the West as a framing ideology of the Middle Ages, and considers ideology from four angles: as a means of defining power; as a way of managing power; ideology as an influence on daily living and societies; and the ways in which ideology associated with the Middle Ages continues to influence understandings of past and present. A focus on southern European case studies has been chosen as a means of enriching and complicating study of the Middle Ages.</div>
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"If You Tolerate This . . . "
The Spanish Civil War in the Age of Total War
Edited by Martin Baumeister and Stefanie Schüler-Springorum
Campus Verlag, 2008
The Spanish Civil War has been called the quintessential expression of violent ideological confrontation in 1930s Europe. Despite this reputation, researchers have neglected to properly explore the Spanish experience in the context of the history of twentieth-century warfare. To fill this gap, “If You Tolerate This . . . ”  brings together an international group of scholars to address the Spanish Civil War’s role in the development of total war.
Examining such topics as military violence, the experience of war, and the culture of war, this anthology traces how the differentiation between civilian and military sectors crumbled with the onset of civil war. Individual memory and collective identity in Spain, the authors argue, became synonymous with mass killing and mass dying. Offering a unique perspective on one of European history’s most fraught events, this volume will be necessary reading for students and scholars of twentieth-century Spain and military history.
 
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If You've Seen One, You've Seen the Mall
EUROPEANS AND AMERICAN MASS CULTURE
Rob Kroes
University of Illinois Press, 1996
The Dutch scholar Rob Kroes argues that American culture is "modular,"
continually fragmenting, disassembling, and reassembling itself--and in
the process creating something new. In a series of topical essays that
show why he is one of Europe's leading authorities on American culture,
Kroes probes trends in American advertising, the image of the Vietnam
war in American films, the implications of American vernacular culture as represented in rap music, and other topics.
 
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The Igor Moiseyev Dance Company
Dancing Diplomats
Anthony Shay
Intellect Books, 2019
In this book, Anthony Shay examines the history of the Moiseyev Dance Company and the life and works of its renowned choreographer and founder, Igor Moiseyev. Founded in Moscow in 1937 amid a mass Soviet Union campaign of political repression, Moiseyev’s theatrical dance troupe came to be an international force, transforming the folk traditions of the Soviet Union into a vital diplomatic tool that helped usher in a new era of cultural exchange. The author explores the company through multiple lenses of spectacle, Russian nationalism, and the Cultural Cold War to analyze its history and its enduring contributions to dance and global culture. The first English-language study of its kind, Shay blends academic research with personal anecdote to provide a nuanced analysis of Moiseyev’s importance in choreographic art and his place in the world of dance.
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front cover of <i>Group Experiment</i> and Other Writings
Group Experiment and Other Writings
The Frankfurt School on Public Opinion in Postwar Germany
By: Friedrich Pollock, Theodor W. Adorno, and ColleaguesEdited, Translated and Introduced by: Andrew J. Perrin and Jeffrey K. Olick
Harvard University Press, 2011
During the occupation of West Germany after the Second World War, the American authorities commissioned polls to assess the values and opinions of ordinary Germans. They concluded that the fascist attitudes of the Nazi era had weakened to a large degree. Theodor W. Adorno and his Frankfurt School colleagues, who returned in 1949 from the United States, were skeptical. They held that standardized polling was an inadequate and superficial method for exploring such questions. In their view, public opinion is not simply an aggregate of individually held opinions, but is fundamentally a public concept, formed through interaction in conversations and with prevailing attitudes and ideas “in the air.” In Group Experiment, edited by Friedrich Pollock, they published their findings on their group discussion experiments that delved deeper into the process of opinion formation. Andrew J. Perrin and Jeffrey K. Olick make a case that these experiments are an important missing link in the ontology and methodology of current social-science survey research.
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Illegitimacy in Renaissance Florence
Thomas Kuehn
University of Michigan Press, 2002
As far back as Jacob Burckhardt, illegitimate children have been considered advantaged, insofar as they lacked family obligations. Celebrated Renaissance figures such as Petrarch, Boccaccio, Alberti, and da Vinci were born illegitimately. Of course, their status put these children at a legal and a social disadvantage that was nearly impossible to overcome in usual circumstances. Illegitimacy in Renaissance Florence is the first systematic study of a population of illegitimate children--in this case in the city often seen at the heart of Renaissance politics and culture, Florence.
The Florentine catasto, a fiscal survey of households taken at several points in the fifteenth century, locates hundreds of illegitimate children and reveals a great deal about their household circumstances and parentage. Supplementing this information are notarial documents and family account books. Illegitimacy in Renaissance Florence places Florentine illegitimate children in a complete legal context, culminating in examination of several Florentine legal cases. Thomas Kuehn shows how lawyers were called on to cope with and make legal sense of the actions and prejudices of Florentines toward their illegitimate kin.
It is clear, in its simplest terms, that illegitimacy in Florence was a permanent, if not fixed, status. Most illegitimate children, especially girls, were abandoned; infanticide was undoubtedly practiced. But even those children raised by benevolent fathers and granted legitimation always remained "legitimatus" and not "legitimus." Florentines whose illegitimate paternity was admitted were overwhelmingly born of elite fathers but poor or servile mothers. In neither social nor legal terms did the illegitimate share fully in the personhood of the legitimate adult male Florentine citizen. Still, ambiguities of status could be useful for those with sufficient wealth and social standing to exploit their potential.
Illegitimacy in Renaissance Florence will appeal to social historians of Europe, medieval and early modern, especially those concerned with family life, women, and children, as well as all those interested in Florentine history. Legal historians will find it useful as well.
Thomas Kuehn is Professor of History, Clemson University.
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Illuminated Paris
Essays on Art and Lighting in the Belle Époque
Hollis Clayson
University of Chicago Press, 2019
The City of Light. For many, these four words instantly conjure late nineteenth-century Paris and the garish colors of Toulouse-Lautrec’s iconic posters. More recently, the Eiffel Tower’s nightly show of sparkling electric lights has come to exemplify our fantasies of Parisian nightlife. Though we reflect longingly on such scenes, in Illuminated Paris, Hollis Clayson shows that there’s more to these clichés than meets the eye. In this richly illustrated book, she traces the dramatic evolution of lighting in Paris and how artists responded to the shifting visual and cultural scenes that resulted from these technologies. While older gas lighting produced a haze of orange, new electric lighting was hardly an improvement: the glare of experimental arc lights—themselves dangerous—left figures looking pale and ghoulish. As Clayson shows, artists’ representations of these new colors and shapes reveal turn-of-the-century concerns about modernization as electric lighting came to represent the harsh glare of rapidly accelerating social change. At the same time, in part thanks to American artists visiting the city, these works of art also produced our enduring romantic view of Parisian glamour and its Belle Époque.
 
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The Illusion of History
Andrew R. Russ
Catholic University of America Press, 2012
Andrew Russ argues in this book that a closer look at their philosophical underpinnings finds that Rousseau, Marx, and Foucault are much less "historical" in their methodology than is widely believed. Instead, they share a more "timeless" view, one indebted to principles ordinarily seen as timeless or transcendent
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Illustrating Empire
A Visual History of British Imperialism
Edited by Ashley Jackson and David Tomkins
Bodleian Library Publishing, 2011

Through more than 150 striking and original images from the John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera at the Bodleian Library, Illustrating Empire tells the history of the British Empire from the age of discovery through World War II. This wealth of visual material was used to promote, record, and celebrate the development of the Empire, which by 1922 included more than thirteen million square miles—or almost a quarter of the Earth. The captions that accompany the illustrations reveal the narrative of the Empire and unlock the history and meaning behind the images. 

Following a general introduction that provides an overarching discussion of the many facets of the Empire’s long history, the book is structured around eight major themes: emigration and settlement; imperial authority; exploration and knowledge; trade and commerce; travel and communications; popular culture; exhibitions and jubilees; and politics. Along the way, Illustrating Empire examines the significance of media in conveying and creating ideas about empire and the non-European world. It also provides a clear summary of debates regarding the significance of empire in British culture. 

This informative and accessible visual history represents a significant contribution to the literature on culture and empire and will be an engaging and useful source of historical information for general readers and scholars alike.

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Ilse Koch on Trial
Making the “Bitch of Buchenwald”
Tomaz Jardim
Harvard University Press, 2023

An authoritative reassessment of one of the Third Reich’s most notorious war criminals, whose alleged sexual barbarism made her a convenient scapegoat and obscured the true nature of Nazi terror.

On September 1, 1967, one of the Third Reich’s most infamous figures hanged herself in her cell after nearly twenty-four years in prison. Known as the “Bitch of Buchenwald,” Ilse Koch was singularly notorious, having been accused of owning lampshades fabricated from skins of murdered camp inmates and engaging in “bestial” sexual behavior. These allegations fueled a public fascination that turned Koch into a household name and the foremost symbol of Nazi savagery. Her subsequent prosecution resulted in a scandal that prompted US Senate hearings and even the intervention of President Truman.

Yet the most sensational atrocities attributed to Koch were apocryphal or unproven. In this authoritative reappraisal, Tomaz Jardim shows that, while Koch was guilty of heinous crimes, she also became a scapegoat for postwar Germans eager to distance themselves from the Nazi past. The popular condemnation of Koch—and the particularly perverse crimes attributed to her by prosecutors, the media, and the public at large—diverted attention from the far more consequential but less sensational complicity of millions of ordinary Germans in the Third Reich’s crimes.

Ilse Koch on Trial reveals how gendered perceptions of violence and culpability drove Koch’s zealous prosecution at a time when male Nazi perpetrators responsible for greater crimes often escaped punishment or received lighter sentences. Both in the international press and during her three criminal trials, Koch was condemned for her violation of accepted gender norms and “good womanly behavior.” Koch’s “sexual barbarism,” though treated as an emblem of the Third Reich’s depravity, ultimately obscured the bureaucratized terror of the Nazi state and hampered understanding of the Holocaust.

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Image Critique and the Fall of the Berlin Wall
Sunil Manghani
Intellect Books, 2008
Although we are now accustomed to watching history unfold live on the air, the fall of the Berlin Wall was one of the first instances when history was produced on television. Inspired by the Wall and its powerful resonances, Sunil Manghani’s breakthrough study presents the new critical concept of “image critique,” a method of critiquing images while simultaneously using them as a means to engage with contemporary culture. Manghani examines current debates surrounding visual culture, ranging from such topics as Francis Fukuyama’s end of history thesis to metapictures and East German film. The resulting volume is an exhilarating interweaving of history, politics, and visual culture.
 
