Download or read book Human Nature in Rural Tuscany written by G. Hanlon and published by Springer. This book was released on 2007-04-02 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Melding evolutionary theory and both animal and human ethology together with close, descriptive historical research on a typical Tuscan village in the Seventeenth century, Hanlon explains the good reasons individuals had for behaving in ways that now seem strange to us.
Download or read book The Better Angels of Our Nature written by Steven Pinker and published by Penguin Books. This book was released on 2012-09-25 with total page 834 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Faced with the ceaseless stream of news about war, crime, and terrorism, one could easily think this is the most violent age ever seen. Yet as bestselling author Pinker shows in this startling and engaging new work, just the opposite is true.
Download or read book A Cultural History of Work in the Early Modern Age written by Bert De Munck and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-09-17 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2020 PROSE Award for Multivolume Reference/Humanities In the early modern age technological innovations were unimportant relative to political and social transformations. The size of the workforce and the number of wage dependent people increased, due in large part to population growth, but also as a result of changes in the organization of work. The diversity of workplaces in many significant economic sectors was on the rise in the 16th-century: family farming, urban crafts and trades, and large enterprises in mining, printing and shipbuilding. Moreover, the increasing influence of global commerce, as accompanied by local and regional specialization, prompted an increased reliance on forms of under-compensated and non-compensated work which were integral to economic growth. Economic volatility swelled the ranks of the mobile poor, who moved along Europe's roads seeking sustenance, and the endemic warfare of the period prompted young men to sign on as soldiers and sailors. Colonists migrated to Europe's territories in the Americas, Africa, and Asia, while others were forced overseas as servants, convicts or slaves. The early modern age proved to be a “renaissance” in the political, social and cultural contexts of work which set the stage for the technological developments to come. A Cultural History of Work in the Early Modern Age presents an overview of the period with essays on economies, representations of work, workplaces, work cultures, technology, mobility, society, politics and leisure.
Download or read book Death Control in the West 1500 1800 written by Gregory Hanlon and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-09-21 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Employing a rigorous methodological approach and analysing a vast body of sources from towns and regions in Italy, France and England over 300 years, this book hints at the extent of "routine" infanticide of newborns by married parents in early modern Europe, a practice ignored by contemporary tribunals. Death Control in the West 1500–1800 examines baptismal registers and ecclesiastical censuses across a score of communities in Catholic and Protestant Europe. Married women had little reason to hide their condition from priests, midwives, neighbours and friends; however, the practice of post-partum abortion was common everywhere, especially during times of hardship. By no means was it confined to the lower classes or to girls alone. Proposing a series of reflections on population control, this volume explores how families adopted a system of selective infanticide to manage resources and to safeguard social status, just like populations elsewhere around the globe. This study is an excellent tool for students and researchers interested in the demographic mechanisms of the age and social and familial relationships in early modern Europe.
Download or read book Past Minds written by Luther H Martin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-06-16 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do historians understand the minds, motivations, intentions of historical agents? What might evolutionary and cognitive theorizing contribute to this work? What is the relation between natural and cultural history? Historians have been intrigued by such questions ever since publication in 1859 of Darwin's The Origin of Species, itself the historicization of biology. This interest reemerged in the latter part of the twentieth century among a number of biologists, philosophers and historians, reinforced by the new interdisciplinary finding of cognitive scientists about the universal capacities of and constraints upon human minds. The studies in this volume, primarily by historians of religion, continue this discussion by focusing on historical examples of ancient religions as well as on the theoretical promises and problems relevant to that study.
Download or read book Mind Morality and Magic written by Istvan Czachesz and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-10-14 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The cognitive science of religion that has emerged over the last twenty years is a multidisciplinary field that often challenges established theories in anthropology and comparative religion. This new approach raises many questions for biblical studies as well. What are the cross-cultural cognitive mechanisms which explain the transmission of biblical texts? How did the local and particular cultural traditions of ancient Israel and early Christianity develop? What does the embodied and socially embedded nature of the human mind imply for the exegesis of biblical texts? "Mind, Morality and Magic" draws on a range of approaches to the study of the human mind - including memory studies, computer modeling, cognitive theories of ritual, social cognition, evolutionary psychology, biology of emotions, and research on religious experience. The volume explores how cognitive approaches to religion can shed light on classical concerns in biblical scholarship - such as the transmission of traditions, ritual and magic, and ethics - as well as uncover new questions and offer new methodologies.
