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Anyone who wants to understand how abortion has been treated historically in the Western legal tradition must first come to terms with two quite different but interrelated historical trajectories. On one hand, there is the ancient Judeo-Christian condemnation of prenatal homicide as a wrong warranting retribution; on the other, there is the juristic definition of "crime" in the modern sense of the word, which distinguished the term sharply from "sin" and "tort" and was tied to the rise of Western jurisprudence. To find the act of abortion first identified as a crime in the West, one has to go back to the twelfth century, to the schools of ecclesiastical and Roman law in medieval Europe. In t...
In Saints and Society, Donald Weinstein and Rudolph M. Bell examine the lives of 864 saints who lived between 1000 and 1700 and the perceptions of sanctity prevalent in late medieval and early modern Europe. They also provide a substantial body of information on the people among whom the saints lived and by whom they came to be venerated. In the first part, the authors give close consideration to what the saints' lives reveal about childhood, adolescence, and adulthood; the impact of religious inspiration upon family bonds; and family influences upon religious behavior. The second part provides a composite picture of piety and its changing configuration in Latin Christendom. With the assistance of statistical analysis, the authors answer questions involving the popular perception of holiness, social class, and gender.
First Published in 2005. The task of compiling a bibliography of the African slave trade is a difficult one as the literature comprises books, pamphlets and periodical articles in a variety of languages from the sixteenth century to the present day. This title aspires to present a representative selection of the material available and serve as a guide to the main categories of printed material on the subject in western languages. Due to their pre-existing availability and overwhelming quantity, government publications have been kept to a minimum.
Vincenzo Consolo is counted by many critics among the most significant voices in contemporary world literature. This volume makes available for the first in English an edited and annotated volume of Consolo's short stories, essays, and other writings pertaining to the diverse cultures and histories of Sicily and the Mediterranean basin. The Mediterranean region holds a particular fascination for Consolo, who seeks through his writing to recover the memory of a Sicilian and Mediterranean history, which he feels is presently being threatened by the forces of late-capitalist Western culture. His writings about the region also voice a commitment to questions of ethics and human rights, which hav...