“Sunil Manghani’s Image Critique & the Fall of the Berlin Wall is the best sort of scholarly book—an intellectually grounded and theoretically adventurous critical performance. Through his concept of image critique, Manghani makes a virtue out of the many attributes of images that bedevil visual cultural studies, rightly insisting that rather than domesticating images for the tyranny of the word, scholars must do visual studies from the ground of images, in the process reconceptualizing theory and criticism. Manghani adeptly anchors his insights in close engagements with images, most notably images from the event of the fall of the Berlin Wall.  If heeded, Manghani’s book will change the trajectory of visual cultural studies by making critique a performance with force in the world.”—Kevin  DeLuca, University of Georgia
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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Image Matters
Archive, Photography, and the African Diaspora in Europe
Tina M. Campt
Duke University Press, 2012
In Image Matters, Tina M. Campt traces the emergence of a black European subject by examining how specific black European communities used family photography to create forms of identification and community. At the heart of Campt's study are two photographic archives, one composed primarily of snapshots of black German families taken between 1900 and 1945, and the other assembled from studio portraits of West Indian migrants to Birmingham, England, taken between 1948 and 1960. Campt shows how these photographs conveyed profound aspirations to forms of national and cultural belonging. In the process, she engages a host of contemporary issues, including the recoverability of non-stereotypical life stories of black people, especially in Europe, and their impact on our understanding of difference within diaspora; the relevance and theoretical approachability of domestic, vernacular photography; and the relationship between affect and photography. Campt places special emphasis on the tactile and sonic registers of family photographs, and she uses them to read the complexity of "race" in visual signs and to highlight the inseparability of gender and sexuality from any analysis of race and class. Image Matters is an extraordinary reflection on what vernacular photography enabled black Europeans to say about themselves and their communities.
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Image of Britain 1
Edited by Thomas Mabry Cranfill
University of Texas Press, 1961

Image of Britain 1, originally published in 1961, was the first of two special issues of The Texas Quarterly devoted to Britain. This volume contains three dozen selections, including essays, fiction, poetry, and illustrations, most of them specially commissioned. The editorial aim has been to achieve scope and variety. Surveyed in the articles are a dozen or more facets of British culture, among them politics, education, Anglo-American relations, religion, law, food, changes in class structure, pediatrics, the intellectual climate, scientific progress, and international relations.

Those who labor under the delusion that the British lack humor are advised to read Siriol Hugh-Jones's remarks on the subject, Henry Green's "Firefighting," William Sansom's "Dear Sir," and Willis W. Pratt's article on the great cartoonists Emett and Searle—whose cartoons should then be inspected carefully.

Their cartoons are only a part of the book’s handsome illustrations. In addition, the photographer Hans Beacham visited England at the Quarterly's invitation to depict for American readers distinguished figures in British arts and letters. His gallery of forty-one portraits of writers and other notables has historical as well as artistic importance. Beacham has also contributed twenty-one hauntingly beautiful photographs of the studio of the late great sculptor Sir Jacob Epstein.

Thirty-three of the contributors to this collection are British. There is much to be said for inviting members of this forthright, brilliantly self-critical race to comment extensively on themselves. Among the authors are the young and already noteworthy—Dom Moraes, Ted Hughes, and Alan Sillitoe, for example—as well as the firmly established and celebrated, such as John Wain, William Sansom, and Henry Green.

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Image of Britain 2
Edited by Thomas Mabry Cranfill
University of Texas Press, 1961

Image of Britain 2, originally published in 1961, was the second of two special numbers of The Texas Quarterly devoted to Britain. This volume comprises some three dozen selections—essays, fiction, poetry, and illustrations, most of them specially commissioned. The editorial aim has been to achieve scope and variety.

The articles, essays in criticism on British themes, for the most part survey literature and the fine arts: poetry, theater, intellectual review, then-recent translations into English, the flood of military memoirs, British humor, architecture, painting and sculpture, and music. Other essays treat individual authors, among them Shakespeare, Trollope, Galsworthy, Forster, Wells, Yeats, Pound, Shaw, Muir, Green, Snow, Waugh, Amis, and Pinter.

All except a handful of the essayists are British. There is much to be said for inviting the forthright and brilliantly self-critical to comment extensively on their own literature and art. Stephen Spender and John Lehmann, two of Britain’s most distinguished editors, deal with British literary matters, both international and domestic; the novelist David Garnett discusses George Moore, Galsworthy, Forster, and H. G. Wells—the men and their works; and the poet Kathleen Raine appraises the verse of Edwin Muir.

Like the essayists, the contributors of fiction and poetry include the emerging and already noteworthy—Ted Hughes, Peter Redgrove, and Andrew Sinclair, for example—as well as the firmly established and celebrated, such as Angus Wilson, Stephen Spender, and Joyce Cary. Cary’s short story “The Ball” appeared here in print for the first time.

The photographer Hans Beacham, who visited England at the Quarterly’s invitation, contributed a gallery of portraits of important British painters and sculptors. The photographs complement David Sylvester’s article on contemporary British art. In addition, Edward Bawden’s drawings of the British scene run like a charming frieze throughout this number.

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Images and Translations
The Etruscans Abroad
Larissa Bonfante
University of Michigan Press, 2023

Professor Larissa Bonfante’s great gift was the ability to evoke, in a fresh, immediate, and convincing way, the experiences, beliefs, and thoughts of people living more than two thousand years ago. Her final publication, Images and Translations: The Etruscans Abroad, communicates the sensations of other times and places, from the day-to-day to the solemnly ritualistic.

The world of the Etruscans, sophisticated and pleasure-loving, radiated throughout a vast area of the ancient world – a world very different from our own. Relying on a wealth of creative works, Images and Translations examines the expertise and productions of the artists who made them, the tastes of those who used them, and the sometimes surprising results of the exchanges between creators and buyers. Just as the French demand for Chinese ceramics in the seventeenth century gave birth to the unprecedented famille colors, so the production of Greek ceramics for the Etruscan market produced singularly expressive depictions. Humorous, pious, or erotic to the buyers, they could be shocking to the culture that made them.

Images and Translations explores areas in much closer economic and cultural contact than is usually recognized. The volume finds threads of connection not only between Italy and Greece, but between Italy and northern Europe—today’s France and Germany—as well as between Italy and the Near East. Etruscan influence runs through Western history, into the Renaissance, and emerges in imagery still evocative today.
 
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Imagination, Emblems, and Expressions
Essays on Latin American, Carribean, and Continental Culture and Identity
Helen Ryan-Ranson
University of Wisconsin Press, 1993

This book of essays—carefully written by twenty-four authorities on their subjects—provides a deep understanding of and appreciation for the coherence, primacy, and importance of the search for identity in the divergent areas of Latin America, the Caribbean, and Europe.

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Imagination, Meditation, and Cognition in the Middle Ages
Michelle Karnes
University of Chicago Press, 2011
In Imagination, Meditation, and Cognition in the Middle Ages, Michelle Karnes revises the history of medieval imagination with a detailed analysis of its role in the period’s meditations and theories of cognition. Karnes here understands imagination in its technical, philosophical sense, taking her cue from Bonaventure, the thirteenth-century scholastic theologian and philosopher who provided the first sustained account of how the philosophical imagination could be transformed into a devotional one. Karnes examines Bonaventure’s meditational works, the Meditationes vitae Christi, the Stimulis amoris, Piers Plowman, and Nicholas Love’s Myrrour, among others, and argues that the cognitive importance that imagination enjoyed in scholastic philosophy informed its importance in medieval meditations on the life of Christ. Emphasizing the cognitive significance of both imagination and the meditations that relied on it, she revises a long-standing association of imagination with the Middle Ages. In her account, imagination was not simply an object of suspicion but also a crucial intellectual, spiritual, and literary resource that exercised considerable authority.
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Imagined Communities on the Baltic Rim, from the Eleventh to Fifteenth Centuries
Edited by Wojtek Jezierski and Lars Hermanson
Amsterdam University Press, 2016
Prior to the high Middle Ages, the Baltic Rim was largely terra incognita-but by the late Middle Ages, it was home to diverse small and large communities. But the Baltic Rim was not simply the place those people lived-it was also an imagined space through which they defined themselves and their identities. This book traces the transformation of the Baltic Rim in this period through a focus on the self-image of a number of communities: urban and regional, cultic, missionary, legal, and political. Contributors look at the ways these communities defined themselves in relationship to other groups, how they constructed their identities and customs, and what held them together or tore them apart.
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The Imagined Empire
Balloon Enlightenments in Revolutionary Europe
Mi Gyung Kim
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016
The hot-air balloon, invented by the Montgolfier brothers in 1783, launched for the second time just days before the Treaty of Paris would end the American Revolutionary War. The ascent in Paris—a technological marvel witnessed by a diverse crowd that included Benjamin Franklin—highlighted celebrations of French military victory against Britain and ignited a balloon mania that swept across Europe at the end of the Enlightenment. This popular frenzy for balloon experiments, which attracted hundreds of thousands of spectators, fundamentally altered the once elite audience for science by bringing aristocrats and commoners together.
            The Imagined Empire explores how this material artifact, the flying machine, not only expanded the public for science and spectacle but also inspired utopian dreams of a republican monarchy that would obliterate social boundaries. The balloon, Mi Gyung Kim argues, was a people-machine, a cultural performance that unified and mobilized the people of France, who imagined an aerial empire that would bring glory to the French nation. This critical history of ballooning considers how a relatively simple mechanical gadget became an explosive cultural and political phenomenon on the eve of the French Revolution.
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Imagined Geographies in the Mediterranean, Middle East, and Beyond
Dimitri Kastritsis
Harvard University Press, 2023

This collaborative volume focuses on imagined geography and the relationships among power, knowledge, and space. A sequel to Imperial Geographies in Byzantine and Ottoman Space, Imagined Geographies in the Mediterranean, Middle East, and Beyond shares with its predecessor a strong focus on the role of empire and ideas of space viewed in inter-regional and interdisciplinary terms.

Both volumes bring together specialists on history, art history, literature, and theater studies, but the present volume covers an even wider geography than the first. In addition to the core provinces of Byzantium and the Ottoman Empire in the eastern Mediterranean and Middle East, it also includes connections between these regions and others further away—notably Iran, Inner Asia, and the Indian Ocean. The essays collected here suggest that the phenomenon of imagined geographies is essentially discursive in nature, since Self and Other may only be defined relative to one another.

