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Volume I offers a broad perspective on urban culture in the ancient European world. It begins with chronological overviews which paint in broad brushstrokes a picture that serves as a frame for the thematic chapters in the rest of the volume. Positioning ancient Europe within its wider context, it touches on Asia and Africa as regions that informed and were later influenced by urban development in Europe, with particular emphasis on the Mediterranean basin. Topics range from formal characteristics (including public space), water provision, waste disposal, urban maintenance, spaces for the dead, and border spaces; to ways of thinking about, visualising, and remembering cities in antiquity; to conflict within and between cities, economics, mobility and globalisation, intersectional urban experiences, slavery, political participation, and religion.
This volume of new essays offers a substantial, systematic and detailed analysis of how various Aristotelian doctrines are central to and yet in important ways transformed by Kant's thought. The essays present new avenues for understanding many of Kant's signature doctrines, such as transcendental idealism, the argument of the Transcendental Deduction, and the idea that moral law is given to us as a 'fact of reason,' as well as a number of other topics of central importance to Kant's theoretical and practical philosophy, including self-consciousness, objective validity, the Principle of Sufficient Reason, virtue, and the moral significance of the consequences of action. Two introductory essays outline the volume's central exegetical commitments and anchors its approach in the immediate historical context. The resulting volume emphasizes the continuities between Kant's Critical philosophy and the Scholastic-Aristotelian tradition, and presents, for the first time, a synoptic overview of this new, 'Aristotelian' reading of Kant.
Volume III uncovers the radical transformations of European cities from 1850 until the twenty-first century. The volume explores how modern developments in urban environments, socio-cultural dynamics, the relation between work and leisure, and governance have transformed urban life. It highlights these complex processes across different regions, showcasing the latest scholarship and current challenges in the field. The first half provides an overview on the urban development of European regions in the West, North, Centre, East-South-East, and South, and the interconnectedness of European urbanism with the Americas and Africa. The second half explores major themes in European urban history, from the conceptualisation of cities, their built fabric and environment, and the continuities, rhythms, and changes in their social, political, economic, and cultural histories. Using transborder, transregional, and transdisciplinary approaches to discern traits that characterise modern and contemporary European urbanism, the volume invites readers to reconsider major paradigms of European urban history.
Volume II charts European urbanism between 700–1850, the millennium during which Europe became the world's most urbanised region. Featuring thirty-six chapters from leading scholars working on all the major linguistic areas of Europe, the volume offers a state-of-the-art survey that explores and explains this transformation, how similar or different such processes were across Europe, and how far it is possible to discern traits that characterise European urbanism in this period. The first half of the volume offers overviews on the urban history of Mediterranean Europe, Atlantic and North Sea Europe, Central and Eastern Europe, and European urbanisms around the world. The second half explores major themes, from the conceptualisation of cities and their material fabric to continuities and changes in the social, political, economic, religious, and cultural histories of cities and towns.
The second volume focuses on the years of upheaval during the American Revolution between 1775 and 1789. It breaks new ground by surveying a wide range of internal conflicts in the thirteen colonies, the trauma of a bloody war and its consequences, as well as the continental, hemispheric, and global forces shaping warfare and politics in this era. Together, the essays expand our understanding of how various people navigated military occupation, community conflict, governmental paralysis, interpersonal relationships, institutional collapse, and the slipperiness of allegiances. Through sweeping interpretative essays and micro-history viewpoints, the volume highlights the interplay of class, race, and gender in a wartime context and how these dynamics played out and were influenced by broader geopolitical developments. The depths of division and grand possibilities are explored – and interrupt our long-standing notions of traditional linear narratives of nation-making in this era.
The first volume delves into how the context of the American Revolution was set, taking readers across North America and the world to reveal the far-flung people, events, institutions, cultures, and ideas that led to its inception. Through a global lens, the volume shows how empires struggled with political and economic reforms, as well as popular protest, while competing and warring with each other. On a continental scale, long-term environmental and economic structures, native peoples, colonial settlers, and their interactions set the parameters for revolutionary conflict. Focusing on the thirteen colonies, -particularly groups who are traditionally overlooked- the essays shed light on the specific milieus in which the Revolution took place, examining and reinterpreting the iconic events leading up to independence and war. A mixture of broad topical essays and short innovative “viewpoints”, together the essays question notions of American exceptionalism while emphasizing both change and continuity.
In this innovative reinterpretation of the economic history of Africa and Europe, Warren C. Whatley argues that freedom from Western-style slavery is the origin of modern Western economic growth. Such freedom was achieved around the 13th century in Western European Christendom by making enslavement among European Christians a sin but still a recognized property right and form of wealth. After 1500, the triangular trade in the North Atlantic integrates the slave and free sectors of expanding European Empires, spreading freedom and development in Europe and slavery and underdevelopment in Africa. Whatley documents when the slave and/or free sectors drove the expansion of Empire, and how exposure to slave trades in Africa spread institutions and norms better suited to capturing and trading people – slavery, polygyny, ethnic stratification and inherited aristocracies – some of the mechanisms through which the past is still felt in Africa today.
