What is an epaulette? What is a hanbok? These clothing items--and hundreds more--are entertainingly explained and vividly illustrated in this accessible guide. Whether in art or life, fashion makes a statement. It gives form to the temper of the times and the motives of the moment, charting shifts in society, status, technology, and economy. Fashion is shaped by both high and popular culture and reveals the influence of individuals from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds. Spanning the centuries and representing a global point of view, Looking at Fashion is a guide to the elements that make clothing practical, wearable, stylish, and distinctive. Created for scholars, students, fashionistas, and anyone who wants to expand their understanding of world culture through the history of dress, this book provides a rich and varied lexicon of the vocabulary that describes and explains the most essential components of garments and techniques of clothing construction. Ranging from basic pieces and their individual parts to structure, embellishments, and innovations, Looking at Fashion offers insights into the evolution of dress in terms of style, fit, and design. Gorgeous color illustrations, including paintings, photographs, historical garments, and custom drawings, reveal the interrelationship of fashion and art from antiquity to now.
Looking beyond the marble elegance of Michelangelo's David, the pugnacious, passionate, and--crucially--important story of Renaissance manhood. Making the Renaissance Man explores the images, objects, and experiences that fashioned men and masculinity in the courts of fifteenth-century Italy. Across the peninsula, Italian princes fought each other in fierce battles and spectacular jousts, seduced mistresses, flaunted splendor in lavish rituals of knighting, and demonstrated prowess through the hunt--all ostentatious performances of masculinity and the drive to rule. Hardly frivolous pastimes, these activities were essential displays of privilege and virility; indeed, violence underlay the cultural veneer of the Italian Renaissance. Timothy McCall investigates representations and ideals of manhood in this time and provides a historically grounded and gorgeously illustrated account of how male identity and sexuality proclaimed power during a century crucial to the formation of Early Modern Europe.
A Times Literary Supplement Best Book of the Year
A preeminent Renaissance scholar illuminates early modern encounters with books, in which literature became a portal to self-awareness and miraculous communion between author and reader. The experience of reading is often presented as personal and transformative--a journey of self-discovery and, perhaps, renewal. In A Marvelous Solitude, Lina Bolzoni examines the early modern roots of this attitude toward the readerly act. Between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, European men of letters increasingly came to see books as something more than compendia of knowledge: they could also help readers understand the human condition. As Bolzoni shows, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Machiavelli, Montaigne, and Tasso all presented reading as a private encounter and a dialogue with the author. For many Renaissance intellectuals, reading was instrumental to the construction of the self, which was enriched by contact with other learned men. These readers imagined the book as a mirror image of its author, with whom they held a secret affinity. In their letters to one another, humanists described the book as a body, reflecting the notion that reading literature placed its author in the room with oneself. Reading the work of a deceased author became akin to a necromantic rite, as the writers of bygone times were resurrected and placed in contemporary conversation. The vogue for hanging portraits of authors in libraries and studios ensured that the image of the creator was never far from his words, cementing bonds of friendship across barriers of time. These myths--charming, fragile, and powerful--invested the readerly encounter with miraculous properties that lingered in the hearts of the Romantics. And something of those wonders persists today, in the intimate feeling that reading yet provokes.
"Maus I" was the first half of the tale of survival of the author's parents, charting their desperate progress from pre-war Poland Auschwitz. Here is the continuation, in which the father survives the camp and is at last reunited with his wife.
Based on research in the Inquisitorial archives of Northern Italy, The Night Battles recounts the story of a peasant fertility cult centered on the benandanti, literally, "good walkers." These men and women described fighting extraordinary ritual battles against witches and wizards in order to protect their harvests. While their bodies slept, the souls of the benandanti were able to fly into the night sky to engage in epic spiritual combat for the good of the village. Carlo Ginzburg looks at how the Inquisition's officers interpreted these tales to support their world view that the peasants were in fact practicing sorcery. The result of this cultural clash, which lasted for more than a century, was the slow metamorphosis of the benandanti into the Inquisition's mortal enemies--witches.
Relying upon this exceptionally well-documented case study, Ginzburg argues that a similar transformation of attitudes--perceiving folk beliefs as diabolical witchcraft--took place all over Europe and spread to the New World. In his new preface, Ginzburg reflects on the interplay of chance and discovery, as well as on the relationship between anomalous cases and historical generalizations.
"An amazing read." --The Los Angeles Times
The #1 New York Times bestselling historical novelist delivers her magnum opus--a landmark work of feminist nonfiction that radically redefines our understanding of the extraordinary roles ordinary women played throughout British history.
AN INDIE BESTSELLER
Did you know that there are more penises than women in the Bayeux Tapestry? That the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 was started and propelled by women who were protesting a tax on women? Or that celebrated naturalist Charles Darwin believed not just that women were naturally inferior to men, but that they'd evolve to become ever more inferior?