Download or read book Singing of Arms and Men written by KELLEY. HARNESS and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-10-11 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Equestrian ballets (balletti a cavallo) emerged as valued dramatic entertainments in early modern Europe, demonstrating the wealth and magnificence of the patrons who commissioned them as well as the horsemanship and military skills of the noblemen who rode in them. Author Kelley Harness undertakes the first comprehensive study of seventeenth-century Florentine horse ballets and shows how the balletto a cavallo played a crucial role in self-fashioning by the Medici family during the period. Horse ballets also provided participating noblemen a venue for demonstrating critical markers of masculine nobility and confirming their family's relationship to the Medici.
Download or read book The Animals of Spain written by Abel Alves and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2011-07-14 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An overlooked area in the burgeoning field of animal studies is explored: the way nonhuman animals in the early modern Spanish empire were valued companions, as well as economic resources. Montaigne was not alone in his appreciation of animal life.
Download or read book Studies in Hellenistic Religions written by Luther H. Martin and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2018-02-26 with total page 421 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This selection of essays by Luther Martin brings together studies from throughout his career--both early as well as more recent--in the various areas of Graeco-Roman religions, including mystery cults, Judaism, Christianity, and Gnosticism. It is hoped that these studies, which represent spatial, communal, and cognitive approaches to the study of ancient religions might be of interest to those concerned with the structures and dynamics of religions past in general, as well as to scholars who might, with more recent historical research, confirm, evaluate, extend, or refute the hypotheses offered here, for that is the way scholars work and by which scholarship proceeds.
Download or read book Deep History Secular Theory written by Luther Martin and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2014-05-21 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the course of his career, Luther H. Martin has primarily produced articles rather than monographs. This approach to publication has given him the opportunity to experiment with different methodological approaches to an academic study of religion, with updates to and different interpretations of his field of historical specialization, namely Hellenistic religions, the subject of his only monograph (1987). The contents of this collected volume represent Martin's shift from comparative studies, to socio-political studies, to scientific studies of religion, and especially to the cognitive science of religion. He currently considers the latter to be the most viable approach for a scientific study of religion within the academic context of a modern research university. The twenty-five contributions collected in this volume are selected from over one hundred essays, articles, and book chapters published over a long and industrious career and are representative of Martin's work over the past two decades.
Download or read book Family and Gender in Renaissance Italy 1300 1600 written by Thomas Kuehn and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-03-24 with total page 405 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book studies family life and gender within Italy through the lens of law and legal disputes.
Download or read book Evolutionary Perspectives on Imaginative Culture written by Joseph Carroll and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-08-28 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This pioneering volume offers an expansive introduction to the relatively new field of evolutionary studies in imaginative culture. Contributors from psychology, neuroscience, anthropology, and the humanities probe the evolved human imagination and its artefacts. The book forcefully demonstrates that imagination is part of human nature. Contributors explore imaginative culture in seven main areas: Imagination: Evolution, Mechanisms and Functions Myth and Religion Aesthetic Theory Music Visual and Plastic Arts Video Games and Films Oral Narratives and Literature Evolutionary Perspectives on Imaginative Culture widens the scope of evolutionary cultural theory to include much of what “culture” means in common usage. The contributors aim to convince scholars in both the humanities and the evolutionary human sciences that biology and imaginative culture are intimately intertwined. The contributors illuminate this broad theoretical argument with comprehensive insights into religion, ideology, personal identity, and many particular works of art, music, literature, film, and digital media. The chapters “Imagination, the Brain’s Default Mode Network, and Imaginative Verbal Artifacts” and “The Role of Aesthetic Style in Alleviating Anxiety About the Future” are licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Download or read book A Renaissance of Violence written by Colin Rose and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-17 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This in-depth analysis of homicide patterns in seventeenth-century Italy explores the social contexts behind a sharp rise in interpersonal violence.