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Imagined Homes
Soviet German Immigrants in Two Cities
Hans Werner
University of Manitoba Press, 2007
Imagined Homes: Soviet German Immigrants in Two Cities is a study of the social and cultural integration of two migrations of German speakers from Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union to Winnipeg, Canada in the late 1940s, and Bielefeld, Germany in the 1970s. Employing a cross-national comparative framework, Hans Werner reveals that the imagined trajectory of immigrant lives influenced the process of integration into a new urban environment. Winnipeg’s migrants chose a receiving society where they knew they would again be a minority group in a foreign country, while Bielefeld’s newcomers believed they were “going home” and were unprepared for the conflict between their imagined homeland and the realities of post-war Germany. Werner also shows that differences in the way the two receiving societies perceived immigrants, and the degree to which secularization and the sexual and media revolutions influenced these perceptions in the two cities, were crucially important in the immigrant experience.
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Imagining A Medieval English Nation
Kathy Lavezzo
University of Minnesota Press, 2003

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Imagining the Nation in Nature
Landscape Preservation and German Identity, 1885–1945
Thomas M. Lekan
Harvard University Press, 2004

One of the most powerful nationalist ideas in modern Europe is the assertion that there is a link between people and their landscape. Focusing on the heart of German romanticism, the Rhineland, Thomas Lekan examines nature protection activities from Wilhelmine Germany through the end of the Nazi era to illuminate the relationship between environmental reform and the cultural construction of national identity.

In the late nineteenth century, anxieties about national character infused ecological concerns about industrialization, spurring landscape preservationists to protect the natural environment. In the Rhineland’s scenic rivers, forests, and natural landmarks, they saw Germany as a timeless and organic nation rather than a recently patchworked political construct. Landscape preservation also served conservative social ends during a period of rapid modernization, as outdoor pursuits were promoted to redirect class-conscious factory workers and unruly youth from “crass materialism” to the German homeland. Lekan’s examination of Nazi environmental policy challenges recent work on the “green” Nazis by showing that the Third Reich systematically subordinated environmental concerns to war mobilization and racial hygiene.

This book is an original contribution not only to studies of national identity in modern Germany but also to the growing field of European environmental history.

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Imagining the Penitentiary
Fiction and the Architecture of Mind in Eighteenth-Century England
John Bender
University of Chicago Press, 1987
This brilliant and insightful contribution to cultural studies investigates the role of literature—particularly the novel—and visual arts in the development of institutions. Arguing the attitudes expressed in narrative literature and art between 1719 and 1779 helped bring about the change from traditional prisons to penitentiaries, John Bender offers studies of Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, The Beggar's Opera, Hogarth's Progresses, Jonathan Wild, and Amelia as well as illustrations from prison literature, art, and architecture in support of his thesis.
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Imagining the Sacred Past
Hagiography and Power in Early Normandy
Samantha Kahn Herrick
Harvard University Press, 2007

In 911, the French king ceded land along the river Seine to Rollo the Viking, on condition that he convert to Christianity. Over the next century and a half, Rollo and his descendants would become powerful and pious Christian rulers of the mighty European territory, Normandy. In 1066, Rollo's descendant William would conquer England, with papal sanction.

Investigating the role of religious tradition in the legitimation of power and the establishment of identity, Samantha Kahn Herrick illuminates the often murky early history of the duchy of Normandy. Central to this religious heritage stood the region's traditional saints, whose deeds, recorded in Latin lives, were celebrated regularly. Herrick focuses on the neglected figures Taurinus of Evreux, Vigor of Bayeux, and Nicasius of Rouen, saints with particular resonance in areas central to the Norman dukes' territorial ambitions. In elaborating a vision of the past that helped explain the present, the saints' stories sanctioned the dukes' rule.

Innovative in its historical use of hagiographical literature, this work advances our understanding of early Normandy and the Vikings' transformation from pagan raiders to Christian princes. It also sheds light on the intersection of religious tradition, identity, and power.

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Imagining the West in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union
Gyorgy Peteri
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010

This volume presents work from an international group of writers who explore conceptualizations of what defined “East” and “West” in Eastern Europe, imperial Russia, and the Soviet Union. The contributors analyze the effects of transnational interactions on ideology, politics, and cultural production. They reveal that the roots of an East/West cultural divide were present many years prior to the rise of socialism and the cold war.


The chapters offer insights into the complex stages of adoption and rejection of Western ideals in areas such as architecture, travel writings, film, music, health care, consumer products, political propaganda, and human rights. They describe a process of mental mapping whereby individuals “captured and possessed” Western identity through cultural encounters and developed their own interpretations from these experiences. Despite these imaginaries, political and intellectual elites devised responses of resistance, defiance, and counterattack to defy Western impositions.


Socialists believed that their cultural forms and collectivist strategies offered morally and materially better lives for the masses and the true path to a modern society. Their sentiments toward the West, however, fluctuated between superiority and inferiority. But in material terms, Western products, industry, and technology, became the ever-present yardstick by which progress was measured. The contributors conclude that the commodification of the necessities of modern life and the rise of consumerism in the twentieth century made it impossible for communist states to meet the demands of their citizens. The West eventually won the battle of supply and demand, and thus the battle for cultural influence.

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Imams in Western Europe
Developments, Transformations, and Institutional Challenges
Edited by Khalid Hajji, Mohammed Hashas, Jan Jaap de Ruiter and Niels Valdemar Vindin
Amsterdam University Press, 2018
As European Muslims and Muslims in the Middle East diverge, imams in Europe have emerged as major agents of religious authority who shape Islam’s presence in Western societies. This volume examines the theoretical and practical questions concerning the evolving role of imams in Europe. To what extent do imams act as intermediaries between European states and Muslim communities? Do states subsidise imam training? How does institutionalisation of Islam differ between European states?
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The Immaterial Book
Reading and Romance in Early Modern England
Sarah Wall-Randell
University of Michigan Press, 2013

In romances—Renaissance England’s version of the fantasy novel—characters often discover books that turn out to be magical or prophetic, and to offer insights into their readers’ selves. The Immaterial Book examines scenes of reading in important romance texts across genres: Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Shakespeare’s Cymbeline and The Tempest, Wroth’s Urania, and Cervantes’ Don Quixote. It offers a response to “material book studies” by calling for a new focus on imaginary or “immaterial” books and argues that early modern romance authors, rather than replicating contemporary reading practices within their texts, are reviving ancient and medieval ideas of the book as a conceptual framework, which they use to investigate urgent, new ideas about the self and the self-conscious mind.

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The Immigrant Threat
The Integration of Old and New Migrants in Western Europe since 1850
Leo Lucassen
University of Illinois Press, 2005
Starting in the 1980s, anti-immigrant discourse shifted away from the "color" of immigrants to their religion and culture. It focused in particular on newcomers from Muslim countries—people feared both as terrorists and as products of tribal societies with values opposed to those of secular Western Europe.

Leo Lucassen tackles the question of whether the integration process of these recent immigrants will fundamentally differ in the long run (over multiple generations) from the experiences of similar immigrant groups in the past. For comparison, Lucassen focuses on "large and problematic groups" from Western Europe's past (the Irish in the United Kingdom, the Poles in Germany, and the Italians in France) and demonstrates a number of structural similarities in the way migrants and their descendants integrated into these nation states. Lucassen emphasizes that the geographic sources of the "threat" have changed and that contemporaries tend to overemphasize the threat of each successive wave of immigrants, in part because the successfully incorporated immigrants of the past have become invisible in national histories.

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Immigrants, Markets, and States
The Political Economy of Postwar Europe
James F. Hollifield
Harvard University Press, 1992

This timely study of the recent migration tides explores the political and economic factors that have influenced the rise of immigration in postwar Europe and the United States. It seeks to explain immigration in terms of the globalization of labor markets and the expansion of civil rights for marginal groups in the liberal democracies.

Immigration raises emotional issues of nationalism and citizenship. Territorial norms of community and nationhood come into conflict with the liberal ideal of free, rational individuals seeking a better life for themselves and their families. Yet immigration has been an essential ingredient in economic growth. How then can liberal states reconcile economic pressures to maintain adequate supplies of labor with political pressures to protect citizenship and safeguard rights that are accorded, in principle, to every member of society?

Three prominent democracies—France, Germany, and the United States—are chosen for study because their experience illustrates the dilemma that liberal states must face when trying to control immigration. The author carefully distinguishes differences in the factors that influence each state’s struggle to resolve the status of the “guest” worker and the “illegal” immigrant. Yet he finds that the accretion of rights for aliens and the globalization of markets have led to a convergence of immigration policies in the industrialized West.

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Immigration and Social Systems
Collected Essays of Michael Bommes
Edited by Christina Boswell and Gianni D’Amato
Amsterdam University Press, 2012
Michael Bommes (1954–2010) was one the most brilliant and original scholars of migration studies in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This posthumously published collection brings together a selection of his most important essays on immigration, transnationalism, irregular migration, and migrant networks.
“In Bommes, the academy lost a scholar with penetrating analyses of migration, the welfare state and social systems where the two interact. By completing his last project, Boswell and D’Amato have done scholarship a lasting service. A major contribution to public debate and a tribute to a very great man.”—Randall Hansen, University of Toronto

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An Imperfect Occupation
Enduring the South African War
John Boje
University of Illinois Press, 2015
The South African War (1899–1902), also called the Boer War and Anglo-Boer War, began as a conventional conflict. It escalated into a savage irregular war fought between the two Boer republics and a British imperial force that adopted a scorched-earth policy and used concentration camps to break the will of Afrikaner patriots and Boer guerrillas. In An Imperfect Occupation , John Boje delves into the agonizing choices faced by Winburg district residents during the British occupation. Afrikaner men fought or evaded combat or collaborated; Afrikaner women fled over the veld or submitted to life in the camps; and black Africans weighed the life or death consequences of taking sides. Boje's sensitive analysis showcases the motives, actions, and reactions of Boers and Africans alike as initial British accommodation gave way to ruthlessness. Challenging notions of Boer unity and homogeneity, Boje illustrates the precarious tightrope of resistance, neutrality, and collaboration walked by people on all sides. He also reveals how the repercussions of the war's transformative effect on Afrikaner identity plays out in today's South Africa. Readable and compassionate, An Imperfect Occupation provides a dramatic account of the often overlooked aspects of one of the first "modern" wars.
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The Imperial City of Cologne
From Roman Colony to Medieval Metropolis (19 B.C.-1125 A.D.)
Joseph Huffman
Amsterdam University Press, 2018
The Imperial City of Cologne: From Roman Colony to Medieval Metropolis (19 B.C.-1125 A.D.) is an urban history of Cologne from its imperial Roman origins as a northeastern frontier military outpost to a medieval metropolis on the German Empire’s northwestern border. This first history of Cologne, available in English, challenges received notions of late Roman ethnic identities, a Dark Age collapse of urban life, devastating Viking and Magyar incursions, and the origins of medieval urban government.
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Imperial City
Rome under Napoleon
Susan Vandiver Nicassio
University of Chicago Press, 2009

In 1798, the armies of the French Revolution tried to transform Rome from the capital of the Papal States to a Jacobin Republic. For the next two decades, Rome was the subject of power struggles between the forces of the Empire and the Papacy, while Romans endured the unsuccessful efforts of Napoleon’s best and brightest to pull the ancient city into the modern world. Against this historical backdrop, Nicassio weaves together an absorbing social, cultural, and political history of Rome and its people. Based on primary sources and incorporating two centuries of Italian, French, and international research, her work reveals what life was like for Romans in the age of Napoleon.
 