In Germany at the close of the eighteenth century, Johann Gottfried Herder offered an important alternative to the philosophy of his teacher, Immanuel Kant. He held radical views on language, world history, the equality of all peoples, the role of climate in human life, and other topics that remain important to this day. He explored how these ideas might lead to radical intellectual practices and politics, providing an alternative to Eurocentric and racist ways of thinking. Writing in the wake of the French Revolution, Herder attempted to develop a political philosophy that would do justice to all humanity. His Letters for the Advancement of Humanity provides his mature statement on this project, available to English readers now for the first time in its entirety. An introduction situates the work within Herder's thought, and comprehensive notes provide access to its wider context.
Early modern English people were obsessed with making babies. In this fascinating new history, Leah Astbury traces this preoccupation through manuscript letters, diaries, recipe books and almanacs, revealing its centrality to family life. Information was plentiful in guides on the burgeoning fields of domestic conduct and midwifery, as well as in the many satirical ballads focused on sex, marriage and family. Astbury utilises this broad source base to explore all aspects of early modern childbearing, from conception to the months after delivery. She demonstrates that, while religious and cultural ideals dictated that women carry out all of this work, men were engaged in its practice through directing medical decisions. With the entire household including servants, wetnurses and other unexpected actors included in the project, childbearing can be situated within the histories of gender, medicine, social status, family and record-keeping. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.
Clergy formed a distinct and privileged group in later medieval society as regarded violent crime. Church law was intended to protect them from it, induce them to avoid it, and exempt them from secular justice following it. But in practice, were the clergy so separate from the violent culture around them and different from the laymen who dominated it? In the first full-length study of this subject in the later medieval period, Peter Clarke shows that clergy accused of violent and other crimes increasingly submitted to secular justice like laymen, seeking clerical immunity only as a last resort. It reveals that church authorities, in providing legal redress for clerical victims of lay violence, sought to heal divisions between laity and clergy, not to deepen them. Additionally, it explores the motives and contexts behind clerical involvement in violent crime, both as perpetrators and victims, revealing that clergy often acted similarly to laymen.
Founded in 1478 and not permanently abolished until 1834, the Spanish Inquisition has always been a notorious institution in history as an engine of religious and racial persecution. Yet, Spaniards themselves did not create its legal processes or its theoretical mission, which was to reconcile heretics to the Catholic Church. In this volume, leading international scholars assess the origins, legal practices, victims, reach, and failures of Spanish inquisitors across centuries and geographies. Grounded in recent scholarship and archival research, the chapters explore the Inquisition's medieval precedents as well as its turbulent foundation and eradication. The volume examines how inquisitors changed their targets over time, and how literal physical settings could affect their investigations and prosecutions. Contributors also demonstrate how deeply Spanish inquisitors cared about social status and legal privilege, and explore the scandals that could envelop inquisitors and their employees. In doing so, this volume offers a nuanced, contextual understanding of the Spanish Inquisition as a historical phenomenon.
The first volume of The Cambridge History of Arthurian Literature and Culture is the authoritative source for those wanting to explore the flourishing medieval world of Arthur from its very beginnings. Narrating the development of a now globally famous literary tradition from multiple disciplinary angles, it features chapters covering the early Arthur, Arthurian developments in literary genres, transnational and trans-media phenomena, thematic and character-specific topics, Arthurian matter in art, and the transition from manuscript to print at the cusp of the early modern period. Building new bridges between the literary and historical disciplines, and elevating ephemeral cultural forms alongside literary texts, this volume grounds its rich exploration of Arthur the medieval literary hero in a thorough engagement with the Arthur of histories, chronicles, political propaganda, and prophecy.
The second volume of The Cambridge History of Arthurian Literature and Culture charts the growth and spread of Arthurian matter outwards from Britain into Europe, and then into the globalising world of the 1500s and beyond, up to the present day. In the opening chapters, Welsh and continental engagements with and adaptations of Arthuriana are foregrounded, alongside its permutations throughout the British early modern, Romantic, and Victorian eras. Essays then explore how the legend has gained new resonances and found new means of expression in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, through media as diverse as cinema, television, cartoons, games, and tourist packages. Chapters reveal how Arthurian matter remains relevant to issues such as race, gender, the emotions, and childhood, and how it has come to suffuse popular and literary culture on a global scale, in Japan, Australia, Latin America, and Africa.
