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The Spirit of French Capitalism
How did the economy become bound up with faith in infinite wealth creation and obsessive consumption? Drawing on the economic writings of eighteenth-century French theologians, historian Charly Coleman uncovers the surprising influence of the Catholic Church on the development of capitalism. Even during the Enlightenment, a sense of the miraculous did not wither under the cold light of calculation. Scarcity, long regarded as the inescapable fate of a fallen world, gradually gave way to a new belief in heavenly as well as worldly affluence. Animating this spiritual imperative of the French economy was a distinctly Catholic ethic that—in contrast to Weber's famous "Protestant ethic"—privileged the marvelous over the mundane, consumption over production, and the pleasures of enjoyment over the rigors of delayed gratification. By viewing money, luxury, and debt through the lens of sacramental theory, Coleman demonstrates that the modern economy casts far beyond rational action and disenchanted designs, and in ways that we have yet to apprehend fully.
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A Data-Driven Analysis of Cemeteries and Social Reform in Paris, 1804–1924
This book takes a novel, data-driven approach to the cemeteries of Paris, analyzing a largely text-based body of archival material as proxy evidence for visual material that has been lost due to systematic, and legally sanctioned, acts of erasure. This study represents the first full-length study of vernacular monuments in France and the entrepreneurs who made them. It also provides methodical considerations, at the intersection of the computational and digital humanities for managing survival biases in extant historical evidence, that are applicable beyond the thematic focus of this book. Since extant examples of these more inconspicuous monuments are rare, this project employs both distant and close viewing—analyzing commercial almanacs, work logs, and burial records in aggregates alongside detailed case studies—to compensate for gaps in the material record. The book will be of interest to scholars working in visual culture, popular culture, digital humanities, and French history.
Elephant Slaves & Pampered Parrots
This lively history “adds a new dimension to our understanding of 18th-century France” by exploring the Parisian fashion of importing exotic animals (American Historical Review). In 1775, a visitor to Laurent Spinacuta’s Grande Ménagerie at the annual winter fair in Paris would have seen two tigers, several kinds of monkeys, an armadillo, an ocelot, and a condor—in all, forty-two live animals. In the streets of the city, one could observe performing elephants and a fighting polar bear. Those looking for unusual pets could purchase parrots, flying squirrels, and capuchin monkeys. The royal menagerie at Versailles displayed lions, cranes, an elephant, a rhinoceros, and a zebra, which ...
The Great Vogue for the Guitar in Western Europe
The first book devoted to the composers, instrument makers and amateur players who advanced the great guitar vogue throughout Western Europe during the early decades of the nineteenth century. Contemporary critics viewed the fashion for the guitar with sheer hostility, seeing in it a rejection of true musical value. After all, such trends advanced against the grain of mainstream musical developments of ground-breaking (often Austro-German) repertoire for standard instruments. Yet amateur musicians throughout Europe persisted; many instruments were built to meet the demand, a substantial volume of music was published for amateurs to play, and soloist-composers moved freely between European ci...
Gendered Touch
This book aims at exploring how practical expertise, textual learning, and the gendered bodies intersected with the production of knowledge in early modern Europe. Gendered touch looks at both how representations of gendered bodies contributed to the production of knowledge, and at how practice itself was gendered. By exploring new archival material and by reading anew printed sources, the book inquiries about how knowledge was produced, translated, appropriated, and transmitted among different kinds of actors – both women and men – such as craftspeople, physicians, alchemists, apothecaries, music theorists, natural philosophers, and natural historians.
How Scientists Explain Disease
How do scientists develop new explanations of disease? How do those explanations become accepted as true? And how does medical diagnosis change when physicians are confronted with new scientific evidence? These are some of the questions that Paul Thagard pursues in this pathbreaking book that develops a new, integrative approach to the study of science. Ranging through the history of medicine, from the Hippocratic theory of humors to modern explanations of Mad Cow Disease and chronic fatigue syndrome, Thagard analyzes the development and acceptance of scientific ideas. At the heart of the book is a case study of the recent dramatic shift in medical understanding of peptic ulcers, most of whi...
The Expert Cook in Enlightenment France
In the eighteenth-century French household, the servant cook held a special place of importance, providing daily meals and managing the kitchen and its finances. In this scrupulously researched and witty history, Sean Takats examines the lives of these cooks as they sought to improve their position in society and reinvent themselves as expert, skilled professionals. Much has been written about the cuisine of the period, but Takats takes readers down into the kitchen and introduces them to the men and women behind the food. It is only in that way, Takats argues, that we can fully recover the scientific and cultural significance of the meals they created, and, more important, the contributions...
The Arsenal of Eighteenth-Century Chemistry
The substantial collection of Antoine Laurent Lavoisier’s apparatus is not the only surviving collection of eighteenth-century chemical apparatus and instrumentation, but it is without question the most important. The present study provides the first scientific catalogue of Lavoisier’s surviving apparatus. This collection of instruments is remarkable not only for the quality of many of them but, above all, for the number of items that have survived (ca. 600 items). Given such a wealth and variety of instruments, this study also offers the first comprehensive attempt to reconstruct the cultural and social context of Lavoisier’s experimental activities.
