Cultural Encounters: Cross-disciplinary studies from the Late Middle Ages to the Enlightenment
Title | Cultural Encounters: Cross-disciplinary studies from the Late Middle Ages to the Enlightenment PDF eBook |
Author | Désirée Cappa |
Publisher | Vernon Press |
Pages | 183 |
Release | 2019-01-15 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 1622735374 |
This collection of essays contributes to the growing field of ‘encounter studies’ within the domain of cultural history. The strength of this work is the multi- and interdisciplinary approach, with papers on a broad range of historical times, places, and subjects. While each essay makes a valuable and original contribution to its relevant field(s), the collection as a whole is an attempt to probe more general questions and issues concerning the productive outcomes of cultural encounters throughout the Late Medieval and Early Modern periods. The collection is divided into three sections organised thematically and chronologically. The first, ‘Encounters with the Past,’ focuses on the reception of classical antiquity in medieval images and texts from France, Italy and the British Isles. The second, ‘Encounters with Religion,’ presents a selection of instances in which political, philosophical and natural philosophical issues arise within inter-religious contexts. The final section, ‘Encounters with Humanity,’ contains essays on early science fiction, political symbolism, and Elizabethan drama theory, all of which deal with the conception and expression of humanity, on both the individual and societal level. This volume’s wide range of topics and methodological approaches makes it an important point of reference for researchers and practitioners within the humanities who have an interest in the (cross-)cultural history of the medieval and Renaissance periods.
Twilight of the Godlings
Title | Twilight of the Godlings PDF eBook |
Author | Francis Young |
Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
Pages | 385 |
Release | 2023-03-31 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 1009330365 |
A bold and field-defining exploration of the cultural and religious origins of Britain's small gods, fairies and other supernatural beings.
From Influence to Inhabitation
Title | From Influence to Inhabitation PDF eBook |
Author | James E. Christie |
Publisher | Springer Nature |
Pages | 223 |
Release | 2019-10-02 |
Genre | Science |
ISBN | 3030221695 |
This book describes how and why the early modern period witnessed the marginalisation of astrology in Western natural philosophy, and the re-adoption of the cosmological view of the existence of a plurality of worlds in the universe, allowing the possibility of extraterrestrial life. Founded in the mid-1990s, the discipline of astrobiology combines the search for extraterrestrial life with the study of terrestrial biology – especially its origins, its evolution and its presence in extreme environments. This book offers a history of astrobiology's attempts to understand the nature of life in a larger cosmological context. Specifically, it describes the shift of early modern cosmology from a paradigm of celestial influence to one of celestial inhabitation. Although these trends are regarded as consequences of Copernican cosmology, and hallmarks of a modern world view, they are usually addressed separately in the historical literature. Unlike others, this book takes a broad approach that examines the relationship of the two. From Influence to Inhabitation will benefit both historians of astrology and historians of the extraterrestrial life debate, an audience which includes researchers and advanced students studying the history and philosophy of astrobiology. It will also appeal to historians of natural philosophy, science, astronomy and theology in the early modern period.
Fate and Fortune in European Thought, ca. 1400–1650
Title | Fate and Fortune in European Thought, ca. 1400–1650 PDF eBook |
Author | Ovanes Akopyan |
Publisher | BRILL |
Pages | 300 |
Release | 2021-04-26 |
Genre | Philosophy |
ISBN | 9004459960 |
This collection of essays presents new insights into what shaped and constituted the Renaissance and early modern views of fate and fortune. It argues that these ideas were emblematic of a more fundamental argument about the self, society, and the universe and shows that their influence was more widespread, both geographically and thematically, than hitherto assumed.
Rediscovering Enoch? The Antediluvian Past from the Fifteenth to Nineteenth Centuries
Title | Rediscovering Enoch? The Antediluvian Past from the Fifteenth to Nineteenth Centuries PDF eBook |
Author | |
Publisher | BRILL |
Pages | 464 |
Release | 2023-02-13 |
Genre | Religion |
ISBN | 9004537511 |
As the first volume to focus on texts and traditions about Enoch between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, this book brings specialists in antiquity into conversation with specialists in early modernity, exploring the reimagination of the antediluvian past.
Debating the Stars in the Italian Renaissance
Title | Debating the Stars in the Italian Renaissance PDF eBook |
Author | Ovanes Akopyan |
Publisher | BRILL |
Pages | 272 |
Release | 2020-10-12 |
Genre | Philosophy |
ISBN | 9004442278 |
An account of the astrological controversies that arose in Renaissance Italy in the wake of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s Disputationes adversus astrologiam divinatricem, published in 1496.
A Cultural History of Race in the Middle Ages
Title | A Cultural History of Race in the Middle Ages PDF eBook |
Author | Thomas Hahn |
Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
Pages | 257 |
Release | 2023-06-01 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 1350300004 |
This volume presents a comprehensive and collaborative survey of how people, individually and within collective entities, thought about, experienced, and enacted racializing differences. Addressing events, texts, and images from the 5th to the 16th centuries, these essays by ten eminent scholars provide broad, multi-disciplinary analyses of materials whose origins range from the British Isles, Western Iberia, and North Africa across Western and Eastern Europe to the Middle East. These diverse communities possessed no single word equivalent to modern race, a term (raza) for genetic, religious, cultural, or territorial difference that emerges only at the end of the medieval period. Chapter by chapter, this volume nonetheless demonstrates the manifold beliefs, practices, institutions, and images that conveyed and enforced difference for the benefit of particular groups and to the detriment of others. Addressing the varying historiographical self-consciousness concerning race among medievalist scholars themselves, the separate analyses make use of paradigms drawn from social and political history, religious, environmental, literary, ethnic, and gender studies, the history of art and of science, and critical race theory. Chapters identify the eruption of racial discourses aroused by political or religious polemic, centered upon conversion within and among Jewish, Christian, and Islamic communions, and inspired by imagined or sustained contact with alien peoples. Authors draw their evidence from Hebrew, Latin, Arabic, and a profusion of European vernaculars, and provide searching examinations of visual artefacts ranging from religious service books to maps, mosaics, and manuscript illuminations