In 1662, in the aftermath of the Restoration, parliament passed new legislation for the settlement and removal of the poor. Important provisions were finalised in no more than a few days. But once the settlement of the poor was set in law it became an agent of historical change that affected society, state formation, and the lives of millions in Britain and beyond for centuries to come. Within a few decades, practices of local government were transformed. In towns and villages hierarchies of social status and gender were affected. The rising empire employed the settlement administration to mobilise forces for large-scale international wars and to deal with soldiers' wives and children left behind. The huge number of bureaucratic forms generated following the new policies made a lasting impact on administrative culture. The Settlement of the Poor in England is about social change and about history's unintended consequences. It is also about the struggles and experiences of individuals and communities. It reminds us how the settlement legislation still resonates today. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.
In this major new interpretation of Sino-North Korean relations, Gregg A. Brazinsky argues that neither the PRC nor the DPRK would have survived as socialist states without the ideal of Sino-North Korean friendship. Chinese and North Korean leaders encouraged mutual empathy and sentimental attachments between their citizens and then used these emotions to strengthen popular commitment to socialist state building. Drawing on an array of previously unexamined Chinese and North Korean sources, Brazinsky shows how mutual empathy helped to shape political, military, and cultural interactions between the two socialist allies. He explains why the unique relationship that Beijing and Pyongyang forged during the Korean War remained important throughout the Cold War and how it continues to influence the international relations of East Asia today.
While French political discourse in the late Middle Ages had been based on ancient Roman ideas that government existed for the common good (le bien public, or la chose publique, a French translation of the Latin res publica), these ideas began to evolve in the 1570s. Although references to the common good continued to be used right up to the French Revolution, they were gradually overtaken by a focus on the good of the State (le bien de l'État). James B. Collins demonstrates how this evolution in language existed at every social level from the peasant village up to the royal court. By analysing the language used in scores of local, regional and national lists of grievances presented to provincial estates and the Estates-General, Collins demonstrates how the growth was as much a bottom-up process as a top-down enforcement of royal power.
Weimar Germany is often remembered as the ultimate political disaster, a democracy whose catastrophic end directly led to Adolf Hitler's rise. Invisible Fatherland challenges this narrative by recovering the nuanced and sophisticated efforts of Weimar contemporaries to make democracy work in Germany-efforts often obscured by the Republic's eventual collapse. In doing so, Manuela Achilles reveals a unique form of constitutional patriotism that was rooted in openness, compromise, and the capacity to manage conflict. Authoritative yet accessible, Invisible Fatherland contrasts Weimar's pluralistic democratic practices with the rigid tendencies in contemporary thought, including Rudolf Smend's theory of symbolic integration and Karl Löwenstein's concept of militant democracy. Both theories, though influential, restrict the positive potential of open, conflict-driven democratic processes. This study challenges us to appreciate the fundamental fluidity and pluralism of liberal democracy and to reflect on its resilience in the face of illiberal and authoritarian threats-an urgent task in our time.
David Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion were published posthumously in 1779 and are considered one of the most important contributions to the philosophy of religion. Throughout Hume's philosophical career his views on religion were highly controversial and many of his own contemporaries regarded his philosophy as a defence of atheism and irreligion. The Dialogues is Hume's final and his most definitive statement of his views on this subject. In this Critical Guide, leading scholars engage with topics including the argument from intelligent design, the cosmological argument, the problem of evil, religion and morality, miracles, suicide and immortality, and the natural origins and roots of religious belief. The volume updates and expands our critical understanding of this major philosophical work, and will be of interest to a range of readers in philosophy, religion, and the history of ideas.
The future is contingent. It can unfold differently, hinging on chance or choice within the present. This Element tells the story of how these twin concepts have developed across human history. Arcing from our earliest ancestors, through al-Ghazālī, to S. J. Gould, the Element demonstrates how humans realised the future is an undecided, contingent place – at scales leading beyond the biographical, up to the planetary, and beyond. It pinpoints this realisation as an ongoing and unfinished intellectual revolution. Just as the telescope revealed Deep Space in the 1600s, and the geologists' hammer revealed Deep Time in the 1800s, contemporary developments in science are revealing what I call Deep Possibility. This is the realisation that there is far more possible than will ever be actual. It is this that makes history matter, and gives contingency its bite, insofar as it forces acknowledgement that not all outcomes will come to pass regardless.
Many western settler states are undertaking processes to improve Indigenous-settler relations. The primary focus is Canada, with some discussion of Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, and the United States of America. This Element highlights myths promoted by explorers, settlers, and the state about Indigenous Peoples and history. It engages with and attempts to correct a selection of the misperceptions that have developed over the many centuries. I argue that the first 'foundational history wars' were advanced by European explorers, travellers, and settlers through the promotion of negative myths about Indigenous Peoples, as an accompaniment to settler colonialism. I distinguish these from 'modern history wars' from the 1960s to the 1990s. The goal is to provide a fuller history which critically engages settler myths, privileges Indigenous perspectives, and offers a robust and informed critique of dominant historical narratives. The larger goal is to promote truth as a necessary accompaniment to reconciliation.