Suchergebnisse

This book examines the relationship between humans and nature that evolved in medieval Europe over the course of a millennium. From the beginning, people lived in nature and discovered things about it. Ancient societies bequeathed to the Middle Ages both the Bible and a pagan conception of natural history. These conflicting legacies shaped medieval European ideas about the natural order and what economic, moral and biological lessons it might teach. This book analyzes five themes found in medieval views of nature – grafting, breeding mules, original sin, property rights and disaster – to understand what some medieval people found in nature and what their assumptions and beliefs kept them from seeing

Europe at the millennium -- Agriculture and rural life -- Trade 1000-1350 -- Cities, guilds, and political economy -- Economic and social thought -- The great hunger and the big death -- The calamitous fourteenth century -- Technology and consumerism -- War and social unrest -- Fifteenth century portraits

Three excellent recent books attest to how much remains to be understood about the AIDS epidemic, and even about its most well-studied years, the 1980s and 1990s. While varying by discipline and approach, these books converge around a common set of preoccupations: the potency of historical legacies, the vigor as well as the fragility of counterpublics, the tensions between individualizing and collectivizing responses to disaster, and the social management of despair. Yet despite their virtues, these books also raise questions about the limitations of accounts that isolate HIV/AIDS as a distinct scholarly topic.

The influence and staying power of Gayle Rubin's essay "Thinking Sex" reflect her success in taking the insights of empirical studies of sexuality—particularly, historically informed ethnography—and drawing out their intellectual and political implications so as to permit an astonishingly interdisciplinary engagement. Part of what Rubin has given social scientists (as well as ethnographically minded humanists) is a model of how to link discourse and representation to the domain of practice as enacted within the lived worlds of erotic communities that are marked by their own rituals, politics, institutions, and spatial configurations.