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As war, pestilence, and famine spread through Europe in the Middle Ages, so did reports of miracles, of hopeless victims wondrously saved from disaster. These "rescue miracles," recorded by over one hundred fourteenth-century cults, are the basis of Michael Goodich's account of the miraculous in everyday medieval life. Rescue miracles offer a wide range of voices rarely heard in medieval history, from women and children to peasants and urban artisans. They tell of salvation not just from the ravages of nature and war, but from the vagaries of a violent society—crime, unfair judicial practices, domestic squabbles, and communal or factional conflict. The stories speak to a collapse of confid...
This book aims to provide an understanding of "religious exoticism", and of the ways in which certain foreign religious practices and beliefs are disseminated and appropriated through contemporary practices of bricolage.
In the first English-language edition of a general, synthetic history of French Jewry from antiquity to the present, Esther Benbassa tells the intriguing tale of the social, economic, and cultural vicissitudes of a people in diaspora. With verve and insight, she reveals the diversity of Jewish life throughout France's regions, while showing how Jewish identity has constantly redefined itself in a country known for both the Rights of Man and the Dreyfus affair. Beginning with late antiquity, she charts the migrations of Jews into France and traces their fortunes through the making of the French kingdom, the Revolution, the rise of modern anti-Semitism, and the current renewal of interest in J...
Nineteenth-century France grew fascinated with the local past. Thousands of citizens embraced local archaeology, penned historical vignettes and monographs, staged historical pageants, and created museums and pantheons of celebrities. Stéphane Gerson's rich, elegantly written, and timely book provides the first cultural and political history of what contemporaries called the "cult of local memories," an unprecedented effort to resuscitate the past, instill affection for one's locality, and hence create a sense of place. A wide range of archival and printed sources (some of them untapped until now) inform the author's engaging portrait of a little-known realm of Parisian entrepreneurs and mi...
By revealing the investment of eighteenth-century British prose fiction in contemporary debates about domestic ideology, this book addresses the multiple ways in which traditional notions of the family were estranged, reconstituted as novel concepts, and then finally presented as national social norms. It focuses on works by Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Eliza Haywood, Horace Walpole, Laurence Sterne, and Mary Wollstonecraft, addressing a number of narratives that historians of the novel have overlooked while linking such better-known works as Robinson Crusoe and Pamela to their often neglected sequels. Challenging competing critical claims that the household either experience...
Over the past decade or so, the social scientific sociological analysis of the family has been obliged to reconsider its traditional view that industrialisation triggered a shift within society from the 'large family', which fulfilled all social functions from socialising the children to caring for the sick and the old, to the modern nuclear family, which was regarded solely as being the locus for emotional relationships. Historians have shown that in the past there was a variety of family structures within a range of varying demographic, economic and cultural frameworks, distinctive for each society. At the same time, the interaction between sociology and social anthropology has led to a cl...
The nineteenth century, a time of far-reaching cultural, political, and socio-economic transformation in Europe, brought about fundamental changes in the role of women. Women achieved this by fighting for their rights in the legal, economic, and political spheres. In the various parts of Europe, this process went forward at a different pace and followed different patterns. Most historical research up to now has ignored this diversity, preferring to focus on women’s emancipation movements in major western European countries such as Britain and France. The present volume provides a broader context to the movement by including countries both large and small from all regions of Europe. Fourteen historians, all of them specialists in women’s history, examine the origins and development of women’s emancipation movements in their respective areas of expertise. By exploring the cultural and political diversity of nineteenth-century Europe and at the same time pointing out connections to questions explored by conventional scholarship, the essays shed new light on common developments and problems.
Many observers in colonial Spanish America—whether clerical, governmental, or foreign—noted the large numbers of forasteros, or Indians who were not seemingly attached to any locality. These migrants, or “wanderers,” offended the bureaucratic sensibilities of the Spanish administration, as they also frustrated their tax and revenue efforts. Ann M. Wightman’s research on these early “undocumentals” in the Cuzco region of Peru reveals much of importance on Andean society and its adaptation and resistance to Spanish cultural and political hegemony. The book thereby informs our understanding of social change in the colonial period. Wightman shows that the dismissal of the forastero...
The original French edition of this encyclopedia, the Encyclopédie politique et historique des femmes, Second Edition has been lauded by French reviewers, and now Routledge is pleased to publish this acclaimed resource in an English language edition. From the Salic Law in medieval France to the American Revolution to today's women's representation in American and European politics, this valuable resource discusses women's participation in Western political and historical transformation. The 40 authoritative in-depth articles, written by an international team of scholars, examine women's activism in areas such as voting, emancipation, equality, and democracy, providing students and general readers with an indispensable resource.
In Middle-Class Pentecostalism in Argentina: Inappropriate Spirits Jens Köhrsen offers an intriguing account of how the middle class relates to Latin America's most vibrant religious movement. Based on pervasive field research, this study suggests that Pentecostalism stands in tension with the social imaginary of the middle class and is perceived as an inappropriate lower class practice. As such, middle class Pentecostals negotiate the appropriateness of their religious belonging by demonstrating distinctive tastes and styles of Pentecostalism. Abstaining from the expressiveness, emotionality, and strong spiritual practice that have marked the movement, they create a milder and socially more acceptable form of Pentecostalism. Increasingly turning into a middle class movement, this style has the potential to embody the future shape of Pentecostalism.