“A remarkable book that wonderfully vivifies an understudied era in the history of Rome. . . . This book will engage anyone interested in early modern cities, the relationship between religion and daily life, and the history of the city of Rome.”—Journal of Modern History
 

“An engaging account of Tosca’s Rome. . . . Nicassio provides a fluent introduction to her subject.”—History Today
 

“Meticulously researched, drawing on a host of original manuscripts, memoirs, personal letters, and secondary sources, enabling [Nicassio] to bring her story to life.”—History

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Imperial Fictions
German Literature Before and Beyond the Nation-State
Todd Kontje
University of Michigan Press, 2018
Imperial Fictions explores ways in which writers from late antiquity to the present have imagined communities before and beyond the nation-state. It takes as its point of departure challenges to the discrete nation-state posed by globalization, migration, and European integration today, but then circles back to the beginnings of European history after the fall of the Roman Empire. Unlike nationalist literary historians of the nineteenth century, who sought the tribal roots of an allegedly homogeneous people, this study finds a distant mirror of analogous processes today in the fluid mixtures and movements of peoples. Imperial Fictions argues that it is time to stop thinking about today’s multicultural present as a deviation from a culturally monolithic past. We should rather consider the various permutations of “German” identities that have been negotiated within local and imperial contexts from the early Middle Ages to the present.
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Imperial Geographies in Byzantine and Ottoman Space
Sahar Bazzaz
Harvard University Press, 2012
Imperial Geographies in Byzantine and Ottoman Space opens new and insightful vistas on the nexus between empire and geography. The volume redirects attention from the Atlantic to the space of the eastern Mediterranean shaped by two empires of remarkable duration and territorial extent, the Byzantine and the Ottoman. The essays offer a diachronic and comparative account that spans the medieval and early modern periods and reaches into the nineteenth century. Methodologically rich, the essays combine historical, literary, and theoretical perspectives. Through texts as diverse as court records and chancery manuals, imperial treatises and fictional works, travel literature and theatrical adaptations, the essays explore ways in which the production of geographical knowledge supported imperial authority or revealed its precarious mastery of geography.
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Imperial Nature
Joseph Hooker and the Practices of Victorian Science
Jim Endersby
University of Chicago Press, 2008
Joseph Dalton Hooker (1817–1911) was an internationally renowned botanist, a close friend and early supporter of Charles Darwin, and one of the first—and most successful—British men of science to become a full-time professional. He was also, Jim Endersby argues, the perfect embodiment of Victorian science. A vivid picture of the complex interrelationships of scientific work and scientific ideas, Imperial Nature gracefully uses one individual’s career to illustrate the changing world of science in the Victorian era.
By analyzing Hooker’s career, Endersby offers vivid insights into the everyday activities of nineteenth-century naturalists, considering matters as diverse as botanical illustration and microscopy, classification, and specimen transportation and storage, to reveal what they actually did, how they earned a living, and what drove their scientific theories. What emerges is a rare glimpse of Victorian scientific practices in action. By focusing on science’s material practices and one of its foremost practitioners, Endersby ably links concerns about empire, professionalism, and philosophical practices to the forging of a nineteenth-century scientific identity.
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Imperial Russian Rule in the Kingdom of Poland, 1864-1915
Malte Rolf
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021

After crushing the Polish Uprising in 1863–1864, Russia established a new system of administration and control. Imperial Russian Rule in the Kingdom of Poland, 18641915 investigates in detail the imperial bureaucracy’s highly variable relationship with Polish society over the next half century. It portrays the personnel and policies of Russian domination and describes the numerous layers of conflict and cooperation between the Tsarist officialdom and the local population. Presenting case studies of both modes of conflict and cooperation, Malte Rolf replaces the old, unambiguous “freedom-loving Poles vs. oppressive Russians” narrative with a more nuanced account and does justice to the complexity and diversity of encounters among Poles, Jews, and Russians in this contested geopolitical space. At the same time, he highlights the process of “provincializing the center,” the process by which the erosion of imperial rule in the Polish Kingdom facilitated the demise of the Romanov dynasty itself.

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Imperial White
Race, Diaspora, and the British Empire
Radhika Mohanram
University of Minnesota Press, 2007

Radhika Mohanram shows not just how British imperial culture shaped the colonies, but how the imperial rule of colonies shifted—and gave new meanings to—what it meant to be British.

Imperial White looks at literary, social, and cultural texts on the racialization of the British body and investigates British whiteness in the colonies to address such questions as: How was the whiteness in Britishness constructed by the presence of Empire? How was whiteness incorporated into the idea of masculinity? Does heterosexuality have a color? And does domestic race differ from colonial race? In addition to these inquiries on the issues of race, class, and sexuality, Mohanram effectively applies the methods of whiteness studies to British imperial material culture to critically racialize the relationship between the metropole and the peripheral colonies.

Considering whether whiteness, like theory, can travel, Mohanram also provides a new perspective on white diaspora, a phenomenon of the nineteenth century that has been largely absent in diaspora studies, ultimately rereading—and rethinking—British imperial whiteness.

Radhika Mohanram teaches postcolonial cultural studies in the School of English, Communication and Philosophy at Cardiff University, Wales. She is the author of Black Body: Women, Colonialism, Space (Minnesota, 1999) and edits the journal Social Semiotics.

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Imperialism and the Origins of Mexican Culture
Colin M. MacLachlan
Harvard University Press, 2015

With an empire stretching across central Mexico, unmatched in military and cultural might, the Aztecs seemed poised on the brink of a golden age in the early sixteenth century. But the arrival of the Spanish changed everything. Imperialism and the Origins of Mexican Culture chronicles this violent clash of two empires and shows how modern Mestizo culture evolved over the centuries as a synthesis of Old and New World civilizations.

Colin MacLachlan begins by tracing Spain and Mesoamerica’s parallel trajectories from tribal enclaves to complex feudal societies. When the Spanish laid siege to Tenochtitlán and destroyed it in 1521, the Aztecs could only interpret this catastrophe in cosmic terms. With their gods discredited and their population ravaged by epidemics, they succumbed quickly to Spanish control—which meant submitting to Christianity. Spain had just emerged from its centuries-long struggle against the Moors, and zealous Christianity was central to its imperial vision. But Spain’s conquistadors far outnumbered its missionaries, and the Church’s decision to exclude Indian converts from priesthood proved shortsighted. Native religious practices persisted, and a richly blended culture—part Indian, part Christian—began to emerge.

The religious void left in the wake of Spain’s conquests had enduring consequences. MacLachlan’s careful analysis explains why Mexico is culturally a Mestizo country while ethnically Indian, and why modern Mexicans remain largely orphaned from their indigenous heritage—the adopted children of European history.

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The Importance of Being Poirot
Jeremy Black
St. Augustine's Press, 2021
Written by the renowned British historian who has been described as both utterly thorough and humanely delicate, Jeremy Black offers a guided tour through the mind of Agatha Christie and life during the Great World Wars. His incomparable treatment of literary craft developing alongside global military engagement nearly overshadows the natural draw of the crime drama that is the subject of his book. Indeed, the “prurience and sensationalism” of crime is not as exciting as Black’s aptitude for drawing the reality from the fiction (and periphery sources), giving Christie a much louder voice than she might ever have dreamed. If Christie is also moralist and mirror to her times, Black here plays his part as the detective and reveals layers of previously unmined truths in her stories.

Hercule Poirot as a character is masterfully imagined, but Black shows us how he is inseparable from Christie’s turbulent and changing world. He also illuminates significant social commentary in Christie’s fiction, and in so doing Black often uses his authority to vindicate Christie’s work from hastily, at times stupidly, applied labels and interpretations. He is especially magnificent in his chapters, “Xenophobia” and “The Sixties.” Black nevertheless gives due recognition to Christie’s critics when they have something relevant and reasonable to say, and hence the reader finds yet another service in Black’s comprehensive review of the reviewers over the expanse of Christie’s writing career.

For all this, Black proves himself to be a worthy history-teller because he can aptly ‘detect’ the meaning of stories that seeks to answer the past and guide the present. His erudition runs much deeper than his ability to navigate the stores of resources available on the subject, and the reader gets a glimpse of this early on when in the introduction he proffers his own defense for writing about the importance of a Hercule Poirot. Black writes, “the notion of crime had a moral component from the outset, and notably so in terms of the struggle between Good and Evil, and in the detection of the latter. Indeed, it is this detection that is the basis of the most powerful strand of detection story, because Evil disguises its purposes. It has to do so in a world and humanity made fundamentally benign and moral by God.” The Golden Age of detective novels represents much more than a triumph of a literary genre. It is in its own right a story of how the challenge to address the problem of evil was accepted. Its convergence with the plot-rich narrative of the twentieth century in the modern age renders Black’s account a thrilling masterpiece, seducing historians to read fiction and crime junkies to read more history.
 
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Importing the European Army
The Introduction of European Military Techniques and Institutions in the Extra-European World, 1600-1914
David B. Ralston
University of Chicago Press, 1990
In a study that extends well beyond military history, David B. Ralston documents the ways in which five different countries—Russia, the Ottoman Empire, Egypt, China, and Japan—refashioned their armed forces along European lines during the three centuries after 1600. The appropriation of Western military institutions in countries outside of Europe was, Ralston argues, the major force driving these countries to adopt European administrative, economic, and cultural modes.

Following the same format in his discussion of each country, Ralston makes this central theme in world history easily accessible to students while offering scholars a sophisticated understanding of the exact nature of the changes brought about by Europeanizing military reforms.

