Author: Albrecht Classen
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3111190609
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 628
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Book Description
Although it is fashionable among modernists to claim that globalism emerged only since ca. 1800, the opposite can well be documented through careful comparative and transdisciplinary studies, as this volume demonstrates, offering a wide range of innovative perspectives on often neglected literary, philosophical, historical, or medical documents. Texts, images, ideas, knowledge, and objects migrated throughout the world already in the pre-modern world, even if the quantitative level compared to the modern world might have been different. In fact, by means of translations and trade, for instance, global connections were established and maintained over the centuries. Archetypal motifs developed in many literatures indicate how much pre-modern people actually shared. But we also discover hard-core facts of global economic exchange, import of exotic medicine, and, on another level, intensive intellectual debates on religious issues. Literary evidence serves best to expose the extent to which contacts with people in foreign countries were imaginable, often desirable, and at times feared, of course. The pre-modern world was much more on the move and reached out to distant lands out of curiosity, economic interests, and political and military concerns. Diplomats crisscrossed the continents, and artists, poets, and craftsmen traveled widely. We can identify, for instance, both the Vikings and the Arabs as global players long before the rise of modern globalism, so this volume promises to rewrite many of our traditional notions about pre-modern worldviews, economic conditions, and the literary sharing on a global level, as perhaps best expressed by the genre of the fable.
Author: Jeffrey D. Sachs
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231550480
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 369
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Book Description
Today’s most urgent problems are fundamentally global. They require nothing less than concerted, planetwide action if we are to secure a long-term future. But humanity’s story has always been on a global scale. In this book, Jeffrey D. Sachs, renowned economist and expert on sustainable development, turns to world history to shed light on how we can meet the challenges and opportunities of the twenty-first century. Sachs takes readers through a series of seven distinct waves of technological and institutional change, starting with the original settling of the planet by early modern humans through long-distance migration and ending with reflections on today’s globalization. Along the way, he considers how the interplay of geography, technology, and institutions influenced the Neolithic revolution; the role of the horse in the emergence of empires; the spread of large land-based empires in the classical age; the rise of global empires after the opening of sea routes from Europe to Asia and the Americas; and the industrial age. The dynamics of these past waves, Sachs demonstrates, offer fresh perspective on the ongoing processes taking place in our own time—a globalization based on digital technologies. Sachs emphasizes the need for new methods of international governance and cooperation to prevent conflicts and to achieve economic, social, and environmental objectives aligned with sustainable development. The Ages of Globalization is a vital book for all readers aiming to make sense of our rapidly changing world.
Author: Albrecht Classen
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3111387631
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 606
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Book Description
The study of pre-modern anthropology requires the close examination of the relationship between nature and human society, which has been both precarious and threatening as well as productive, soothing, inviting, and pleasurable. Much depends on the specific circumstances, as the works by philosophers, theologians, poets, artists, and medical practitioners have regularly demonstrated. It would not be good enough, as previous scholarship has commonly done, to examine simply what the various writers or artists had to say about nature. While modern scientists consider just the hard-core data of the objective world, cultural historians and literary scholars endeavor to comprehend the deeper meaning of the concept of nature presented by countless writers and artists. Only when we have a good grasp of the interactions between people and their natural environment, are we in a position to identify and interpret mental structures, social and economic relationships, medical and scientific concepts of human health, and the messages about all existence as depicted in major art works. In light of the current conditions threatening to bring upon us a global crisis, it matters centrally to take into consideration pre-modern discourses on nature and its enormous powers to understand the topoi and tropes determining the concepts through which we perceive nature. Nature thus proves to be a force far beyond all human comprehensibility, being both material and spiritual depending on our critical approaches.
Author: Albrecht Classen
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 184384690X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 157
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Book Description
First English translation and detailed commentary of a fourteenth-century Low-German work about the Near and Middle East. That extensive travel took place during the Middle Ages has long been established, via such accounts as, for example, Marco Polo's Devisement du Monde; but there remains a relative paucity of documents or narratives confirming and dealing with this phenomenon. Der Niederrheinische Orientbericht ("An Account of the Middle East"), composed around 1350/55 by an anonymous author in Low German, is powerful evidence of international relations between east and west during this period; it provides extensive information, dealing with such matters as the local culture, fauna and flora, and offers spectacular insights into the co-existence of many different religions and peoples. It is therefore an important source for our knowledge; but it has hitherto been neglected by scholars, not least because of the difficulty of its language. This volume offers the first translation into English, thereby making the work available to a wider audience; it is accompanied by a detailed commentary on its historical, religious, military, architectural and political elements, elucidating the narrative fully. The volume also contains a contextual introduction, considering what can be known of the author, and the manuscript tradition.
