The emblem, an image accompanied by a motto and a verse or short prose passage, is both art and literature: in the emblem tradition, the image presents a story – often with pictorial symbols – and the verse below it drives home the picture-story's moral instruction. It is one of the most fascinating, and enduring, art forms in Western culture. John Manning's book charts the rise and evolution of the emblem from its earliest manifestations to its emergence as a genre in its own right in the sixteenth century, and then through its various reinventions to the present day. The seventeenth century saw the development of new emblematic forms and sub-genres, and the sharpening of the form for the purpose of social satire. When the Jesuits appropriated the emblem, producing enormous quantities of material, a further dimension of moral seriousness was introduced, alongside a concentration of emblematic "wit". The emblem later came to be directed increasingly at young people and children; in particular, William Blake adopted a fresh attitude towards ideas of the child and childishness. Since then, reprints of 17th-century emblem books have been produced with new plates, and writers and artists from Robert Louis Stevenson to Ian Hamilton Finlay have used emblems in new and subversive ways.

In our own age, the engagement with death has been discretely narrowed into a brief process of formal commemoration and burial, but in Shakespeare's time it was ritualized into the very fabric of everyday life, where the reminders of death, the journey to the grave, and the moment of expiry were all central to the cultural engagement with mortality in post-Reformation England. Inevitably, this way of seeing the world impacted the writing of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, not only in relation to the intellectual content of the drama but with regard to its visual impressions as well. Emblems of Mortality explores the relationship between Shakespeare's theatre and popular memento mori and funereal iconography of the Renaissance, combining cultural studies and historicism with semiotic analysis of period iconography. Through close reading of Elizabethan signs and sign systems with attention to historical context, the work seeks to demonstrate the quality and intention of some of Shakespeare's theatrical designs in a way that will appeal to scholars of drama and students of Shakespeare's work.

The past twenty-five years have brought a dramatic expansion of scholarship in maritime history, including new research on piracy, long-distance trade, and seafaring cultures. Yet maritime history still inhabits an isolated corner of world history, according to editors Lauren Benton and Nathan Perl-Rosenthal. Benton and Perl-Rosenthal urge historians to place the relationship between maritime and terrestrial processes at the center of the field and to analyze the links between global maritime practices and major transformations in world history. A World at Sea consists of nine original essays that sharpen and expand our understanding of practices and processes across the land-sea divide and the way they influenced global change. The first section highlights the regulatory order of the seas as shaped by strategies of land-based polities and their agents and by conflicts at sea. The second section studies documentary practices that aggregated and conveyed information about sea voyages and encounters, and it traces the wide-ranging impact of the explosion of new information about the maritime world. Probing the political symbolism of the land-sea divide as a threshold of power, the last section features essays that examine the relationship between littoral geographies and sociolegal practices spanning land and sea. Maritime history, the contributors show, matters because the oceans were key sites of experimentation, innovation, and disruption that reflected and sparked wide-ranging global change. Contributors: Lauren Benton, Adam Clulow, Xing Hang, David Igler, Jeppe Mulich, Lisa Norling, Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, Carla Rahn Phillips, Catherine Phipps, Matthew Raffety, Margaret Schotte.

This bookexposes the true nature and culture of fraternities and sororities. In these secret societies there are activities and requirements that cause prospective members and members aliketo unknowingly enter into ungodly pacts and covenants. These ungodly practices lead to activities which include physical abuse, fornication, adultery, hatred, envy, strife, manipulation, social and intellectual elitism, abominable sexual activities and witchcraft. These organizationsattract people that are looking for something that only Christ Jesus can provide. However, the organizations appears as a light by their community service and networking abilities. This light however is afalse light.Once one gets into the inner workings of the organizations, the sin and soul inflicting antics are found deeply rooted in darkness. The authorsbeing former members that participated in ungodly activities within these organizations expose the physical, mental, sexualand spiritualdeath-dealing activities found in fraternities and sororities. This is by no means a kiss and tell composition, but it is a trying to save people from hell exposition. Actual accounts of sexual requirements, abuse,ancient ungodly spiritual practices, witchcraft, and required chantswhich denouncetheexistence the One True God are given in detail in this book.Ungodly spirits of oldhave found new vessels to operate inthrough these fraternities and sororities. The good thing about this book is that it not only exposes spiritual wickedness and old ungodly practices, but it shows people who want to be free how to find God, the Ancient of Days.Let the Truth be told. We encourage you to read this book if you arejoining a fraternity or sorority, are a member of one, are apastor, orhave a loved one in one of these organizations. We desire for all to be free and blessed by this book.

The unvarying essential meanings of around 1,000 symbols and symbolic themes commonly found in the art, literature and thought of all cultures through the ages are clarified.