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First systematic, inclusive study of the impact of the high civilizations of Asia on the development of modern Western civilization.
This monumental series, acclaimed as a "masterpiece of comprehensive scholarship" in the New York Times Book Review, reveals the impact of Asia's high civilizations on the development of modern Western society. The authors examine the ways in which European encounters with Asia have altered the development of Western society, art, literature, science, and religion since the Renaissance. In Volume III: A Century of Advance, the authors have researched seventeenth-century European writings on Asia in an effort to understand how contemporaries saw Asian societies and peoples.
Eating the flesh of an Egyptian mummy prevents the plague. Distilled poppies reduce melancholy. A Turkish drink called coffee increases alertness. Tobacco cures cancer. Such beliefs circulated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, an era when the term "drug" encompassed everything from herbs and spices—like nutmeg, cinnamon, and chamomile—to such deadly poisons as lead, mercury, and arsenic. In The Age of Intoxication, Benjamin Breen offers a window into a time when drugs were not yet separated into categories—illicit and licit, recreational and medicinal, modern and traditional—and there was no barrier between the drug dealer and the pharmacist. Focusing on the Portuguese col...
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Portugal was not always the best place for poets in the sixteenth century. Against the backdrop of an expanding empire, the country's annexation by Spain in 1580, and ongoing religious controversy, poets struggled to articulate their worth to rulers and patrons. This did not prevent them, however, from persisting in their craft. Indeed, many of their works reflected precisely on the question of what poetry could do and what, ultimately, its value was. The answers that poets like Luís de Camões, Francisco de Sá de Miranda, António Ferreira, and Diogo Bernardes offered to these questions, and which are explored in this book, ranged from lofty ideals to the more practical concerns of making...