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A study of individual trajectories in an early modern global context
The Commentaries is the first complete English language translation, with complete annotations, of a unique and extraordinary memoir from the pen of the erudite Spanish soldier-diplomat D. García de Silva y Figueroa over the course of his embassy to Persia (1614–1624). The Commentaries transcend the travel-literature genre, emerging as a precocious European intellectual global history that is remarkable for its encyclopedic breadth, its historical depth, and its ethnographic and even artistic sensitivity. The Commentaries will be of interest to historians, ethnographers, and literary critics, or anyone with an interest in early modern European accounts of the encounter between the Portuguese and Spanish Empires and Safavid Persia during the early modern period.
Winner of the Modern Language Association's Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize. The Darker Side of the Renaissance weaves together literature, semiotics, history, historiography, cartography, geography, and cultural theory to examine the role of language in the colonization of the New World. Walter D. Mignolo locates the privileging of European forms of literacy at the heart of New World colonization. He examines how alphabetic writing is linked with the exercise of power, what role "the book" has played in colonial relations, and the many connections between writing, social organization, and political control. It has long been acknowledged that Amerindians were at a disadvantage in facing Europe...
The American-Style University at Large: Transplants, Outposts, and the Globalization of Higher Education is an edited collection by Kathryn L. Kleypas and James McDougall that analyzes the recent expansion of American universities overseas as well as the emergence of American-style universities in Europe, Asia, and Africa. The contributors examine the various ways that American models of higher learning have become instituted around the world and explore ways that these new configurations help to define the university as a force that organizes, develops, and controls methods of education, knowledge, power, and culture.
The topic of religious conversion into and out of Islam as a historical phenomenon is mired in a sea of debate and misunderstanding. It has often been viewed as the permanent crossing of not just a religious divide, but in the context of the early modern Mediterranean also political, cultural and geographic boundaries. Reading between the lines of a wide variety of sources, however, suggests that religious conversion between Christianity, Judaism and Islam often had a more pragmatic and prosaic aspect that constituted a form of cultural translation and a means of establishing communal belonging through the shared, and often contested articulation of religious identities. The chapters in this...
A Companion to the Spanish Renaissance makes a renewed case for the inclusion of Spain within broader European Renaissance movements. Its introduction, “A Renaissance for the ‘Spanish Renaissance’?” will be sure to incite polemic across a broad spectrum of academic fields. This interdisciplinary volume combines micro- with macro-history to offer a snapshot of the best new work being done in this area. With essays on politics and government, family and daily life, religion, nobles and court culture, birth and death, intellectual currents, ethnic groups, the plastic arts, literature, popular culture, law courts, women, literacy, libraries, civic ritual, illness, money, notions of commu...
Books printed in the fifteenth century have been the subject of much in-depth research. In contrast, the beginning of the sixteenth century has not attracted the same scholarly interest. This volume brings together studies that charter the development of printing and bookselling throughout Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It presents new research and analysis on the impact of the Reformation, on how texts were transmitted and on the complex relationships that affected the production and sale of books. The result is a wide-ranging reappraisal of a vital period in the history of the printed book. Contributors include Zsuzsa Barbarics-Hermanik, Jürgen Beyer, Amy Nelson Burnett, Neil Harris, Brenda M. Hosington, Johannes Hund, Henning P. Jürgens, Justyna Kiliańczyk-Zięba, Hans-Jörg Künast, Urs Bernhard Leu, Matthew McLean, Andrew Pettegree, David Shaw, Christoph Volkmar, Hanno Wijsman and Alexander Wilkinson.
A new history explores how one of Renaissance ItalyÕs leading cities maintained its influence in an era of global exploration, trade, and empire. The Grand Duchy of Tuscany was not an imperial power, but it did harbor global ambitions. After abortive attempts at overseas colonization and direct commercial expansion, as Brian Brege shows, Tuscany followed a different path, one that allowed it to participate in EuropeÕs new age of empire without establishing an empire of its own. The first history of its kind, Tuscany in the Age of Empire offers a fresh appraisal of one of the foremost cities of the Italian Renaissance, as it sought knowledge, fortune, and power throughout Asia, the Americas...
This book covers a mix of learned articles and book reviews, which discusses academic moral philosophy and noble virtues. It includes topics about Rodrigo de Arriaga in Prague, Nicolaus Andreae Granius, and academic writing in early modern ethics. It also discusses Johann Bartold Niemeier, the Nicomachean ethics and the teaching of rhetoric at the Akademia Zamojska, and emblematic pedagogy and Nuremberg civic culture. The book captures the richness and diversity of teachings on ethics in early modern universities by clearly illustrating the workings of the teaching of ethics from the late fifteenth to the late seventeenth-century from Spain to Prague. It describes the Protestant universities in the German territories and the regions of central Europe in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
The Natural and Moral History of the Indies, the classic work of New World history originally published by José de Acosta in 1590, is now available in the first new English translation to appear in several hundred years. A Spanish Jesuit, Acosta produced this account by drawing on his own observations as a missionary in Peru and Mexico, as well as from the writings of other missionaries, naturalists, and soldiers who explored the region during the sixteenth century. One of the first comprehensive investigations of the New World, Acosta’s study is strikingly broad in scope. He describes the region’s natural resources, flora and fauna, and terrain. He also writes in detail about the Ameri...