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The flood of information brought to us by advancing technology is often accompanied by a distressing sense of "information overload," yet this experience is not unique to modern times. In fact, says Ann M. Blair in this intriguing book, the invention of the printing press and the ensuing abundance of books provoked sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European scholars to register complaints very similar to our own. Blair examines methods of information management in ancient and medieval Europe as well as the Islamic world and China, then focuses particular attention on the organization, composition, and reception of Latin reference books in print in early modern Europe. She explores in detail the sophisticated and sometimes idiosyncratic techniques that scholars and readers developed in an era of new technology and exploding information.
"Information technology shapes nearly every part of modern life, and debates about information--its meaning, effects, and applications--are central to a range of fields, from economics, technology, and politics to library science, media studies, and cultural studies. This rich, unique resource traces the history of information with an approach designed to draw connections across fields and perspectives, and provide essential context for our current age of information. Clear, accessible, and authoritative, the book opens with a series of articles that provide a narrative history of information from premodern practices to twenty-first-century information culture. This section focuses on major ...
The wrenching decision facing successful women who must choose between demanding careers and intensive family lives has been the subject of many articles and books, most of which propose strategies for resolving the dilemma. Competing Devotions focuses on broader social and cultural forces that create women's identities and shape their understanding of what makes life worth living. Mary Blair-Loy examines the career paths of women financial executives who have tried various approaches to balancing career and family. These mavericks, who face great resistance but are aided by new ideological and material resources that come with historical change, may eventually redefine both the nuclear fami...
This book presents and explores a challenging new approach in book history. It offers a coherent volume of thirteen chapters in the field of early modern book history covering a wide range of topics and it is written by renowned scholars in the field. The rationale and content of this volume will revitalize the theoretical and methodological debate in book history. The book will be of interest to scholars and students in the field of early modern book history as well as in a range of other disciplines. It offers book historians an innovative methodological approach on the life cycle of books in and outside Europe. It is also highly relevant for social-economic and cultural historians because of the focus on the commercial, legal, spatial, material and social aspects of book culture. Scholars that are interested in the history of science, ideas and news will find several chapters dedicated to the production, circulation and consumption of knowledge and news media.
The Theater of Nature is histoire totale of the last work of the political philosopher Jean Bodin, his Universae naturae theatrum (1596). Through Bodin's work, Ann Blair explores the fascinating and previously little known world of late Renaissance natural philosophy. A study of the text, of its context (through comparisons with different genres of natural philosophy and works entitled "Theater"), and of its reception in the seventeenth century highlights above all the religious motivations, encyclopedic ambitions, and bookish methods characterizing much of late Renaissance science. Amid the religious crisis and the explosion of knowledge in the late sixteenth century, natural philosophy off...
This is Tony Blair's own account of his political life, his rise to power, his life on the world stage, and the clashes, controversies and triumphs of one of the most successful political careers of modern times.
This first book-length study of physico-theology questions the widespread notion of a steadily advancing early modern separation of religion and science. Beginning around 1650, the emergence of a number of new scientific concepts, methods, and instruments challenged existing syntheses of science and religion. Physico-theology, which embraced the values of personal, empirical observation, was an international movement of the early Enlightenment that focused on the new science to make arguments about divine creation and providence. By reconciling the new science with Christianity across many denominations, physico-theology played a crucial role in diffusing new scientific ideas, assumptions, a...
The lives of one California family over the course of five decades is recounted. Each of four siblings tells his or her story--a doctor, psychiatrist, teacher, and problem child James, the only one who hasn't settled down.
The past quarter-century has seen an explosion of interest in the history of science and religion. But all too often the scholars writing it have focused their attention almost exclusively on the Christian experience, with only passing reference to other traditions of both science and faith. At a time when religious ignorance and misunderstanding have lethal consequences, such provincialism must be avoided and, in this pioneering effort to explore the historical relations of what we now call "science" and "religion," the authors go beyond the Abrahamic traditions to examine the way nature has been understood and manipulated in regions as diverse as ancient China, India, and sub-Saharan Africa. Science and Religion around the World also provides authoritative discussions of science in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam -- as well as an exploration of the relationship between science and the loss of religious beliefs. The narratives included in this book demonstrate the value of plural perspectives and of the importance of location for the construction and perception of science-religion relations.
Somewhere in Africa, more than a million years ago, a line of apes began to rear their young differently than their Great Ape ancestors. From this new form of care came new ways of engaging and understanding each other. How such singular human capacities evolved, and how they have kept us alive for thousands of generations, is the mystery revealed in this bold and wide-ranging new vision of human emotional evolution. Mothers and Others finds the key in the primatologically unique length of human childhood. If the young were to survive in a world of scarce food, they needed to be cared for, not only by their mothers but also by siblings, aunts, fathers, friends—and, with any luck, grandmoth...