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This study reveals for the first time the full extent of Chaucer's use of astronomy in his work and sheds new light on the poet's character, literary techniques, and wider purposes. Part I discusses the physical, astronomical, astrological, and geomantic elements of Chaucerian cosmology, providing an introduction to the history of the techniques of medieval astronomy, and argues that Chaucer was indeed the author of the treatise on the equatorium. Part II identifies astronomical allegory in more than a dozen of Chaucer's works.
Examines the impact the Civil War had on coastal North Carolina, describing the key battles that took place on the state's coast during the war.
Argues that Stonehenge's scientific purpose was to observe the setting midwinter sun, and that astronomical observations made by the ancient Britons were as rational and methodical as they are today.
Clocks became common in late medieval Europe and the measurement of time began to rule everyday life. God's Clockmaker is a biography of England's greatest medieval scientist, a man who solved major practical and theoretical problems to build an extraordinary and pioneering astronomical and astrological clock. Richard of Wallingford (1292-1336), the son of a blacksmith, was a brilliant mathematician with a genius for the practical solution of technical problems. Trained at Oxford, he became a monk and then abbot of the great abbey of St Albans, where he built his clock. Although as abbot he held great power, he was also a tragic figure, becoming a leper. His achievement, nevertheless, is a striking example of the sophistication of medieval science, based on knowledge handed down from the Greeks via the Arabs.
The definitive history of humanity's search to find its place within the universe. North charts the history of astronomy and cosmology from the Paleolithic period to the present day.
This book offers a radical new survey of more than a thousand years of religious life at Rome. It sets religion in its full cultural context, between the primitive hamlet of the eighth century BC and the cosmopolitan, multicultural society of the first centuries of the Christian era. The narrative account is structured around a series of broad themes: how to interpret the Romans' own theories of their religious system and its origins; the relationship of religion and the changing politics of Rome; the religious importance of the layout and monuments of the city itself; changing ideas of religious identity and community; religious innovation - and, ultimately, revolution. The companion volume, Religions of Rome: A Sourcebook, sets out a wide range of documents richly illustrating the religious life in the Roman world.
In Pursuing Johns, Thomas C. Mackey studies the New York Committee of Fourteen and its members' attempts to influence vagrancy laws in early-20th-century New York City as a way to criminalize men's patronizing of female prostitutes. It sought out and prosecuted the city's immoral hotels, unlicensed bars, opium dens, disorderly houses, and prostitutes. It did so because of the threats to individual "character" such places presented. In the early 1920s, led by Frederick Whitin, the Committee thought that the time had arrived to prosecute the men who patronized prostitutes through what modern parlance calls a "john's law." After a notorious test case failed to convict a philandering millionaire...