Author: Ivan T. Berend
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139452649
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 24
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Book Description
A major history of economic regimes and economic performance throughout the twentieth century. Ivan T. Berend looks at the historic development of the twentieth-century European economy, examining both its failures and its successes in responding to the challenges of this crisis-ridden and troubled but highly successful age. The book surveys the European economy's chronological development, the main factors of economic growth, and the various economic regimes that were invented and introduced in Europe during the twentieth century. Professor Berend shows how the vast disparity between the European regions that had characterized earlier periods gradually began to disappear during the course of the twentieth century as more and more countries reached a more or less similar level of economic development. This accessible book will be required reading for students in European economic history, economics, and modern European history.
Author: Chiara Benati
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1036415082
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 161
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Book Description
Lanfranc of Milan is one of the most influential medieval surgeons and his Latin works informed surgical practice until the seventeenth century. Both his Chirurgia parva and Chirurgia magna were repeatedly translated into vernacular languages and contributed to the dissemination of surgical knowledge throughout late medieval Europe. Addressing a public of scholars and graduate students in the fields of philology, historical linguistics and history of medicine, this volume aims at analyzing in depth some key-aspects of the Romance and the Germanic translations of Lanfranc’s works from both a philological and lexical perspective. In this, it focuses on some relevant questions concerning the aim of these vernacular versions, their authors, and their intended audience. Including contributions by experts in the field in both the Romance and the Germanic areas, this volume enhances a comparative approach toward the study of the development of a vernacular surgical tradition.
Author: Peter Paul Dobek
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1666927392
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 253
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Book Description
Public houses—inns, taverns, and alehouses—during the Jagiellonian Dynasty (1385-1572) in the city of Cracow functioned as important establishments in the everyday life of the city. While the city continued to grow and prosper as the preferred residence of the dynasty, inhabitants, travelers, and migrants increasingly relied on the public houses of the conurbation to meet their many needs and desires. Although scholars have studied these establishments throughout Europe during various epochs, they have neglected to analyze the public houses in Cracow during the Jagiellonian era. The Public House in Central Europe: Inns, Taverns, and Alehouses in Cracow during the Jagiellonian Dynasty provides a comprehensive examination of a multitude of sources to reconstruct qualitatively and quantitatively the public houses of the city. This reconstruction reveals public houses' role in the history of the city, their locations, edifices, related activities, and people, including publicans, clients, and others. This book places the establishments of Cracow at the center of a deeply debated topic about the extent and types of violence in public houses, which further addresses their many functions. Contrary to some contemporary accounts and some current secondary literature, the establishments were fundamental to the everyday life of the city and were not centers of nefarious acts.
Author: Albrecht Classen
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1666941220
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 301
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Book Description
Examining literary narratives from the tenth through the fifteenth centuries, this book explores how writers used their craft to voice harsh criticism of the ruling class and unearths a deep distrust of kings and other authority figures during the Middle Ages.
Author: Fidel Fajardo-Acosta
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1666926949
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 315
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Book Description
The Poetry of the Medieval Troubadour, William IX of Aquitaine: The Songs that Built Europe offers a new edition, translation, and critical discussion of the songs of the first European troubadour, William IX, Duke of Aquitaine. This book argues that William and his poetic works manifest the economic, political, and cultural forces that laid the foundations of modern Europe, including the subjectivities of modern westerners and the concerns and motifs of what later became the national literatures of France, Spain, England, Germany, and Italy. Encouraging personal freedoms, self-definition, and the pursuit of love and happiness, the culture of courtly love that William initiated is distinctly modern but can also be seen to have played a key role in the subjection of medieval Europeans to the then-emergent market economy, imperialist ambitions of the Church, and authority of proto-national kingdoms. As such subjection affected even the highest-ranking aristocrats, such as William, the road of liberation of desire appears to have been a fast lane to serfdom for everyone, perhaps the most pre-modern feature of the modern and postmodern conditions.
Author: B. M. S. Campbell
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521195888
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 491
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Book Description
Major account of the fourteenth-century crisis which saw a series of famines, revolts and epidemics transform the medieval world.
