This is the second volume of Friedell's monumental A Cultural History of the Modern Age. A key figure in the flowering of Viennese culture between the two world wars, this three volume work is considered his masterpiece. The centuries covered in this second volume mark the victory of the scientifi c mind: in nature-research, language-research, politics, economics, war, even morality, poetry, and religion. All systems of thought produced in this century, either begin with the scientifi c outlook as their foundation or regard it as their highest and fi nal goal. Friedell claims three main streams pervade the eighteenth century: Enlightenment, Revolution, and Classicism. In ordinary use, by "Enlightenment" we mean an extreme rationalistic tendency of which preliminary stages were noted in the seventeenth century. Th e term "Classicism", is well understood. Under the term "Revolution" Friedell includes all movements directed against what has been dominant and traditional. Th e aims of such movements were remodeling the state and society, banning all esthetic canons, and dethronement of reason by sentiment, all in the name of the "Return to Nature." Th e Enlightenment tendency might be seen as laying the ground for an age of revolution. Th is second volume continues Friedell's dramatic history of the driving forces of the twentieth century.

Volume three of A Cultural History of the Modern Age finishes a journey that begins with Descartes in the first volume and ends with Freud and the psychoanalytical movement in the third volume. Friedell describes the contents of these books as a series of performances, starting with the birth of the man of the Modern Age, followed by flowering of this epoch, and concludes with the death of the Modern Age. This huge landscape provides an intertwining of the material and the cultural, the civil and the military, from the high points of creative flowering in Europe to death and emptiness. The themes convey multiple messages: romanticism and liberalism opens the cultural scene, encased in a movement from The Congress of Vienna and its claims of peaceful co-existence to the Franco-German War. The final segment covers the period from Bismarck's generation to World War I. In each instance, the quotidian life of struggle, racial, religious, and social class is seen through the lens of the mighty figures of the period. The works of the period's great figures are shown in the new light of the human search for symbolism, the search for superman, the rise of individualism and decline of history as a source for knowledge. This third volume is painted in dark colors, a foreboding of the world that was to come, of political extremes, and intellectual exaggerations. The author looks forward to a postmodern Europe in which there is a faint glean of light from the other side. What actually appeared was the glare of Nazism and Communism, each claiming the future.

"Kippenberg is a fine scholar of real integrity. His book is a readable and practical introduction to the rise of the study of religion and culture in Europe as well as an intriguing piece of cultural theorizing. It is serious without being pompous, intelligent without being at all impenetrable, and fresh without being strange."--Ivan Strenski, University of California, Riverside

A Cultural History of Shopping was a Library Journal Best in Reference selection for 2022. Covering the period from 500 BCE to 500 CE, this is the first book to address the cultural history of shoppers and shopping in antiquity. Evidence for the existence of shops has been found across many archaeological sites in Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East but the study of shops and retailing in antiquity is a relatively new subject. From Classical Greece through to the Late Roman Empire, shopping shifted from being a means to an end – a method of supplementing the family diet or providing material goods the household could not manufacture itself – to a form of experience where the processes of browsing and not purchasing became as important as buying. This dramatic transformation is a reflection of the changing material desires of these societies and their perspectives on the ways in which the fulfilment of those desires could be achieved. Recurring themes in this interdisciplinary volume include the lives of 'ordinary' people; the relationship between gender and shopping; the contrast between Greece and Rome; the attitudes towards shopkeepers; the placing of shops in the cityscape; and the zoning of particular crafts and products. A Cultural History of Shopping in Antiquity presents an overview of the period with themes addressing practices and processes; spaces and places; shoppers and identities; luxury and everyday; home and family; visual and literary representations; reputation, trust and credit; and governance, regulation and the state.

While the physical sciences are a continuously evolving source of technology and of understanding about our world, they have become so specialized and rely on so much prerequisite knowledge that for many people today the divide between the sciences and the humanities seems even greater than it was when C. P. Snow delivered his famous 1959 lecture,

The sea is omnipresent in the ancient cultures of the Mediterranean basin. It is an inexhaustible source of food, but also a well-traveled roadway and a means to communicate, trade with, or wage war against one's neighbors. Perhaps because these practical meanings of the sea were so deeply embedded in daily life, the sea also had a profound religious and symbolic significance for ancient people, from the worship of sea-deities by anxious mariners to the creation of intricate literary devices based on 'the wine-dark sea' and concepts such as insularity. People even imagined that, at the edge of the world, where the ocean meets the sky, was the entrance to the Underworld as well as to Olympus, the realm of the gods. In between these distant mythical shores and the well-known contours of the Mediterranean was a space where all utopias and dystopias could be projected-a space to discover and rediscover endlessly. This volume addresses the constant interplay between the real and the imaginary significance of the sea in ancient thought, from philosophy and science to shipbuilding, trade routes, military technology, poetry, mythmaking, and iconography. The volume spans a period of almost two millennia and an area that covers Spain to India and China, and West Africa to the British Isles, demonstrating the global interconnection of cultures and trade, conceived in its broadest possible sense, in the ancient world.