You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Over 8,200 large city fires broke out between 1000 and 1939 CE in Central Europe. Prometheus Tamed inquires into the long-term history of that fire ecology, its local and regional frequencies, its relationship to climate history. It asks for the visual and narrative representation of that threat in every-day life. Institutional forms of fire insurance emerged in the form of private joint stock companies (the British model, starting in 1681) or in the form of cameralist fire insurances (the German model, starting in 1676). They contributed to shape and change society, transforming old communities of charitable solidarity into risk communities, finally supplemented by networks of cosmopolite aid. After 1830, insurance agencies expanded tremendously quickly all over the globe: Cultural clashes of Western and native perceptions of fire risk and of what is insurance can be studied as part of a critical archaeology of world risk society and the plurality of modernities.
From a modern point of view, the four volumes of the Atlantica of Olaus Rudbeck the elder (1630-1702) seem to be not only the climax of Gothicism, but a key example of an early modern polymath. In Odins Imperium Bernd Roling reconstructs Rudbeck’s immense influence at Scandinavian universities, the debates he provoked, his manifold reception in early modern academic culture and the role Rudbeckianism played as paradigm of science until the Swedish romanticism of the 19th century. Taking into account all branches of science, Bernd Roling illustrates in detail Rudbeck’s majestic impact on antiquarianism, national mythology, and also on religious sciences and linguistics, but also documents the massive criticism the scholar from Uppsala received almost immediately. See inside the book.