David B. Ralston, associate professor of history at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is the author of The Army of the Republic.
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The Imprisoned Traveler
Joseph Forsyth and Napoleon's Italy
Keith Crook
Bucknell University Press, 2020
The Imprisoned Traveler is a fascinating portrait of a unique book, its context, and its elusive author. Joseph Forsyth, traveling through an Italy plundered by Napoleon, was unjustly imprisoned in 1803 by the French as an enemy alien. Out of his arduous eleven-year “detention” came his only book, Remarks on Antiquities, Arts, and Letters during an Excursion in Italy (1813). Written as an (unsuccessful) appeal for release, praised by Forsyth’s contemporaries for its originality and fine taste, it is now recognized as a classic of Romantic period travel writing. Keith Crook, in this authoritative study, evokes the peculiar miseries that Forsyth endured in French prisons, reveals the significance of Forsyth’s encounters with scientists, poets, scholars, and ordinary Italians, and analyzes his judgments on Italian artworks. He uncovers how Forsyth’s allusiveness functions as a method of covert protest against Napoleon and reproduces the hitherto unpublished correspondence between the imprisoned Forsyth and his brother.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press. 
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In Command of France
French Foreign Policy and Military Planning, 1933-1940
Robert J. Young
Harvard University Press, 1978

No other attempt to explain French civil and military leadership during the 1930s has been so gracefully written, so firmly based on archival material, or so sensitive to French conditions and purposes as In Command of France. It combines a detailed survey of French foreign policy during the Nazi period with a careful examination of France's corresponding military planning and preparation. France was under control, the author argues, and credits the civilian and military command with more vision, more determination, more competence than hitherto recognized.

Young introduces the reader to some of the leading personalities of the day--Laval, Bonnet, Weygand, Pétain, Gamelin, Delbos, Cot, Daladier--soldiers and statesmen whose names have come close to fading from our view. He outlines the problems and alternatives that confronted them in the Nazi years--strikes, lockouts, unemployment, inflating prices, devalued currency--and finds that they failed not because of an absence of policy or incompetence but because the problems they faced were insuperable.

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In Defense of Women
A Bilingual Edition
Pompeo Colonna
Iter Press, 2024
An important contribution to early public debates on the nature of women written by a cardinal in the Roman Catholic Church.

Pompeo Colonna’s In Defense of Women (1530), presented in this volume in Latin and English translation, is one of several important defenses of women composed in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries by male advocates of women’s moral and intellectual worth. Known as a cardinal and a warrior, but also as an active participant in sixteenth-century Italian literary circles, Colonna addresses the work to his cousin Vittoria Colonna, the most renowned Italian woman poet of the era, who, he writes, had urged him to undertake it. His Defense not only refutes arguments of women’s inferiority and incapacity but, remarkably, asserts their ability to hold political office and govern. It contains original Latin text and a critical introduction by Franco Minonzio. It also features a foreword by Margaret L. King, as well as a postscript by King, tracing the separate male-authored and female-authored Renaissance defenses of women.
 
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In Dialogue with the Other Voice in Sixteenth-century Italy
Literary and Social Contexts for Women's Writing
Edited by Julie D. Campbell and Maria Galli Stampino
Iter Press, 2011
This excellent collection of essays and texts surveys the culture and intellectual context of early modern Italy in order to render more intelligible the writing of Italian women. The role of women in society and the persistent misogyny even of the most pro-woman texts are explored in the essays, and the recent critical debates are examined. The translations make available in English a selection of male-authored texts which directly or indirectly elicited the spirited responses of women, for which the volume is aptly entitled “In Dialogue.” A valuable classroom resource, the volume is an important addition to The Other Voice: Toronto series.
—Elissa Weaver
Professor of Italian, Emerita, University of Chicago
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In Fielding’s Wake
Jeremy Black
St. Augustine's Press, 2022
In the second volume of The Weight of Words Series, Jeremy Black continues his efforts to present and preserve Britain's literary genius. Its intelligence and enduring influence is in large part reliant on the underlining conservatism that has motivated authors such as Agatha Christie (Black's earlier subject) and Henry Fielding alike. 

Fielding's epic comic novel, Tom Jones, is unforgettable for many reasons, but the author must be credited with an aptitude for documenting contemporary cultural history and his contribution to a new species of writing. Black's treatment of Fielding draws to the fore a man who was of his time but not confined to it. "Philosophy in practice encompassed his stance as a man of action as well as a reflective writer of genius." Fielding is shown to provide across the breadth of his work extensive and invaluable commentary on issues as diverse as law and order, marriage, women, and the interplay of urban and rural life. Black, an historian, is here a student of storytelling and recovers Fielding's rich descriptions of the human heart and call to defy the vices with which circumstances might taunt it.

Black has done a service along many fronts at once: the science of the novel and genre, the history of a people and the figure of a memorable writer. 
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In Isolation
Dispatches from Occupied Donbas
Stanislav Aseyev
Harvard University Press, 2022

In this exceptional collection of dispatches from occupied Donbas, writer and journalist Stanislav Aseyev details the internal and external changes observed in the cities of Makiïvka and Donetsk in eastern Ukraine. Aseyev scrutinizes his immediate environment and questions himself in an attempt to understand the reasons behind the success of Russian propaganda among the working-class residents of the industrial region of Donbas.

In this work of documentary prose, Aseyev focuses on the early period of the Russian-sponsored military aggression in Ukraine’s east, the period of 2015–2017. The author’s testimony ends with his arrest for publishing his dispatches and his subsequent imprisonment and torture in a modern-day concentration camp on the outskirts of Donetsk run by lawless mercenaries and local militants with the tacit approval and support of Moscow. For the first time, an inside account is presented here of the toll on real human lives and civic freedoms that the citizens of Europe’s largest country continue to suffer in Russia’s hybrid war on its territory.

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In Permanent Crisis
Ethnicity in Contemporary European Media and Cinema
Ipek A. Celik
University of Michigan Press, 2015
Refugees, migrants, and minorities of migrant origin frequently appear in European mainstream news in emergency situations: victims of human trafficking, suspects of terrorism, “bogus” asylum seekers. Through analysis of work by established filmmakers Michael Haneke, Fatih Akin, and Alfonso Cuarón, In Permanent Crisis contemplates the way mass media depictions become invoked by film to frame ethnic and racial Otherness in Europe as adornments of catastrophe. Special attention is given to European auteur films in which riots, terrorism, criminal activities, and honor killings bring Europe’s minorities to the forefront of public visibility only to reduce them to perpetrators or victims of violence.

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In Praise of Older Women
The Amorous Recollections of A. V
Stephen Vizinczey
University of Chicago Press, 1990
"A cool, comic survey of the sexual education of a young Hungarian, from his first encounter, as a twelve-year-old refugee with the American forces, to his unsatisfactory liaison with a reporter's wife in Canada at the belated end of his youth, when he was twenty-three . . . elegantly erotic, with masses of that indefinable quality, style . . . this has the real stuff of immortality."—B. A. Young, Punch

"A pleasure. Vizinczey writes of women beautifully, with sympathy, tact and delight, and he writes about sex with more lucidity and grace than most writers ever acquire."—Larry McMurtry, Houston Post

"Like James Joyce, who was as far from being a writer of erotica as Dostoevsky, Vizinczey has a refreshing message to deliver: Life is not about sex, sex is about life."—John Podhoretz, Washington Times

"The gracefully written story of a young man growing up among older women . . . although some passages may well arouse the reader, this novel brims with what the courts have termed "redeeming literary merit."—Clarence Petersen, Chicago Tribune

"A funny novel about sex, or rather (which is rarer) a novel which is funny as well as touching about sex . . . elegant, exact and melodious—has style, presence and individuality."—Isabel Quigly, Sunday Telegraph

"The delicious adventures of a young Casanova who appreciates maturity while acquiring it himself. In turn naive, sophisticated, arrogant, disarming, the narrator woos his women and his tale wins the reader."—Polly Devlin, Vogue


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In Pursuit of Civility
Manners and Civilization in Early Modern England
Keith Thomas
Brandeis University Press, 2018
Keith Thomas’s earlier studies in the ethnography of early modern England, Religion and the Decline of Magic, Man and the Natural World, and The Ends of Life, were all attempts to explore beliefs, values, and social practices in the centuries from 1500 to 1800. In Pursuit of Civility continues this quest by examining what English people thought it meant to be “civilized” and how that condition differed from being “barbarous” or “savage.” Thomas shows that the upper ranks of society sought to distinguish themselves from their social inferiors by distinctive ways of moving, speaking, and comporting themselves, and that the common people developed their own form of civility. The belief of the English in their superior civility shaped their relations with the Welsh, the Scots, and the Irish, and was fundamental to their dealings with the native peoples of North America, India, and Australia. Yet not everyone shared this belief in the superiority of Western civilization; the book sheds light on the origins of both anticolonialism and cultural relativism. Thomas has written an accessible history based on wide reading, abounding in fresh insights, and illustrated by many striking quotations and anecdotes from contemporary sources.
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In Pursuit of German Memory
History, Television, and Politics after Auschwitz
Wulf Kansteiner
Ohio University Press, 2006

The collective memories of Nazism that developed in postwar Germany have helped define a new paradigm of memory politics. From Europe to South Africa and from Latin America to Iraq, scholars have studied the German case to learn how to overcome internal division and regain international recognition.

In Pursuit of German Memory: History, Television, and Politics after Auschwitz examines three arenas of German memory politics—professional historiography, national politics, and national public television—that have played key roles in the reinvention of the Nazi past in the last sixty years. Wulf Kansteiner shows that the interpretations of the past proposed by historians, politicians, and television producers reflect political and generational divisions and an extraordinary concern for Germany's image abroad. At the same time, each of these theaters of memory has developed its own dynamics and formats of historical reflection.

Kansteiner’s analysis of the German scene reveals a complex social geography of collective memory. In Pursuit of German Memory underscores the fact that German memories of Nazism, like many other collective memories, combine two seemingly contradictory qualities: They are highly mediated and part of a global exchange of images and story fragments but, at the same time, they can be reproduced only locally, in narrowly circumscribed networks of communication.

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In Pursuit of Their Dreams
A History of Azorean Immigration to the United States
Jerry R. Williams
Tagus Press, 2007
Jerry Williams' history of Azorean immigration to the United States offers us valuable insight into the experience and culture of Portuguese immigrants and their descendents. This account fills a major gap in American immigration history and gives us a comprehensive overview of how Portuguese-Americans—now numbering close to a million people—have come to constitute a vibrant and highly visible presence within southeastern New England, the areas around San Francisco and San Diego, Hawaii, and the New Jersey/New York metropolitan area. Even though Azorean immigrants all came from similar cultural and social backgrounds, Williams shows how regionally specific opportunity structures and social hierarchies have contributed to significant differences within the Portuguese-American experience.

