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Revolution sweeps Louis Zander, a charismatic philosopher of art and politics known as L, into power as dictator of England. This skillfully composed story could be a fictional realization of the Cloward-Piven strategy or Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals. It is a page-turner that traces the process by which one evil man seduces, perverts and destroys an entire nation. L could be Hitler, Stalin, or even the next Prime Minister or President. Jillian Becker was inspired to write this novel while researching her internationally best-selling book, Hitler's Children: The Story of the Baader-Meinhof Gang. * L: A Novel History deserves to take its place among the great dystopias - The Trial, 1984, ...
"This study of the roots and expression of free thought in the Renaissance consists of three parts. The first is a overview of the history of dissident ideas up to and including the first part of the sixteenth century; the second is an examination and a new interpretation of the Cymbalum Mundi, probably by Bonaventure des Periers; the third is a presentation and interpretation of the Dialogues of Jacques Tahureau. Both works are seen to take their place as resurgences of a continuous though necessarily mostly covert current of dissident thought and feeling which was to well openly to the surface in the libertinism of the seventeenth century and be seen in full flood in the age of the Enlight...
A landmark in the study of early modern Europe, this two-volume collection makes available for the first time a selection of the most important texts from court and civic festival books. Festival entertainments were presented to mark such occasions as royal and ducal entries to capital cities, dynastic marriages, the birth and christening of heirs, religious feasts and royal and ducal funerals. Europa Triumphans represents the chronological and trans-European range of the court and civic festival. These festivals are considered not simply as texts, but as events, and are introduced by groups of scholars, each with a specialist knowledge of the political, social and cultural significance of t...
Winner of the 2016 Roland H. Bainton Book Prize of the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference During the sixteenth century, no part of the Christian West saw the development of a more powerful and pervasive astrological culture than the very home of the Reformation movement--the Protestant towns of the Holy Roman Empire. While most modern approaches to the religious and social reforms of that age give scant attention to cosmological preoccupations, Robin Barnes argues that astrological concepts and imagery played a key role in preparing the ground for the evangelical movement sparked by Martin Luther in the 1520s, as well as in shaping the distinctive characteristics of German evangelical ...
The popular conception of the Renaissance as a culture devoted to order and perfection does not account for an important characteristic of Renaissance art: many of the period's major works, including those by da Vinci, Erasmus, Michelangelo, Ronsard, and Montaigne, appeared as works-in-progress, always liable to changes and additions. In Perpetual Motion, Michel Jeanneret argues for a sixteenth century swept up in change and fascinated by genesis and metamorphosis. Jeanneret begins by tracing the metamorphic sensibility in sixteenth-century science and culture. Theories of creation and cosmology, of biology and geology, profoundly affected the perspectives of leading thinkers and artists on ...
Setting out the historical national and religious characteristics of the Italians as they impact on the integration within the European Union, this study makes note of the two characteristics that have an adverse effect on Italian national identity: cleavages between north and south and the dominant role of family. It discusses how for Italians family loyalty is stronger than any other allegiance, including feelings towards their country, their nation, or the EU. Due to such subnational allegiances and values, this book notes that Italian civic society is weaker and engagement at the grass roots is less robust than one finds in other democracies, leaving politics in Italy largely in the hands of political parties. The work concludes by noting that EU membership, however, provides no magic bullet for Italy: it cannot change internal cleavages, the Italian worldview, and family values or the country’s mafia-dominated power matrix, and as a result, the underlying absence of fidelity to a shared polity—Italian or European—leave the country as ungovernable as ever.
What makes individuals with divergent and often conflicting interests join together and act in unison? By drawing on the fear of external threats, this book develops a theory of 'negative association' that examines the dynamics captured by the maxim 'The enemy of my enemy is my friend'. It then traces its role from Greek and Roman political thought, through Machiavelli and the reason of state thinkers, and Hobbes and his emulators and critics, to the realists of the twentieth century. By focusing on the role of fear and enmity in the formation of individual and group identity, this book reveals an important tradition in the history of political thought and offers insights into texts that are considered familiar. This book demonstrates that the fear of external threats is an essential element of the formation and preservation of political groups and that its absence renders political association unsustainable.
Among the best-known and most prolific French women writers of the sixteenth century, Madeleine (1520–87) and Catherine (1542–87) des Roches were celebrated not only for their uncommonly strong mother-daughter bond but also for their bold assertion of poetic authority for women in the realm of belles lettres. The Dames des Roches excelled in a variety of genres, including poetry, Latin and Italian translations, correspondence, prose dialogues, pastoral drama, and tragicomedy; collected in From Mother and Daughter are selections from their celebrated oeuvre, suffused with an engaging and enduring feminist consciousness. Madeleine and Catherine spent their entire lives in civil war–torn ...