A Cultural History of Memory presents an authoritative survey from ancient times to the present. The set of six volumes covers over 2500 years of history, charting the evolving nature and role of memory throughout history. This volume, A Cultural History of Memory in the Early Modern Age, explores memory in the period from 1450 to 1700 AD. As with all the volumes in the illustrated Cultural History of Memory set, this volume presents essays on memory and: power and politics; time and space; media and technology; science and education; philosophy, religion and history, high culture and popular culture; rituals, faith, practices and the everyday; and remembering and forgetting. A Cultural History of Memory in the Early Modern Age is the most authoritative and comprehensive survey available on memory in the Renaissance.

Pt. 1. The theoretical basis -- Memory culture -- Written culture -- Cultural identity and political imagination -- pt. 2. Case studies -- Egypt -- Israel and the invention of religion -- The birth of history from the spirit of the law -- Greece and disciplined thinking -- Cultural memory : a summary.

This volume examines the practice of memory in early modern Europe, showing that this was already a multimedia affair with many political uses, and affecting people at all levels of society; many pre-modern memory practices persist until today.

For both producers and consumers of theatre in the early modern era, art was viewed as a social rather than an individual activity. Emerging in the context of new capitalistic modes of production, the birth of the nation state and the rise of absolute monarchies, theatre also proved a highly mobile medium across geolinguistic boundaries. This volume provides a comprehensive and interdisciplinary overview of the cultural history of theatre from 1400 to 1650, and examines the socioeconomically heterodox nature of theatre and performance during this period. Highly illustrated with 48 images, the ten chapters each take a different theme as their focus: institutional frameworks; social functions; sexuality and gender; the environment of theatre; circulation; interpretations; communities of production; repertoire and genres; technologies of performance; and knowledge transmission.

Jay Winter's powerful 1998 study of the 'collective remembrance' of the Great War offers a major reassessment of one of the critical episodes in the cultural history of the twentieth century. Dr Winter looks anew at the culture of commemoration and the ways in which communities endeavoured to find collective solace after 1918. Taking issue with the prevailing 'modernist' interpretation of the European reaction to the appalling events of 1914 18, Dr Winter instead argues that what characterised that reaction was, rather, the attempt to interpret the Great War within traditional frames of reference. Tensions arose inevitably. Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning is a profound and moving book of seminal importance for the attempt to understand the course of European history during the first half of the twentieth century."