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"By examining in detail the material life of pre-industrial peoples around the world, Fernand Braudel significantly changed the way historians view their subject. Volume I describes food and drink, dress and housing, demography and family structure, energy and technology, money and credit, and the growth of towns."--
Presenting medieval Pisa in a multidisciplinary study, A Companion to Medieval Pisa provides a comprehensive overview of the city at the time of its greatest fame and prosperity. The volume addresses central aspects of the city’s history: its geomorphology and orientation towards the Mediterranean Sea; its ancient past; the archaeological basis for the study of the medieval city and its built environment; Pisa’s urban and port infrastructure; its social organization and political and economic history; its cultural achievements in the visual and literary arts; and the legacy of the medieval past for the city today. Contributors are: David Abulafia, Monica Bini, Veronica Rossi, Stefano Bruni, Antonio Alberti, Gabriele Gattiglia, Alma Poloni, Giuseppe Petralia, Gabriella Garzella, Ewa Karwacka Codini, Cédric Quertier, Michele Campopiano, Michel Balard, Fabio Redi, Olimpia Vaccari, Mauro Ronzani, Maria Luisa Ceccarelli Lemut, Ottavio Banti, Marco Collareta, Karen Rose Mathews, Cristina Cagianelli, and Franco Cardini.
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.
A thought-provoking study of how knowledge of provenance was not transferred with enslaved people and goods from the Portuguese trading empire to Renaissance Italy In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Renaissance Italy received a bounty of "goods" from Portuguese trading voyages—fruits of empire that included luxury goods, exotic animals and even enslaved people. Many historians hold that this imperial "opening up" of the world transformed the way Europeans understood the global. In this book, K.J.P. Lowe challenges such an assumption, showing that Italians of this era cared more about the possession than the provenance of their newly acquired global goods. With three detailed case st...
This volume offers a scholarly examination of educational history, highlighting the pivotal role of educational practices from the late medieval era to the early modern period. It provides a dynamic forum for emerging academics in the field, revealing fresh, multifaceted perspectives on the educational methods of this era. The work illuminates the sophisticated educational systems that shaped Renaissance Milan's merchants and the education of cantors in royal courts and cathedrals. Spanning from Brazil to India, it traces the extensive reach of Jesuit influence and reveals how their teachings fostered an early consciousness of a globally interconnected world in European education. Contributors to this volume: Bradley Blankemeyer, Laura Madella, Jessica Ottelli, Federico Piseri, David Salomoni, and Carolina Vaz de Carvalho.
Anthropology is a notoriously polysemous term. Within a continental European academic context, it is usually employed in the sense of philosophical anthropology, and mainly concerned with exploring concepts of a universal human nature. By contrast, Anglo-American scholarship almost exclusively associates anthropology with the investigation of cultural and ethnic differences (cultural anthropology). How these two main traditions (and their ‘derivations’ such as literary anthropology, historical anthropology, ethnology, ethnography, intercultural studies) relate to each other is a matter of debate. Both, however, have their roots in the path-breaking changes that occurred within sixteenth ...
This book explores the evolution of credit and financing in Europe from the Middle Ages through to Modern Times. It engages with the distinct political, economic and institutional frameworks of the examined areas (England, Italy, France, Germany, Spain, the Netherlands and Turkey) and discusses how these affected the credit market. It covers a wide range of different types of lending and borrowing instruments, the destination of capital, the way it was raised, and the impact it had on local or national economies in a very long run. Presented in two parts, part one of the book focuses on credit markets in the preindustrial age, in particular the period before the advent of modern joint stock banks. Part two examines the evolution of credit at the time of the emergence of modern banks. This volume will be of interest to academics and researchers in the field of finance who are interested in the historic evolution of credit and the credit market.
An analysis of Valencia's fifteenth-century port activity functional to the study of the city's diverse maritime networks and markets based on first-hand archive research mainly focusing on the second half of the fifteenth century. The text also takes into account an assortment of further late-fourteenth to early-sixteenth century data collected and analysed by other authors.
How did we make reliable predictions before Pascal and Fermat's discovery of the mathematics of probability in 1654? What methods in law, science, commerce, philosophy, and logic helped us to get at the truth in cases where certainty was not attainable? In The Science of Conjecture, James Franklin examines how judges, witch inquisitors, and juries evaluated evidence; how scientists weighed reasons for and against scientific theories; and how merchants counted shipwrecks to determine insurance rates. The Science of Conjecture provides a history of rational methods of dealing with uncertainty and explores the coming to consciousness of the human understanding of risk.