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This second volume of the author’s studies opens with a new survey of the recent historiography of Dubrovnik, and also contains four items specially translated from Serbo-Croat. The first part deals with aspects of daily life in this Mediterranean city, including analyses of the differing attitudes of the patricians and lower classes, and the position of the authorities with regard to homosexuals and Jews. The following articles consider Dubrovnik’s international role, on the one hand as a maritime state and in relation to Venice, and on the other in terms of its participation in the interaction of Latin and Slav cultures in Renaissance Dalmatia.
The first part of David Nicholas's massive two-volume study of the medieval city, this book is a major achievement in its own right. (It is also fully self-sufficient, though many readers will want to use it with its equally impressive sequel which is being published simultaneously.) In it, Professor Nicholas traces the slow regeneration of urban life in the early medieval period, showing where and how an urban tradition had survived from late antiquity, and when and why new urban communities began to form where there was no such continuity. He charts the different types and functions of the medieval city, its interdependence with the surrounding countryside, and its often fraught relations with secular authority. The book ends with the critical changes of the late thirteenth century that established an urban network that was strong enough to survive the plagues, famines and wars of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
The Later Medieval City, 1300-1500, the second part of David Nicholas's ambitious two-volume study of cities and city life in the Middle Ages, fully lives up to its splendid precursor, The Growth of the Medieval City. (Like that volume it is fully self-sufficient, though many readers will want to use the two as a continuum.) This book covers a much shorter period than the first. That traced the rise of the medieval European city system from late Antiquity to the early fourteenth century; this offers a portrait of the fully developed late medieval city in all its richness and complexity. David Nicholas begins with the economic and demographic realignments of the last two medieval centuries. T...
In her own day, Ana Pauker was named "The Most Powerful Woman in the World" by Time magazine. Today, when she is remembered at all, she is thought of as the puppet of Soviet communism in Romania, blindly enforcing the most brutal and repressive Stalinist regime. Robert Levy's new biography changes the picture dramatically, revealing a woman of remarkable strength, dominated by conflict and contradiction far more than by dogmatism. Telling the story of Pauker's youth in an increasingly anti-Semitic environment, her commitment to a revolutionary career, and her rise in the Romanian Communist movement, Levy makes no attempt to whitewash Pauker's life and actions, but rather explores every contour of the complicated persona he found expressed in masses of newly accessible archival documents.
This book presents an innovative and detailed study of the ports of the Crown of Aragon in the initial stage of the maritime expansion of medieval Catalonia, comparing them to the Tuscan coast and port-city of Pisa in the decades that witnessed the apogee of its power in the Mediterranean, and looking for common, or contrasting, traits and patterns of development. The approach is multilevel and multidisciplinary, stressing geomorphological, geographical, political, and commercial factors, and drawing on archaeological investigations as well as published ad unpublished historical documents.
Christianity and Sexuality in the Early Modern World is the first global survey of such for the early modern period. Merry Wiesner-Hanks assesses the role of personal faith and the church itself in the control and expression of all aspects of sexuality. The book ranges over developments within Europe and beyond to the European colonies including Brazil, Mexico, South Africa and Goa, which were establishing themselves around the world. Christian missionaries and rituals and structures accompanied all of the imperial powers and the control of the sexuality of both indigenous peoples and colonists was an essential part of policy. The book is introduced with a clear, original and engaging accoun...
A “groundbreaking” portrait of the migration and resettlement of Spain’s Jewish community after 1492, and how the Sephardic identity emerged (American Historical Review). Honorable Mention, Jordan Schnitzer Book Award in Medieval and Early Modern Jewish History presented by the Association for Jewish Studies On August 3, 1492, the same day that Columbus set sail from Spain, the long and glorious history of that nation’s Jewish community officially came to a close. The expulsion of Europe’s last major Jewish community ended more than a thousand years of unparalleled prosperity, cultural vitality, and intellectual productivity. Yet, the crisis of 1492 also gave rise to a dynamic and ...
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.