Starting with the whaling routes that first connected the mid-Atlantic archipelago with the ports of call in New England and California in the early 1800s, Williams lays out the complex relationship between the Azores and the US that has continued into the present. We learn how particular patterns of poverty, overpopulation and social inequality in the Azores pushed large numbers of the islands' inhabitants to leave their homes in search of better opportunities for themselves and their children. He tells the story of how the early whalers who jumped ship in New Bedford, San Francisco, or Hawaii were followed by kin and fellow villagers who had heard of plentiful jobs in New England's textile mills, gold and land in California, or agricultural work on Hawaiian plantations. Williams' account allows us to understand the importance of family and community connections throughout the immigrants' arduous transition from peasant life to industrial society.
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In Quest of History
On Czech Statehood and Identity
Jirí Pribán and Karel Hvíždala
Karolinum Press, 2019
In honor of the 2018 centennial of Czech independence, philosopher of law Jiří Přibán and award-winning Czech journalist Karel Hvížďala took the opportunity to examine key moments in Czech history from the ninth century to the twenty-first. Covering such a broad span of time allowed them to look into the past and question how Czechs have viewed their history at different points—and what that means for the Czech present and future. As contemporary politics drift closer towards totalitarianism, historiography from scholars and thinkers who experienced twentieth-century totalitarian regimes is more important than ever. In their spirited dialogue, Hvížďala and Přibán raise and explore these crucial issues, sharing subjects normally reserved for university seminars with the broader public.
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In the Company of Demons
Unnatural Beings, Love, and Identity in the Italian Renaissance
Armando Maggi
University of Chicago Press, 2006
Who are the familiar spirits of classical culture and what is their relationship to Christian demons? In its interpretation of Latin and Greek culture, Christianity contends that Satan is behind all classical deities, semi-gods, and spiritual creatures, including the gods of the household, the lares and penates.But with In the Company of Demons, the world’s leading demonologist Armando Maggi argues that the great thinkers of the Italian Renaissance had a more nuanced and perhaps less sinister interpretation of these creatures or spiritual bodies.

Maggi leads us straight to the heart of what Italian Renaissance culture thought familiar spirits were. Through close readings of Giovan Francesco Pico della Mirandola, Strozzi Cigogna, Pompeo della Barba, Ludovico Sinistrari, and others, we find that these spirits or demons speak through their sudden and striking appearances—their very bodies seen as metaphors to be interpreted. The form of the body, Maggi explains, relies on the spirits’ knowledge of their human interlocutors’ pasts. But their core trait is compassion, and sometimes their odd, eerie arrivals are seen as harbingers or warnings to protect us. It comes as no surprise then that when spiritual beings distort the natural world to communicate, it is vital that we begin to listen.
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In the Forest of Metropoles
Karl-Markus Gauß
Seagull Books, 2024
A chronicle of the diversity and wealth of cultures, predominantly from Eastern Europe, that have played a formative role in shaping contemporary Europe but now risk being forgotten.

A Herodotus of Mitteleuropa, cultural historian Karl-Markus Gauß is essential reading for anyone trying to understand the breadth and complexities of cultures and societies in Europe before, during, and after its decades of division in the twentieth century.

In this book, Gauß takes his readers on a thirteen-station journey across Europe. From Brussels to Istanbul and from Naples to Opole, Gauß weaves a Sebaldian web of connection and coincidence into a hybrid cultural history. Significantly, Gauß’s metropoles are not the well-trodden, thoroughly explored, and minutely documented megalopolises and cultural capitals that have been mythologized by writers great and small. There are no visits to Berlin, Paris, Rome, or Madrid, although he does make time for Vienna, where he looks not for imperial remnants, but for traces of genius unrecognized by most. Gauß’s lodestars are small but cosmopolitan towns on the periphery, such as Slaghenaufi, Vacaresti, Fontevraud, Dragatus, Vrzdenec, and Sélestat. In these far-flung towns, Gauß assembles a canon of overlooked humanists, expelled or extinguished by political and historical forces that swept the continent.
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In the House of the Hangman
The Agonies of German Defeat, 1943-1949
Jeffrey K. Olick
University of Chicago Press, 2005
The central question for both the victors and the vanquished of World War II was just how widely the stain of guilt would spread over Germany. Political leaders and intellectuals on both sides of the conflict debated whether support for National Socialism tainted Germany's entire population and thus discredited the nation's history and culture. The tremendous challenge that Allied officials and German thinkers faced as the war closed, then, was how to limn a postwar German identity that accounted for National Socialism without irrevocably damning the idea and character of Germany as a whole. 

In  the House of the Hangman chronicles this delicate process, exploring key debates about the Nazi past and German future during the later years of World War II and its aftermath. What did British and American leaders think had given rise to National Socialism, and how did these beliefs shape their intentions for occupation? What rhetorical and symbolic tools did Germans develop for handling the insidious legacy of Nazism? Considering these and other questions, Jeffrey K. Olick explores the processes of accommodation and rejection that Allied plans for a new German state inspired among the German intelligentsia. He also examines heated struggles over the value of Germany's institutional and political heritage. Along the way, he demonstrates how the moral and political vocabulary for coming to terms with National Socialism in Germany has been of enduring significance—as a crucible not only of German identity but also of contemporary thinking about memory and social justice more generally.

Given the current war in Iraq, the issues contested during Germany's abjection and reinvention—how to treat a defeated enemy, how to place episodes within wider historical trajectories, how to distinguish varieties of victimhood—are as urgent today as they were sixty years ago, and In the House of the Hangman offers readers an invaluable historical perspective on these critical questions.
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In the King's Wake
Post-Absolutist Culture in France
Jay Caplan
University of Chicago Press, 1999
Long before the guillotines of the 1789 Revolution brought a grisly political end to the ancien régime, Jay Caplan argues, the culture of absolutism had already perished. In the King's Wake traces the emergence of a post-absolutist culture across a wide range of works and genres: Saint-Simon's memoirs of Louis XIV and the Regency; Voltaire's first tragedy, Oedipe; Watteau's last great painting, L'Enseigne de Gersaint; the plays of Marivaux; and Casanova's History of My Life.

While absolutist culture had focused on value directly represented in people (e.g., those of noble blood) and things (e.g., coins made of precious metals), post-absolutist culture instead explored the capacity of signs to stand for something real (e.g., John Law's banknotes or Marivaux's plays in which actions rather than birth signify nobility). Between the image of the Sun King and visions of the godlike Romantic self, Caplan discovers a post-absolutist France wracked by surprisingly modern conflicts over the true sources of value and legitimacy.
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In the Kitchen, 1550-1800
Reading English Cooking at Home and Abroad
Madeline Bassnett
Amsterdam University Press, 2023
In the Kitchen insists that the preparation of food, whether imaginative, physical, or spatial, is central to a deeper understanding of early modern food cultures and practices. Devoted to the arts of cooking and medicine, early modern kitchens concentrated on producing, processing, and preserving materials necessary for nourishment and survival; yet they also fed social and economic networks and nurtured a sense of physical, spiritual, and political connection to surrounding lands and their cultures. The essays in this volume illuminate this expansive view of cooking and aspire to show how the kitchen's inner workings prove tightly, though often invisibly, interwoven with local, national, and, increasingly, global surroundings. Engaging with literary and historical methodologies, including close reading, recipe analysis, and perspectives on gender, class, race, and colonialism, we begin to develop a shared theoretical and practical language for the art of cooking that combines the physical with the intellectual, the local with the global, and the domestic with the political.
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In the Name of Women's Rights
The Rise of Femonationalism
Sara R. Farris
Duke University Press, 2017
Sara R. Farris examines the demands for women's rights from an unlikely collection of right-wing nationalist political parties, neoliberals, and some feminist theorists and policy makers. Focusing on contemporary France, Italy, and the Netherlands, Farris labels this exploitation and co-optation of feminist themes by anti-Islam and xenophobic campaigns as “femonationalism.” She shows that by characterizing Muslim males as dangerous to western societies and as oppressors of women, and by emphasizing the need to rescue Muslim and migrant women, these groups use gender equality to justify their racist rhetoric and policies. This practice also serves an economic function. Farris analyzes how neoliberal civic integration policies and feminist groups funnel Muslim and non-western migrant women into the segregating domestic and caregiving industries, all the while claiming to promote their emancipation. In the Name of Women's Rights documents the links between racism, feminism, and the ways in which non-western women are instrumentalized for a variety of political and economic purposes.
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In the Nineties
John Stokes
University of Chicago Press, 1990
John Stokes's lively study is an exercise in interdisciplinary criticism inspired by the decade it observes, the decade of Wilde, Shaw, Beardsley, and Sickert. No longer dismissed as merely transitional between the Victorian and the Modern, the 1890s have now come to be recognized as unique—a period of dramatic engagement between high culture and popular forms, one medium and another, art and life.

Spurning fixed boundaries, Stokes relates the controversial topics of the day—the status of the "New Journalism," the "degenerative" influence of Impressionist painting, the dubious morality of the music hall, the urgent need for prison reform, and the prevalence of suicide—to primary literary texts, such as The Ballad of Reading Gaol, The Importance of Being Earnest, Jude the Obscure, and Portrait of a Lady. And in the process, he explores crucial areas of sociological and psychological interest: criminality, sexuality, madness, and "morbidity."

Each of the book's six chapters opens with a look at the correspondence columns of daily newspapers and goes on, with a keen eye for the hidden link, to pursue a particular theme. Locations shift from Leicester Square and the Thames embankment to the Normandy coast and the Paris morgue and feature, along with famous names, a lesser known company of acrobats, convicts, aesthetes, "philistines," and mysterious suicides.

Nearly a century later, John Stokes's unrivalled knowledge of how the arts actually functioned in the nineties makes this book a major contribution to modern cultural studies.
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In the Shadow of the Magic Mountain
The Erika and Klaus Mann Story
Andrea Weiss
University of Chicago Press, 2008
A biography of Thomas Mann's two eldest children that provides intriguing insight into both their lives and the political and cultural shifts at the same time.

Thomas Mann’s two eldest children, Erika and Klaus, were unconventional, rebellious, and fiercely devoted to each other. Empowered by their close bond, they espoused vehemently anti-Nazi views in a Europe swept up in fascism and were openly, even defiantly, gay in an age of secrecy and repression. Although their father’s fame has unfairly overshadowed their legacy, Erika and Klaus were serious authors, performance artists before the medium existed, and political visionaries whose searing essays and lectures are still relevant today. And, as Andrea Weiss reveals in this dual biography, their story offers a fascinating view of the literary and intellectual life, political turmoil, and shifting sexual mores of their times.

In the Shadow of the Magic Mountain begins with an account of the make-believe world the Manns created together as children—an early sign of their talents as well as the intensity of their relationship. Weiss documents the lifelong artistic collaboration that followed, showing how, as the Nazis took power, Erika and Klaus infused their work with a shared sense of political commitment. Their views earned them exile, and after escaping Germany they eventually moved to the United States, where both served as members of the U.S. armed forces. Abroad, they enjoyed a wide circle of famous friends, including Andre Gide, Christopher Isherwood, Jean Cocteau, and W. H. Auden, whom Erika married in 1935. But the demands of life in exile, Klaus’s heroin addiction, and Erika’s new allegiance to their father strained their mutual devotion, and in 1949 Klaus committed suicide.

