You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
With nine articles neatly combining contemporary theorizing and historical approaches to political thought and concepts, this volume of Redescriptions draws attention to two topics several of the contributions share. In these articles rhetoric serves both as a style of political theorizing and as a medium of conceptual change. In addition, the relationship of political thought and practice to religion is discussed as a subject matter as well as in the sense of a cultural heritage that is used by the political agents for contemporary purposes.
This book focuses on the reception of classical political ideas in the political thought of the fourteenth-century Italian writer Marsilius of Padua. Vasileios Syros provides a novel cross-cultural perspective on Marsilius’s theory and breaks fresh ground by exploring linkages between his ideas and the medieval Muslim, Jewish, and Byzantine traditions. Syros investigates Marsilius’s application of medical metaphors in his discussion of the causes of civil strife and the desirable political organization. He also demonstrates how Marsilius’s demarcation between ethics and politics and his use of examples from Greek mythology foreshadow early modern political debates (involving such prominent political authors as Niccolò Machiavelli and Paolo Sarpi) about the political dimension of religion, church-state relations, and the emergence and decline of the state.
In A History of Ottoman Political Thought up to the Early Nineteenth Century, Marinos Sariyannis offers a survey of Ottoman political texts, examined in a book-length study for the first time. From the last glimpses of gazi ideology and the first instances of Persian political philosophy in the fifteenth century until the apologists of Western-style military reform in the early nineteenth century, the author studies a multitude of theories and views, focusing on an identification of ideological trends rather than a simple enumeration of texts and authors. At the same time, the book offers analytical summaries of texts otherwise difficult to find in English.
Why devote a Companion to the "mirrors for princes", whose very existence is debated? These texts offer key insights into political thoughts of the past. Their ambiguous, problematic status further enhances their interest. And although recent research has fundamentally challenged established views of these texts, until now there has been no critical introduction to the genre. This volume therefore fills this important gap, while promoting a global historical perspective of different “mirrors for princes” traditions from antiquity to humanism, via Byzantium, Persia, Islam, and the medieval West. This Companion also proposes new avenues of reflection on the anchoring of these texts in their historical realities. Contributors are Makram Abbès, Denise Aigle, Olivier Biaggini, Hugo Bizzarri, Charles F. Briggs, Sylvène Edouard, Jean-Philippe Genet, John R. Lenz, Louise Marlow, Cary J. Nederman, Corinne Peneau, Stéphane Péquignot, Noëlle-Laetitia Perret, Günter Prinzing, Volker Reinhardt, Hans-Joachim Schmidt, Tom Stevenson, Karl Ubl, and Steven J. Williams.
This collection of essays, written by leading experts, showcases historiographical problems, fresh interpretations, and new debates in medieval and Renaissance history and political thought. Recent scholarship on medieval and Renaissance political thought is witness to tectonic movements. These involve quiet, yet considerable, re-evaluations of key thinkers such as Thomas Aquinas and Machiavelli, as well as the string of lesser known "political thinkers" who wrote in western Europe between Late Antiquity and the Reformation. Taking stock of thirty years of developments, this volume demonstrates the contemporary vibrancy of the history of medieval and Renaissance political thought. By both ce...
This volume collects twelve chapters that present the multifaceted responses to the works of the William of Ockham in Oxford, Paris, Italy, and at the papal court in Avignon in the 14th century, and it assembles contributions on philosophers and theologians who all have criticized Ockham’s works at different points. In individual case studies it gives an exemplary overview over the reactions the Venerable Inceptor has provoked and also serves to better understand Ockham’s thought in its historical context. The topics range from ontology, psychology, theory of cognition, epistemology, and natural science to ethics and political philosophy. This volume demonstrates that the reactions to Ockham’s philosophy and theology were manifold, but one particular kind of reception is missing: unanimous approval. Contributors include Fabrizio Amerini, Stephen F. Brown, Nathaniel Bulthuis, Stefano Caroti, Laurent Cesalli, Alessandro D. Conti, Thomas Dewender, Isabel Iribarren, Isabelle Mandrella, Aurélien Robert, Christian Rode, and Sonja Schierbaum
This interdisciplinary handbook provides extensive information about research in medieval studies and its most important results over the last decades. The handbook is a reference work which enables the readers to quickly and purposely gain insight into the important research discussions and to inform themselves about the current status of research in the field. The handbook consists of four parts. The first, large section offers articles on all of the main disciplines and discussions of the field. The second section presents articles on the key concepts of modern medieval studies and the debates therein. The third section is a lexicon of the most important text genres of the Middle Ages. The fourth section provides an international bio-bibliographical lexicon of the most prominent medievalists in all disciplines. A comprehensive bibliography rounds off the compendium. The result is a reference work which exhaustively documents the current status of research in medieval studies and brings the disciplines and experts of the field together.
The past two decades have witnessed a revival of the concept of 'civil society'. From East Central Europe to Latin America and East Asia to the recent calls for a 'European civil society' and a 'global civil society', the concept signifies the need for national and supra-national forms of civic commitment against both unjustified state domination and neo-liberal marketization. Reviewing the long history of the concept, its use in various regional contexts and its place in critical political theory, this book takes comprehensive stock of these debates and asks about the potential of the concept of civil society in guiding political transformations towards fuller understandings of liberty and democracy.
To explore Christian-Muslim relations at the dawn of the modern age, this book examines Nicholas of Cusa’s seminal works on the Qur’an and world religions. It also considers Muslim responses to Christianity and other Christian writings on Islam.
This volume provides the first survey of the unexplored connections between Machiavelli’s work and the Islamic world, running from the Arabic roots of The Prince to its first translations into Ottoman Turkish and Arabic. It investigates comparative descriptions of non-European peoples, Renaissance representations of Muḥammad and the Ottoman military discipline, a Jesuit treatise in Persian for a Mughal emperor, peculiar readers from Brazil to India, and the parallel lives of Machiavelli and the bureaucrat Celālzāde Muṣṭafá. Ten distinguished scholars analyse the backgrounds, circulation and reception of Machiavelli’s writings, focusing on many aspects of the mutual exchange of political theories and grammars between East and West. A significant contribution to attempts by current scholarship to challenge any rigid separation within Eurasia, this volume restores a sense of the global spreading of books, ideas and men in the past.