Download or read book Myth and Authority written by Alexander U. Bertland and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2022-10-01 with total page 463 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Living in a province dominated by powerful oligarchs, Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) concluded that political philosophy should work to undermine aristocratic authority and prevent political devolution into feudalism. Rejecting the possibility that the free market could successfully instill civil behavior, he advocated for a strong central judicial system to work closely with citizens to promote stability and justice. This study puts Vico in conversation with other Enlightenment thinkers such as Locke, Rousseau, and Mandeville to show how his alternative warrants serious consideration. In contrast to scholars who read Vico's New Science as a defense of the imagination, this study casts his account of poetic wisdom politically as an epistemological critique of the aristocratic mentality. Myth and Authority argues that Vico's depiction of pagan religion is a refined attempt to explain how oligarchy maintains its stranglehold on power. While Western civilization did not follow the path Vico suggested, it may now be more relevant as concerns grow about the increasing influence of the wealthy on civil institutions.
Download or read book The Mind of Mithraists written by Luther H. Martin and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2014-11-20 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Roman cult of Mithras was the most widely-dispersed and densely-distributed cult throughout the expanse of the Roman Empire from the end of the first until the fourth century AD, rivaling the early growth and development of Christianity during the same period. As its membership was largely drawn from the ranks of the military, its spread, but not its popularity is attributable largely to military deployments and re-deployments. Although mithraists left behind no written archival evidence, there is an abundance of iconographic finds. The only characteristic common to all Mithraic temples were the fundamental architecture of their design, and the cult image of Mithras slaying a bull. How were these two features so faithfully transmitted through the Empire by a non-centralized, non-hierarchical religious movement? The Minds of Mithraists: Historical and Cognitive Studies in the Roman Cult of Mithras addresses these questions as well as the relationship of Mithraism to Christianity, explanations of the significance of the tauroctony and of the rituals enacted in the mithraea, and explanations for the spread of Mithraism (and for its resistance in a few places). The unifying theme throughout is an investigation of the 'mind' of those engaged in the cult practices of this widespread ancient religion. These investigations represent traditional historical methods as well as more recent studies employing the insights of the cognitive sciences, demonstrating that cognitive historiography is a valuable methodological tool.
Download or read book Environment and Infrastructure written by Giacomo Bonan and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2023-04-27 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The material and energy flows that characterized the metabolism of preindustrial and industrial societies were organized through complex infrastructures based on interwoven social and natural elements. Analyzing infrastructures from many methodological and thematic perspectives, the present volume adopts an extensive periodization to identify the undeniable changes caused by industrialization and the persistence of pre-existing features and dynamics. The contributions range from the late Middle Ages to the 1990s and deepen historical characteristics of urban metabolism, the study of energy systems and their transitions, and the management and control of water resources. These reveal the strategies societies and states adopted to transform and adapt their surrounding environment in a constant and challenging equilibrium of diverse interests, whose impact over time has had environmental consequences on a global scale.
Download or read book Jesuit Foundations and Medici Power 1532 1621 written by Kathleen Comerford and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2016-11-07 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jesuit Foundations and Medici Power, 1532–1621 focuses on the cooperation between two new foundations, the last Medici state and the Society of Jesus, spanning nearly a century, concentrating on the Jesuit foundations in Florence, Siena, and Montepulciano. As the Medici built and centralized their power in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, they sought to control both the civic and religious behavior of their citizens. They found partners in the Jesuits, whose educational program helped establish social order and maintain religious orthodoxy. Via a detailed investigation of both minor and major Italian Jesuit colleges, and of multiple Medici rulers, Kathleen M. Comerford provides insight into church/state cooperation in an age in which both institutions underwent significant changes.