These are just a few of the startling findings you will learn from reading Philippa Gregory's Normal Women. In this ambitious and groundbreaking book, she tells the story of England over 900 years, for the very first time placing women--some fifty per cent of the population--center stage.
Using research skills honed in her work as one of our foremost historical novelists, Gregory trawled through court records, newspapers, and journals to find:
highwaywomen beggars murderers brides housewives pirates female husbands hermitsThe "normal women" you will meet in these pages went to war, ploughed the fields, campaigned, wrote, and loved. They rode in jousts, flew Spitfires, issued their own currency, and built ships, corn mills and houses. They committed crimes or treason, worshipped many gods, cooked and nursed, invented things, and rioted. A lot.
A landmark work of scholarship and storytelling, Normal Women chronicles centuries of social and cultural change--from 1066 to modern times--powered by the determination, persistence, and effectiveness of women.
*INCLUDES ILLUSTRATIONS THROUGHOUT AND A FULL-COLOR INSERT*
"An expansive, inclusive and elegantly woven nonfiction account of the lives of women in England from the Norman Conquest to the modern day. To describe it as merely a retelling is to undermine a core principle: This is a history of women in England, yes, but it is also a history of England, full stop. . . . At more than 500 pages, with extensive endnotes and a 30-page index, Normal Women is a behemoth you may be inclined to skim, until you realize you're actually luxuriating in every word." --The New York Times
The definitive history of the Ottoman Empire "Lucid, judicious and enjoyable." (Times Literary Supplement) The Ottoman Empire was one of the largest and most influential empires in world history. Its reach extended to three continents and it survived for more than six centuries, but its history is too often colored by the memory of its bloody final throes on the battlefields of World War I. In this magisterial work--the first definitive account written for the general reader--renowned scholar and journalist Caroline Finkel lucidly recounts the epic story of the Ottoman Empire from its origins in the thirteenth century through its destruction in the twentieth.
The Ottoman Empire was one of the most important non-Western states to survive from medieval to modern times, and played a vital role in European and global history. It continues to affect the peoples of the Middle East, the Balkans and central and western Europe to the present day. This new survey examines the major trends during the latter years of the empire, paying attention to gender issues and to hotly-debated topics such as the treatment of minorities. In this second edition, Donald Quataert has updated his authoritative text, revised the bibliographies, and included brief biographies of major figures of the Byzantines and the post-Ottoman Middle East. First Edition Hb (2000) 0-521-633281 First Edition Pb (2000) 0-521-63360-5
A wide-ranging study of the rich questions raised by speaking infants in medieval French literature. Medieval literature is full of strange moments when infants (even fetuses) speak. In Out of the Mouths of Babes, Julie Singer explores the unsettling questions raised by these events, including What is a person? Is speech fundamental to our humanity? And what does it mean, or what does it matter, to speak truth to power? Singer contends that descriptions of baby talk in medieval French literature are far from trivial. Through treatises, manuals, poetry, and devotional texts, Singer charts how writers imagined infants to speak with an authority untainted by human experience. What their children say, then, offers unique insight into medieval hopes for universal answers to life's deepest wonderings.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER - A "gripping" (The Washington Post) account of how the major transformations in history--from the rise of Homo sapiens to the birth of capitalism--have been shaped not by humans but by germs "Superbly written . . . Kennedy seamlessly weaves together scientific and historical research, and his confident authorial voice is sure to please readers of Yuval Noah Harari or Rutger Bregman."--The Times (U.K.) According to the accepted narrative of progress, humans have thrived thanks to their brains and brawn, collectively bending the arc of history. But in this revelatory book, Professor Jonathan Kennedy argues that the myth of human exceptionalism overstates the role that we play in social and political change. Instead, it is the humble microbe that wins wars and topples empires. Drawing on the latest research in fields ranging from genetics and anthropology to archaeology and economics, Pathogenesis takes us through sixty thousand years of history, exploring eight major outbreaks of infectious disease that have made the modern world. Bacteria and viruses were protagonists in the demise of the Neanderthals, the growth of Islam, the transition from feudalism to capitalism, the devastation wrought by European colonialism, and the evolution of the United States from an imperial backwater to a global superpower. Even Christianity rose to prominence in the wake of a series of deadly pandemics that swept through the Roman Empire in the second and third centuries: Caring for the sick turned what was a tiny sect into one of the world's major religions. By placing disease at the center of his wide-ranging history of humankind, Kennedy challenges some of the most fundamental assumptions about our collective past--and urges us to view this moment as another disease-driven inflection point that will change the course of history. Provocative and brimming with insight, Pathogenesis transforms our understanding of the human story.