Search

Crowning Glories integrates Louis XIV's propaganda campaigns, the transmission of Northern art into France, and the rise of empiricism in the eighteenth century – three historical touchstones – to examine what it would have meant for France's elite to experience the arts in France simultaneously with Netherlandish realist painting. In an expansive study of cultural life under the Sun King, Harriet Stone considers the monarchy's elaborate palace decors, the court's official records, and the classical theatre alongside Northern images of daily life in private homes, urban markets, and country fields. Stone argues that Netherlandish art assumes an unobtrusive yet, for the history of ideas, surprisingly dramatic role within the flourishing of the arts, both visual and textual, in France during Louis XIV's reign. Netherlandish realist art represented thinking about knowledge that challenged the monarchy's hold on the French imagination, and its efforts to impose the king's portrait as an ideal and proof of his authority. As objects appreciated for their aesthetic and market value, Northern realist paintings assumed an uncontroversial place in French royal and elite collections. Flemish and Dutch still lifes, genre paintings, and cityscapes, however, were not merely accoutrements of power, acquisitions made by those with influence and money. Crowning Glories reveals how the empirical orientation of Netherlandish realism exposed French court society to a radically different mode of thought, one that would gain full expression in the Encyclopédie of Diderot and d'Alembert.

The division of European society and culture along a North/South axis was one of the most decisive and enduring developments in the modern world. In North/South, which completes a trilogy of works devoted to the study of the mind and body of Europe, Ricardo J. Quinones examines the momentous early modern origins of this division. Quinones focuses on four concepts connected with the Protestant Reformation whose emergence defines the rise of the North and the subjugation of the South: Christian liberty, skepticism, tolerance, and time. Tracing their influence through the political and philosophical conflicts of the era and forward into the Enlightenment, he suggests that they constitute the basis of Europe's transformation between the sixteenth century and the dawn of the industrial revolution.A fascinating combination of cultural and intellectual history, philosophy, and comparative literature written in the vein of Quinones'award-winning Dualisms, this work, called “dazzling” by one critic, shows a contemporary pertinence with the relapse of the South into the subordinate position which it was thought to have overcome.

Pope Pius XII presided over the Catholic Church during one of the most challenging moments in its history. Elected in early 1939, Pius XII spoke out against war and destruction, but his refusal to condemn Nazi Germany and its allies for mass atrocities and genocide remains controversial almost seventy years after the end of the Second World War.Scholars have blamed Pius's inaction on anti-communism, antisemitism, a special emotional bond with Germany, or a preference for fascist authoritarianism. Delving deep into Catholic theology and ecclesiology, Jacques Kornberg argues instead that what drove Pius XII was the belief that his highest priority must be to preserve the authority of the Church and the access to salvation that it provided.In The Pope's Dilemma, Kornberg uses the examples of Pius XII's immediate predecessors Benedict XV and the Armenian genocide and Pius XI and Fascist Italy, as well as case studies of Pius XII's wartime policies towards five Catholic countries (Croatia, France, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia), to demonstrate the consistency with which Pius XII and the Vatican avoided confronting the perpetrators of atrocities and strove to keep Catholics within the Church. By this measure, Pius XII did not betray, but fulfilled his papal role.A meticulous and careful analysis of the career of the twentieth century's most controversial pope, The Pope's Dilemma is an important contribution to the ongoing debate about the Catholic Church's wartime legacy.

At the start of the twentieth century, the modern metropolis was a riot of sensation. City dwellers lived in an environment filled with smoky factories, crowded homes, and lively thoroughfares. Sights, sounds, and smells flooded their senses, while changing conceptions of health and decorum forced many to rethink their most banal gestures, from the way they negotiated speeding traffic to the use they made of public washrooms.The Feel of the City exposes the sensory experiences of city-dwellers in Montreal and Brussels at the turn of the century and the ways in which these shaped the social and cultural significance of urban space. Using the experiences of municipal officials, urban planners, hygienists, workers, writers, artists, and ordinary citizens, Nicolas Kenny explores the implications of the senses for our understanding of modernity.

In recent years scholars have turned their attention to the rich experience of the Jesuits in France and Spain's American colonies. That attention has brought a flow of new editions and translations of Jesuit accounts of the Americas; it is now time for a study that examines the full range of that work in a comparative perspective. Jesuit Accounts of the Colonial Americas offers the first comprehensive examination of such writings and the role they played in solidifying images of the Americas.The collection also provides a much-needed re-examination of the work of the Jesuits in relation to Enlightenment ideals and the modern social sciences and humanities – two systems of thought that have in the past appeared radically opposed, but which are brought together here under the rubric of modern ethnographic knowledge. Linking Jesuit texts, the rhetorical tradition, and the newly emerging anthropology of the Enlightenment, this collection traverses the vast expanses of Old and New World France and Spain in fascinating new ways.

This bibliography is an exhaustive, objective and unique list of sources in the study of an event the historical significance of which becomes continually more apparent. The list consists of over two thousand entries from books and pamphlets, periodical articles, motion pictures and monitored broadcasts. The articles are arranged by language, and the Hungarian and Slavic book entries are provided with English translations.