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Drawing on extensive archival work, this book examines the crucial contribution of Neapolitan string virtuosi to the dissemination of instrumental music and to the development of string practices and musical culture in Europe. It presents a fresh look at the central place of instrumental music in early modern Naples and considers aspects of music pedagogy, performance practices, patronage, and musicians' social mobility. Music examples, paintings, and lists of personnel of major music institutions inform the discussion and illustrate the opportunities for social mobility afforded by the music profession. Music production and consumption are considered within their cultural, political, and economic contexts and in connection with the rapid political changes of eighteenth-century Naples. This substantial contribution to the understanding of a previously under-studied repertory places the cultivation of Neapolitan instrumental music at the centre of aesthetic and cultural developments across eighteenth-century Europe.
"From personal interviews with chaplains at the temporary mortuary at Ground Zero and her own experiences as an Episcopal priest, psychotherapist, and chaplain, Storm Swain offers a new model of pastoral care grounded in theology and practice. Reflecting on experiences of suffering faced in ministry, Swain considers what it means to love in these instances and what is involved in ministering in these contexts. Within this model, caregivers can move from a place of trauma to a place of transformation, which enables wholeness and healing for both caregivers and those for whom they care" -- Publisher description.
At the heart of the Christian proclamation is the problematic body of Jesus: problematic because His crucified form conveyed shame rather than glory, problematic because Christian communities argued about whether Jesus' body shared in the corruptible and tactile qualities of other human bodies. Jesus' message-bearing body is not the only storytelling body we encounter in early Christian writings. Paul, for example, invited recipients of his letters to read the gospel story in his scarred body. In the second and early third centuries, Christians argued about the perpetual virginity of the body of Mary, the mother of Jesus, and those on both sides of the question saw Mary's body as a meaningfu...
Slavery was widespread throughout the Mediterranean lands where Christianity was born and developed. Though Christians were both slaves and slaveholders, there has been surprisingly little study of what early Christians thought about the realities of slavery. How did they reconcile slavery with the Gospel teachings of brotherhood and charity? Slaves were considered the sexual property of their owners: what was the status within the Church of enslaved women and young male slaves who were their owners' sexual playthings? Is there any reason to believe that Christians shied away from the use of corporal punishments so common among ancient slave owners? Jennifer A. Glancy brings a multilayered a...
Strange Wonder confronts Western philosophy's ambivalent relationship to the Platonic "wonder" that reveals the strangeness of the everyday. On the one hand, this wonder is said to be the origin of all philosophy. On the other hand, it is associated with a kind of ignorance that ought to be extinguished as swiftly as possible. By endeavoring to resolve wonder's indeterminacy into certainty and calculability, philosophy paradoxically secures itself at the expense of its own condition of possibility. Strange Wonder locates a reopening of wonder's primordial uncertainty in the work of Martin Heidegger, for whom wonder is first experienced as the shock at the groundlessness of things and then as an astonishment that things nevertheless are. Mary-Jane Rubenstein traces this double movement through the thought of Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Jacques Derrida, ultimately thematizing wonder as the awesome, awful opening that exposes thinking to devastation as well as transformation. Rubenstein's study shows that wonder reveals the extraordinary in and through the ordinary, and is therefore crucial to the task of reimagining political, religious, and ethical terrain.
Ferdinand III played a crucial role both in helping to end the Thirty Years' War and in re-establishing Habsburg sovereignty within his hereditary lands, and yet he remains one of the most neglected of all Habsburg emperors. The underlying premise of Sacred Music as Public Image for Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand III is that Ferdinand's accomplishments came not through diplomacy or strong leadership but primarily through a skillful manipulation of the arts, through which he communicated important messages to his subjects and secured their allegiance to the Catholic Church. An important locus for cultural activity at court, especially as related to the Habsburgs' political power, was the Empero...