Galka Scheyer, Walter and Louise Arensberg, Richard Neutra, Rudolph Schindler, Will Connell, Lloyd Wright, Norman Bel Geddes, Edward Weston, John Cage, Anais Nin, Jake Zeitlin, Merle Armitage, Harriet and Sam Freeman, and several dozen other artists and designers--this was a circle, not just a loose network of acquaintances. The modernist pioneers of Los Angeles art and architecture made statements in their work and legacies, but they were every bit as much a community as they were individual satellites of expression. These people gathered in solidarity, they met as friends and lovers, and they shared excitement over their important breaks with tradition. In modest but lasting ways, they changed Los Angeles forever. There is history in that, and there is inspiration as well. This book is about a secret Los Angeles, a Los Angeles filled with optimism about a different kind of "city of the future."

"Larvatus prodeo," announced René Descartes at the beginning of the seventeenth century: "I come forward, masked." Deliberately disguising or silencing their most intimate thoughts and emotions, many early modern Europeans besides Descartes-princes, courtiers, aristocrats and commoners alike-chose to practice the shadowy art of dissimulation. For men and women who could not risk revealing their inner lives to those around them, this art of incommunicativity was crucial, both personally and politically. Many writers and intellectuals sought to explain, expose, justify, or condemn the emergence of this new culture of secrecy, and from Naples to the Netherlands controversy swirled for two centuries around the powers and limits of dissimulation, whether in affairs of state or affairs of the heart. This beautifully written work crisscrosses Europe, with a special focus on Italy, to explore attitudes toward the art of dissimulation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Discussing many canonical and lesser-known works, Jon R. Snyder examines the treatment of dissimulation in early modern treatises and writings on the court, civility, moral philosophy, political theory, and in the visual arts.

In the Early Modern period - as both reformed and Catholic churches strove to articulate orthodox belief and conduct through texts, sermons, rituals, and images - communities grappled frequently with the connection between sacred space and behavior. The Sacralization of Space and Behavior in the Early Modern World explores individual and community involvement in the approbation, reconfiguration and regulation of sacred spaces and the behavior (both animal and human) within them. The individual’s understanding of sacred space, and consequently the behavior appropriate within it, depended on local need, group dynamics, and the dissemination of normative expectations. While these expectations were defined in a growing body of confessionalizing literature, locally and internationally traditional clerical authorities found their decisions contested, circumvented, or elaborated in order to make room for other stakeholders’ activities and needs. To clearly reveal the efforts of early modern groups to negotiate authority and the transformation of behavior with sacred space, this collection presents examples that allow the deconstruction of these tensions and the exploration of the resulting campaigns within sacred space. Based on new archival research the eleven chapters in this collection examine diverse aspects of the campaigns to transform Christian behavior within a variety of types of sacred space and through a spectrum of media. These essays give voice to the arguments, exhortations, and accusations that surrounded the activities taking place in early modern sacred space and reveal much about how people made sense of these transformations.

First published in 2002. This fascinating collection of essays examines the politics of gender and desire in premodern Iberia. Eukene Lacarra Lanz brings together a group of noted specialists in Arabic, as well as Castilian, Catalan and other Romance languages, to investigate the changes that affected marriage and sexuality over the course of the millennium, from approximately 650 to 1650 A.D. The contributors utilise a variety of literary and philosophical texts, legal documents, and medical treatises to explore a broad range of topics, such as shrew-taming, wedding rituals, wet-nursing, cross-dressing, sodomy and moral pornography. The volume's interdisciplinary approach traces the origins and genealogies of the predominant discourses on these subjects that engaged the minds of medieval and premodern writers, moralists, politicians and scientists alike. Marriage and sexuality in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia offers a rich history and insightful analysis of some of the central themes of Hispanic literary and cultural life.

Early Modern Universities: Networks of Higher Education contains twenty essays by experts on early modern academic networks. Using a variety of approaches to universities, schools, and academies throughout Europe and in Central America, the book suggests pathways for future research.

Although it is fashionable among modernists to claim that globalism emerged only since ca. 1800, the opposite can well be documented through careful comparative and transdisciplinary studies, as this volume demonstrates, offering a wide range of innovative perspectives on often neglected literary, philosophical, historical, or medical documents. Texts, images, ideas, knowledge, and objects migrated throughout the world already in the pre-modern world, even if the quantitative level compared to the modern world might have been different. In fact, by means of translations and trade, for instance, global connections were established and maintained over the centuries. Archetypal motifs developed in many literatures indicate how much pre-modern people actually shared. But we also discover hard-core facts of global economic exchange, import of exotic medicine, and, on another level, intensive intellectual debates on religious issues. Literary evidence serves best to expose the extent to which contacts with people in foreign countries were imaginable, often desirable, and at times feared, of course. The pre-modern world was much more on the move and reached out to distant lands out of curiosity, economic interests, and political and military concerns. Diplomats crisscrossed the continents, and artists, poets, and craftsmen traveled widely. We can identify, for instance, both the Vikings and the Arabs as global players long before the rise of modern globalism, so this volume promises to rewrite many of our traditional notions about pre-modern worldviews, economic conditions, and the literary sharing on a global level, as perhaps best expressed by the genre of the fable.

This anthology provides a broad overview of the social history of preaching throughout Western and Central Europe, with sections devoted to genre, specific countries, and commentary on the appeal of the Reformation messages.