Suchergebnisse

Magic, witches, and demons have drawn interest and fear throughout human history. In this comprehensive primary source reader, Martha Rampton traces the history of our fascination with magic and witchcraft from the first through to the seventeenth century. In over 80 readings presented chronologically, Rampton demonstrates how understandings of and reactions toward magic changed and developed over time, and how these ideas were influenced by various factors such as religion, science, and law. The wide-ranging texts emphasize social history and include early Merovingian law codes, the Picatrix, Lombard's Sentences, The Golden Legend, and A Midsummer Night's Dream. By presenting a full spectrum of source types including hagiography, law codes, literature, and handbooks, this collection provides readers with a broad view of how magic was understood through the medieval and early modern eras. Rampton's introduction to the volume is a passionate appeal to students to use tolerance, imagination, and empathy when travelling back in time. The introductions to individual readings are deliberately minimal, providing just enough context so that students can hear medieval voices for themselves

Between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, the rise of international trade, the growth of towns and cities, and the politics of diplomacy all helped to foster productive and far-reaching connections and cultural interactions between Britain and Italy; equally, the flourishing of Italian humanism from the late fourteenth century onwards had a major impact on intellectual life in Britain. The aim of this book is to illustrate the continuity and the variety of these exchanges during the period. Each chapter focuses on a specific area (book collection, historiography, banking, commerce, literary production), highlighting the significance of the productive interchange of people and ideas across diverse cultural communities; it is the lived experience of individuals, substantiated by written evidence, that shapes the book's collective understanding of how two European cultures interacted with each other so fruitfully

Die in diesem Band versammelten Beiträge befassen sich mit dem Begriff des Eros auf Grundlage eines breiten Spektrums historischer, literarischer und kultureller Perspektiven. Eines der wesentlichen Ziele der Publikation ist es, sowohl die Macht als auch die problematischen Aspekte des Eros sowie seinen Beitrag zur Gründung von Familien und Gemeinschaften zu erfassen. Die textbasierten und theoretischen Annäherungen an das Konzept des Eros und die vielfältigen in diesem Zusammenhang erschlossenen Themen reflektieren die unterschiedlichen wissenschaftlichen Disziplinen sowie die interdisziplinäre Herangehensweise der Autoren. Ein besonderer Schwerpunkt liegt auf den historischen Aspekten des Eros, seiner zeitlichen Einordnung und Kontextualisierung.****************This collection of articles deals with the notion of Eros from a broad range of historical, literary and cultural perspectives. One of the primary aims of the collection is to comprehend both the power and the problematic aspects of Eros and its contribution to the formation of family and community. Considering the concept of Eros textually and theoretically, the variety of topics raised reflects the different disciplines of the authors as well as their interdisciplinary approach. Special emphasis was given to the historical aspect of Eros, its temporal location and contextualization. Yosef Kaplan is the Bernard Cherrick Emeritus Professor of Jewish History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His most recent publications include The Religious Cultures of Dutch Jewry (with Dan Michman, Leiden-Boston 2017) and Early Modern Religious and Ethnic Communities in Exile (Cambridge 2017). Yoav Rinon is a Renee Lang professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Department of Classics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His publications include: Sadian Reflections (Madison, 2005), Homer and the Dual Model of the Tragic (Ann Arbor, 2008), a verse translation of and commentary (with Luisa Ferretti-Cuomo) on Dante's Inferno (Carmel Press, 2013), and The Crisis in the Humanities (Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2014). Shimrit Peled is a Lecturer at the Department of Hebrew Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Among her publications: The Israeli sovereign: discourse and the novel 1967-1973 (Jerusalem, 2014), "Constructing Sexual Feminine Subjectivity in Victoria by Sami Michael" (Jerusalem, 2014). Ruth Fine is Salomon and Victoria Cohen Professor of Iberian and Latin American Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her recent publications include Lo converso: orden imaginario y realidad en la cultura española (with M. Guillemont and J.D. Vila) (Madrid/ Frankfurt 2013) and Reescrituras bíblicas cervantinas (Madrid/Frankfurt, 2014).

The Control Agenda is a sweeping account of the history of the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT), their rise in the Nixon and Ford administrations, their downfall under President Carter, and their powerful legacies in the Reagan years and beyond.Matthew Ambrose pays close attention to the interplay of diplomacy, domestic politics, and technology, and finds that the SALT process was a key point of reference for arguments regarding all forms of Cold War decision making. Ambrose argues elite U.S. decision makers used SALT to better manage their restive domestic populations and to exert greater control over the shape, structure, and direction of their nuclear arsenals.Ambrose also asserts that prolonged engagement with arms control issues introduced dynamic effects into nuclear policy. Arms control considerations came to influence most areas of defense decision making, while the measure of stability SALT provided allowed the examination of new and potentially dangerous nuclear doctrines. The Control Agenda makes clear that verification and compliance concerns by the United States prompted continuous reassessments of Soviet capabilities and intentions; assessments that later undergirded key U.S. policy changes toward the Soviet Union. Through SALT's many twists and turns, accusations and countercharges, secret backchannels and propaganda campaigns the specter of nuclear conflict loomed large.

The customary treatment of Mediterranean trade from the 11th to the mid-15th century emphasizes the predominance of western merchants and the commercial exchange of spices and eastern raw materials for western woollens and other finished products. The studies in this collection, the sixth by David Jacoby to be published in the Variorum series, adopt a different perspective. They underscore the economic vitality of various countries bordering the eastern Mediterranean, their industrial capacity, the importance of exchanges between them, and the important contribution of the merchants based in that region to trans-Mediterranean trade. They also illustrate the role of hitherto neglected commodities, such as timber, iron, silk and cheese, in that trade.

Moscow has the largest Muslim population of any city in Europe. In 2015, some 2 million Muslim Muscovites celebrated the opening of the continent's biggest mosque. One quarter of the Soviet population was ethnically Muslim, and today their grandchildren, living in the lands between Bukhara, Kazan and the Caucasus, once again have access to their historical traditions. But they also suffer the effects of civil war, mass migration and political instability. At the highest levels, Islam has been swept up into Russia's broader search for identity, as the old question of eastern versus western takes on new force. Dominic Rubin has spent the last three years interviewing Muslims across Russia, from Sufi shaykhs in Dagestan, new Muslim artists on the Volga and professionals in Kyrgyzstan to guest-workers commuting between Russia and Uzbekistan and Kremlin-sponsored muftis hammering out a new Russian Muslim ideology in Moscow. He discovers their family histories, their faith journeys and their hopes and fears, caught between roles as traditionalist allies in the new Eurasian Russia and as potential traitors in Moscow's war on terror.

In the greatest intelligence operation in the history of the world, Donald Trump was made President of the United States with the assistance of a foreign power. Career U.S. Intelligence officer Malcolm Nance provides the dramatic story of how blackmail, espionage, assassination, and psychological warfare were used by Vladimir Putin and his spy agencies to steal the 2016 U.S. election as a step towards bringing about the fall of NATO, the European Union, and Western democracy. Russia and its fifth column allies work to flip the cornerstones of democracy in order to re-engineer the world political order that has kept most of the world free since 1945. Nance has utilized top secret Russian-sourced political and hybrid warfare strategy documents to demonstrate the master plan to undermine American institutions that has been in effect from the Cold War to the present day. Nance exposes how Russia has supported the campaigns of right-wing extremists throughout both the U.S. and Europe to leverage an axis of autocracy, and how Putin's agencies have worked since 2010 to bring fringe candidate Donald Trump into elections