Beautiful never-before-seen photographs illustrate Weiss’s riveting tale of two brave nonconformists whose dramatic lives open up new perspectives on the history of the twentieth century.
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In the Shadows of Romance
Romantic Tragic Drama in Germany, England, and France
Jeffrey N. Cox
Ohio University Press, 2011

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In the Skin of a Beast
Sovereignty and Animality in Medieval France
Peggy McCracken
University of Chicago Press, 2017
In medieval literature, when humans and animals meet—whether as friends or foes—issues of mastery and submission are often at stake. In the Skin of a Beast shows how the concept of sovereignty comes to the fore in such narratives, reflecting larger concerns about relations of authority and dominion at play in both human-animal and human-human interactions.

Peggy McCracken discusses a range of literary texts and images from medieval France, including romances in which animal skins appear in symbolic displays of power, fictional explorations of the wolf’s desire for human domestication, and tales of women and snakes converging in a representation of territorial claims and noble status. These works reveal that the qualities traditionally used to define sovereignty—lineage and gender among them—are in fact mobile and contingent. In medieval literary texts, as McCracken demonstrates, human dominion over animals is a disputed model for sovereign relations among people: it justifies exploitation even as it mandates protection and care, and it depends on reiterations of human-animal difference that paradoxically expose the tenuous nature of human exceptionalism.
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In the Solitude of My Soul
The Diary of Genevieve Breton, 1867-1871
James Smith Allen
Southern Illinois University Press, 1994

Originally published to glowing reviews and literary prizes in France in 1985, this revealing diary not only recounts the moving and tragic relationship of its author, Geneviève Bréton, with the rising young nineteenth-century artist Henri Regnault, it also serves as a valuable historical document concerning the social, cultural, and political life of the French Second Empire.

The young Geneviève Bréton began her journal in 1867 as a consolation for the death of her eldest brother, Antoine. She met Regnault soon after on a trip to Rome. Throughout the next four years of their relationship, Bréton eloquently describes the personal, cultural, and political turbulence that affected her life. Writing against the backdrop of France’s fateful conflict with Prussia and the hardships and dangers of the siege of Paris and the Commune, Bréton, with innate candor and lyricism, creates a text that beautifully illuminates French art, literature, family life, society, and politics of the time. Her poignant account of her love for and engagement to Regnault reveals special insight into the life and mind of an extraordinary, though little known, literary talent. At Regnault’s death in 1871 during the Franco–Prussian War, the expression of her anguish is as much testimony to the political and cultural disorder of the time as it is to her own personal tragedy.

Following Bréton’s own instructions that she left before her death in 1918, this English version of the diary reincorporates material that was deleted from the French edition. Graced by rare photographs of the Bréton family as well as Regnault’s paintings, the book contains a touching foreword by the author’s granddaughter, Daphné Doublet-Vaudoyer. In its first English translation, it is a book for lovers of French life and culture, as well as students of French history; literature, and art.

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In the Vineyard of the Text
A Commentary to Hugh's Didascalicon
Ivan Illich
University of Chicago Press, 1993
In a work with profound implications for the electronic age, Ivan Illich explores how revolutions in technology affect the way we read and understand text.

Examining the Didascalicon of Hugh of St. Victor, Illich celebrates the culture of the book from the twelfth century to the present. Hugh's work, at once an encyclopedia and guide to the art of reading, reveals a twelfth-century revolution as sweeping as that brought about by the invention of the printing press and equal in magnitude only to the changes of the computer age—the transition from reading as a vocal activity done in the monastery to reading as a predominantly silent activity performed by and for individuals.
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In Times of Crisis
Essays on European Culture, Germans, and Jews
Steven E. Aschheim
University of Wisconsin Press, 2001

The nineteenth- and twentieth-century relationship between European culture, German history, and the Jewish experience produced some of the West’s most powerful and enduring intellectual creations—and, perhaps in subtly paradoxical and interrelated ways, our century’s darkest genocidal moments. In Times of Crisis explores the flashpoints of this vexed relationship, mapping the coordinates of a complex triangular encounter of immense historical import.
    In essays that range from the question of Nietzsche’s legacy to the controversy over Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners, the distinguished historian Steven E. Aschheim presents this encounter as an ongoing dialogue between two evolving cultural identities. He touches on past dimensions of this exchange (such as the politics of Weimar Germany) and on present dilemmas of grasping and representing it (such as the Israeli discourse on the Holocaust). His work inevitably traces the roots and ramifications of Nazism but at the same time brings into focus historical circumstances and contemporary issues often overshadowed or distorted by the Holocaust.
    These essays reveal the ubiquitous charged inscriptions of Nazi genocide within our own culture and illuminate the projects of some later thinkers and historians—from Hannah Arendt to George Mosse to Saul Friedlander—who have wrestled with its problematics and sought to capture its essence. From the broadly historical to the personal, from the politics of Weimar Germany to the experience of growing up German Jewish in South Africa, the essays expand our understanding of German Jewish history in particular, but also of historical processes in general.

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Inari Sámi Folklore
Stories from Aanaar
August V. Koskimies and Toivo I. Itkonen, revised by Lea Laitinen; Edited and translated by Tim Frandy
University of Wisconsin Press, 2020
A rich multivoiced anthology of folktales, legends, joik songs, proverbs, riddles, and other verbal art, this is the most comprehensive collection of Sámi oral tradition available in English to date. Collected by August V. Koskimies and Toivo I. Itkonen in the 1880s from nearly two dozen storytellers from the arctic Aanaar (Inari) region of northeast Finland, the material reveals a complex web of social relations that existed both inside and far beyond the community.

First published in 1918 only in the Aanaar Sámi language and in Finnish, this anthology is now available in a centennial English-language edition for a global readership. Translator Tim Frandy has added biographies of the storytellers, maps and period photos, annotations, and a glossary. In headnotes that contextualize the stories, he explains such underlying themes as Aanaar conflicts with neighboring Sámi and Finnish communities, the collapse of the wild reindeer populations less than a century before, and the pre-Christian past in Aanaar. He introduces us to the bawdy humor of Antti Kitti, the didacticism of Iisakki Mannermaa, and the feminist leanings of Juho Petteri Lusmaniemi, emphasizing that folktales and proverbs are rooted in the experiences of individuals who are links in a living tradition.
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Inca Garcilaso and Contemporary World-Making
Sara Castro-Klarén
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016
This edited volume offers new perspectives from leading scholars on the important work of Inca Garcilaso de la Vega (1539–1616), one of the first Latin American writers to present an intellectual analysis of pre-Columbian history and culture and the ensuing colonial period. To the contributors, Inca Garcilaso’s Royal Commentaries of the Incas presented an early counter-hegemonic discourse and a reframing of the history of native non-alphabetic cultures that undermined the colonial rhetoric of his time and the geopolitical divisions it purported. Through his research in both Andean and Renaissance archives, Inca Garcilaso sought to connect these divergent cultures into one world.
This collection offers five classical studies of Royal Commentaries previously unavailable in English, along with seven new essays that cover topics including Andean memory, historiography, translation, philosophy, trauma, and ethnic identity. This cross-disciplinary volume will be of interest to students and scholars of Latin American history, culture, comparative literature, subaltern studies, and works in translation.
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Incest and Influence
The Private Life of Bourgeois England
Adam Kuper
Harvard University Press, 2009

Like many gentlemen of his time, Charles Darwin married his first cousin. In fact, marriages between close relatives were commonplace in nineteenth-century England, and Adam Kuper argues that they played a crucial role in the rise of the bourgeoisie.

Incest and Influence shows us just how the political networks of the eighteenth-century aristocracy were succeeded by hundreds of in-married bourgeois clans—in finance and industry, in local and national politics, in the church, and in intellectual life. In a richly detailed narrative, Kuper deploys his expertise as an anthropologist to analyze kin marriages among the Darwins and Wedgwoods, in Quaker and Jewish banking families, and in the Clapham Sect and their descendants over four generations, ending with a revealing account of the Bloomsbury Group, the most eccentric product of English bourgeois endogamy.

These marriage strategies were the staple of novels, and contemporaries were obsessed with them. But there were concerns. Ideas about incest were in flux as theological doctrines were challenged. For forty years Victorian parliaments debated whether a man could marry his deceased wife’s sister. Cousin marriage troubled scientists, including Charles Darwin and his cousin Francis Galton, provoking revolutionary ideas about breeding and heredity.

This groundbreaking study brings out the connection between private lives, public fortunes, and the history of imperial Britain.

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Incomparable Realms
Spain during the Golden Age, 1500–1700
Jeremy Robbins
Reaktion Books, 2022
A sumptuous history of Golden Age Spain that explores the irresistible tension between heavenly and earthly realms.
 
Incomparable Realms offers a vision of Spanish culture and society during the so-called Golden Age, the period from 1500 to 1700 when Spain unexpectedly rose to become the dominant European power. But in what ways was this a Golden Age, and for whom? The relationship between the Habsburg monarchy and the Roman Catholic Church shaped the period, with both constructing narratives to bind Spanish society together. Incomparable Realms unpicks the impact of these two historical forces on thought and culture and examines the people and perspectives such powerful projections sought to eradicate.
 
The book shows that the tension between the heavenly and earthly realms, and in particular the struggle between the spiritual and the corporeal, defines Golden Age culture. In art and literature, mystical theology and moral polemic, ideology, doctrine, and everyday life, the problematic pull of the body and the material world is the unacknowledged force behind early modern Spain. Life is a dream, as the title of Calderón’s famous play of the period proclaimed, but there is always a body dreaming it.
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Inconvenient Heritage
Colonial Collections and Restitution in the Netherlands and Belgium
Jos van Beurden
Amsterdam University Press, 2022
The discussion about objects, human remains and archives from former colonial territories is becoming increasingly heated. Over the centuries, a multitude of items – including a cannon of the King of Kandy, power-objects from DR Congo, Benin bronzes, Javanese temple statues, M.ori heads and strategic documents – has ended up in museums and private collections in Belgium and the Netherlands by improper means. Since gaining independence, former colonies have been calling for the return of their lost heritage. As continued possession of these objects only grows more uncomfortable, governments and museums must decide what to do. How did these objects get here? Are they all looted, and how can we find out? How does restitution work in practice? Are there any appealing examples? How do other former colonial powers deal with restitution? Do former colonies trust their intentions? The answers to these questions are far from unambiguous, but indispensable for a balanced discussion.
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Increase And Multiply
Governing Cultural Reproduction In Early Modern England
David Glimp
University of Minnesota Press, 2003
A wide-ranging study of the ideology of population control in early modern England. Across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a growing notion of the value of a large populace created a sense of urgency about reproduction; accordingly, a wide array of English writers of the time voiced the need not merely to add more people but also to ensure that England had an abundance of the right kinds of people. This need, in turn, called for a variety of institutions to train-and thus make, through a kind of nonbiological procreation-pious, enterprising, and dutiful subjects. In Increase and Multiply, David Glimp examines previously unexplored links between this emergent demographic mentality and Renaissance literature. Glimp's analysis centers on humanist pedagogy as a mechanism for creating people capable of governing both themselves and others. Acknowledging the ways in which authors such as Sidney, Shakespeare, and Milton advance their own work by appealing to this vision, Glimp argues that their texts allow us to read the scope and limits of this generative ideal, its capacity to reinforce order and to become excessive and destabilizing. His work provides unprecedented insight into the role of fantasies of nonbiological reproduction in early modern political theory, government practice, and literary production. David Glimp is assistant professor of English at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida.
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Indecent Bodies in Early Modern Visual Culture
Fabian Jonietz
Amsterdam University Press, 2023
The life-like depiction of the body became a central interest and defining characteristic of the European Early Modern period that coincided with the establishment of which images of the body were to be considered ‘decent’ and representable, and which disapproved, censored, or prohibited. Simultaneously, artists and the public became increasingly interested in the depiction of specific body parts or excretions. This book explores the concept of indecency and its relation to the human body across drawings, prints, paintings, sculptures, and texts. The ten essays investigate questions raised by such objects about practices and social norms regarding the body, and they look at the particular function of those artworks within this discourse. The heterogeneous media, genres, and historical contexts north and south of the Alps studied by the authors demonstrate how the alleged indecency clashed with artistic intentions and challenges traditional paradigms of the historiography of Early Modern visual culture.
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Independent Women
Work and Community for Single Women, 1850-1920
Martha Vicinus
University of Chicago Press, 1985
Martha Vicinus's subject is the middle-class English woman, the first of her sex who could afford to live on her own earnings 'outside heterosexual domesticity or church governance.' She wanted and needed to work. Meticulous, resonant, original, triumphant, Independent Women tells of the efforts and endurance of this Victorian woman; of her courage and the constraints that she rejected, accepted, and created. . . . The independent women are the 'foremothers' of any women today who seeks significant work, emotionally satisfying friendships, and a morally charged freedom."—from the Foreword by Catharine R. Stimpson

"Feminist insight combines with vast research to produce a dramatic narrative. Independent Women chronicles the energetic lives and imaginative communal structures invented by women who 'pioneered new occupations, new living conditions, and new public roles.'"—Lee R. Edwards, Ms.

"Vicinus is to be congratulated for her brave and unflinching portraits of twisted spinsters as well as stolid saints. That she stretches her net up into the '20s and covers the women's suffrage momement is a brilliant stroke, for one may see clearly how it was possible for women to mount such an enormous and successful political campaign."—Jane Marcus, Chicago Tribune Book World

"Vicinus' beautifully written book abounds in rich historical detail and in subtle psychological insights in the character of its protagonists. The author understands the complexities of the interplay between economic and social conditions, cultural values, and the aims and aspirations of individual personalities who act in history. . . . A superb achievement."—Gerda Lerner, Reviews in American History

"Martha Vicinus has with intelligence and energy paved and landscaped the road on which scholars and students of activist women all travel for many years."—Blanche Wiesen Cook, Women's Review of Books

"Independent Women can be read by anyone with an interest in women's history. But for all contemporary women, unconsciously enjoying privileges and freedoms once bought so dearly, this book should be required reading."—Catharine E. Boyd, History

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Indian Captive, Indian King
Peter Williamson in America and Britain
Timothy J. Shannon
Harvard University Press, 2018

In 1758 Peter Williamson appeared on the streets of Aberdeen, Scotland, dressed as a Native American and telling a remarkable tale. He claimed that as a young boy he had been kidnapped from the city and sold into slavery in America. In performances and in a printed narrative he peddled to his audiences, Williamson described his tribulations as an indentured servant, Indian captive, soldier, and prisoner of war. Aberdeen’s magistrates called him a liar and banished him from the city, but Williamson defended his story.

Separating fact from fiction, Timothy J. Shannon explains what Williamson’s tale says about how working people of eighteenth-century Britain, so often depicted as victims of empire, found ways to create lives and exploit opportunities within it. Exiled from Aberdeen, Williamson settled in Edinburgh, where he cultivated enduring celebrity as the self-proclaimed “king of the Indians.” His performances and publications capitalized on the curiosity the Seven Years’ War had ignited among the public for news and information about America and its native inhabitants. As a coffeehouse proprietor and printer, he gave audiences a plebeian perspective on Britain’s rise to imperial power in North America.

Indian Captive, Indian King is a history of empire from the bottom up, showing how Williamson’s American odyssey illuminates the real-life experiences of everyday people on the margins of the British Empire and how those experiences, when repackaged in travel narratives and captivity tales, shaped popular perceptions about the empire’s racial and cultural geography.

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Indian Ink
Script and Print in the Making of the English East India Company
Miles Ogborn
University of Chicago Press, 2007

A commercial company established in 1600 to monopolize trade between England and the Far East, the East India Company grew to govern an Indian empire. Exploring the relationship between power and knowledge in European engagement with Asia, Indian Ink examines the Company at work and reveals how writing and print shaped authority on a global scale in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Tracing the history of the Company from its first tentative trading voyages in the early seventeenth century to the foundation of an empire in Bengal in the late eighteenth century, Miles Ogborn takes readers into the scriptoria, ships, offices, print shops, coffeehouses, and palaces to investigate the forms of writing needed to exert power and extract profit in the mercantile and imperial worlds. Interpreting the making and use of a variety of forms of writing in script and print, Ogborn argues that material and political circumstances always undermined attempts at domination through the power of the written word.

Navigating the juncture of imperial history and the history of the book, Indian Ink uncovers the intellectual and political legacies of early modern trade and empire and charts a new understanding of the geography of print culture.

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The Indies Diaspora in the Netherlands
Essays on Race, Whiteness, and Identity in Dutch Literature
Alfred Birney; Translated by Annemarie Toebosch and Marjolein van Pagee
Michigan Publishing Services, 2021

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The Indies of the Setting Sun
How Early Modern Spain Mapped the Far East as the Transpacific West
Ricardo Padrón
University of Chicago Press, 2020
Padrón reveals the evolution of Spain’s imagining of the New World as a space in continuity with Asia.

Narratives of Europe’s westward expansion often tell of how the Americas came to be known as a distinct landmass, separate from Asia and uniquely positioned as new ground ripe for transatlantic colonialism. But this geographic vision of the Americas was not shared by all Europeans. While some imperialists imagined North and Central America as undiscovered land, the Spanish pushed to define the New World as part of a larger and eminently flexible geography that they called las Indias, and that by right, belonged to the Crown of Castile and León. Las Indias included all of the New World as well as East and Southeast Asia, although Spain’s understanding of the relationship between the two areas changed as the realities of the Pacific Rim came into sharper focus. At first, the Spanish insisted that North and Central America were an extension of the continent of Asia. Eventually, they came to understand East and Southeast Asia as a transpacific extension of their empire in America called las Indias del poniente, or the Indies of the Setting Sun.

The Indies of the Setting Sun charts the Spanish vision of a transpacific imperial expanse, beginning with Balboa’s discovery of the South Sea and ending almost a hundred years later with Spain’s final push for control of the Pacific. Padrón traces a series of attempts—both cartographic and discursive—to map the space from Mexico to Malacca, revealing the geopolitical imaginations at play in the quest for control of the New World and Asia.
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The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy
Ernst Cassirer
University of Chicago Press, 2010

This provocative volume, one of the most important interpretive works on the philosophical thought of the Renaissance, has long been regarded as a classic in its field.  Ernst Cassirer here examines the changes brewing in the early stages of the Renaissance, tracing the interdependence of philosophy, language, art, and science; the newfound recognition of individual consciousness; and the great thinkers of the period—from da Vinci and Galileo to Pico della Mirandola and Giordano Bruno. The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy discusses the importance of fifteenth-century philosopher Nicholas Cusanus, the concepts of freedom and necessity, and the subject-object problem in Renaissance thought.

“This fluent translation of a scholarly and penetrating original leaves little impression of an attempt to show that a ‘spirit of the age’ or ‘spiritual essence of the time’ unifies and expresses itself in all aspects of society or culture.”—Philosophy

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The Individuality of Portugal
A Study in Historical-Political Geography
By Dan Stanislawski
University of Texas Press, 1959

Many map users have wondered why Portugal, sharing with Spain the Iberian Peninsula, ever became a separate nation. That question is answered with remarkable clarity by Dan Stanislawski. This book also presents an analysis of the factors that produce separate nations and offers a study of the evolution of national cultures generally, especially as they apply to Portugal.

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Individuals and Institutions in Medieval Scholasticism
Edited by Antonia Fitzpatrick and John Sabapathy
University of London Press, 2020
Individuals and Institutions in Medieval Scholasticism is one of the first pieces of close exploratory scholarship on the fundamental relationship between medieval scholastic thought, individual scholars, and their institutions. The text revolves around these essential questions: What was the relationship between particular intellectuals and their wider networks (including but not limited to “schools”), how did intellectuals shape their institutions, and how were their institutions shaped by them? This theoretically sophisticated collection uses a range of European methodological approaches to address a variety of genres such as commentaries, quodlibetal questions, polemics, epic poetry, and inquisition records, and a range of subject matter including history, practical ethics, medicine, theology, philosophy, the constitution of religious orders, the practice of confession, and the institution of cults. This book will be an important reference point for medieval historians, while also raising questions relevant to those working on individualization and institutionalization in other periods and disciplines.
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Industry and Economic Decline in Seventeenth-Century Venice
Richard Tilden Rapp
Harvard University Press, 1976
One of the oldest, most commanding topics in early modern economic history--Venice's fall from commercial supremacy to relative insignificance--is here examined. What emerges is what many scholars have come to suspect: the catch-all phrase "the decline of Venice" embodies a myth. Rapp explains the paradox of seventeenth-century Venice, a republic that experienced a relative economic decline in commerce and industry with no absolute decline in overall income. In this systematic approach to the subject of economic decline, Rapp focuses on economic factors common to all Venetian enterprise: labor supply and quality, technology and capital employment, foreign demand, and government policy. The statistical backbone of this massively documented book is an employment census of the city derived from the records of the Naval Personnel Administration, the Collegio da Milizia da Mar. Throughout the book, many analytical insights are offered about population, guilds, technology, and economic policy in early modern Europe.
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