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Book Pleasure and Leisure in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age

Download or read book Pleasure and Leisure in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age written by Albrecht Classen and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2019-08-05 with total page 766 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jan Huizinga and Roger Caillois have already taught us to realize how important games and play have been for pre-modern civilization. Recent research has begun to acknowledge the fundamental importance of these aspects in cultural, religious, philosophical, and literary terms. This volume expands on the traditional approach still very much focused on the materiality of game (toys, cards, dice, falcons, dolls, etc.) and acknowledges that game constituted also a form of coming to terms with human existence in an unstable and volatile world determined by universal randomness and fortune. Whether considering blessings or horse fighting, falconry or card games, playing with dice or dolls, we can gain a much deeper understanding of medieval and early modern society when we consider how people pursued pleasure and how they structured their leisure time. The contributions examine a wide gamut of approaches to pleasure, considering health issues, eroticism, tournaments, playing music, reading and listening, drinking alcohol, gambling and throwing dice. This large issue was also relevant, of course, in non-Christian societies, and constitutes a critical concern both for the past and the present because we are all homines ludentes.

Book Consuming Passions

    Book Details:
  • Author : Judith Flanders
  • Publisher : HarperCollins UK
  • Release : 2007
  • ISBN : 0007172966
  • Pages : 136 pages

Download or read book Consuming Passions written by Judith Flanders and published by HarperCollins UK. This book was released on 2007 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By the close of the 19th century, the Industrial Revolution had brought with it not just factories, railways, mines and machines but also fashion, travel, leisure and pleasure. This book explores this revolution in science, technology and industry - and how a world of thrilling sensation and theatricality was born.

Book The City s Pleasures

Download or read book The City s Pleasures written by Shirine Hamadeh and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The City's Pleasures is the first historical investigation of the tremendous changes that affected the fabric and architecture of Istanbul in the century that followed the decisive return of the Ottoman court to the capital in 1703. These were spectacular times that witnessed the most extraordinary urban expansion and building explosion in the history of the city. Showing how architecture and urban form became involved in the representation and construction of a changing social order, Shirine Hamadeh reassesses the dominance of the paradigm of Westernization in interpretations of this period and challenges the suggestion that change in the eighteenth century could only occur by turning toward a now superior West. Drawing on a genre of Ottoman poetry written in celebration of the built environment and on a vast array of related textual and visual sources, Hamadeh demonstrates that architectural change was the result of a dynamic synthesis between internal and external factors, and closely mirrored the process of décloisonnement of the city's social landscape. Examining novel forms, spaces, and decorative vocabularies; changing patterns of patronage; and new patterns of architectural perception; The City's Pleasures shows how these exposed and reinforced the internal dynamics that were played out between a society in flux and a state anxious to recreate an ideal system of social hierarchies. Profoundly hybrid in nature, the new architectural idiom reflected a growing permeability between elite and middle-class sensibilities, an unprecedented degree of receptivity to Western and Eastern foreign traditions, and a clear departure from the parameters of the classical canon. Innovation became the new operative doctrine. As the built environment was experienced, perceived, and appreciated by contemporary observers, it increasingly revealed itself as a perpetual source of sensory pleasures.

Book The Pleasures of the Imagination

Download or read book The Pleasures of the Imagination written by John Brewer and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-03-12 with total page 566 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Pleasures of the Imagination examines the birth and development of English "high culture" in the eighteenth century. It charts the growth of a literary and artistic world fostered by publishers, theatrical and musical impresarios, picture dealers and auctioneers, and presented to th public in coffee-houses, concert halls, libraries, theatres and pleasure gardens. In 1660, there were few professional authors, musicians and painters, no public concert series, galleries, newspaper critics or reviews. By the dawn of the nineteenth century they were all aprt of the cultural life of the nation. John Brewer's enthralling book explains how this happened and recreates the world in which the great works of English eighteenth-century art were made. Its purpose is to show how literature, painting, music and the theatre were communicated to a public increasingly avid for them. It explores the alleys and garrets of Grub Street, rummages the shelves of bookshops and libraries, peers through printsellers' shop windows and into artists' studios, and slips behind the scenes at Drury Lane and Covent Garden. It takes us out of Gay and Boswell's London to visit the debating clubs, poetry circles, ballrooms, concert halls, music festivals, theatres and assemblies that made the culture of English provincial towns, and shows us how the national landscape became one of Britain's greatest cultural treasures. It reveals to us a picture of English artistic and literary life in the eighteenth century less familiar, but more suprising, more various and more convincing than any we have seen before.

Book Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth Century Britain

Download or read book Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth Century Britain written by Maxine Berg and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2005-06-30 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, Maxine Berg explores the invention, making, and buying of new, semi-luxury, and fashionable consumer goods during the eighteenth century. It follows these goods, from china tea ware to all sorts of metal ornaments such as candlesticks, cutlery, buckles, and buttons, as they were made and shopped for, then displayed in the private domestic settings of Britain's urban middling classes. It tells the stories and analyses the developments that led from a global trade in Eastern luxuries beginning in the sixteenth century to the new global trade in British-made consumer goods by the end of the eighteenth century. These new products, regarded as luxuries by the rapidly growing urban and middling-class people of the eighteenth century, played an important part in helping to proclaim personal identities,and guide social interaction. Customers enjoyed shopping for them; they took pleasure in their beauty, ingenuity or convenience. All manner of new products appeared in shop windows; sophisticated mixed-media advertising seduced customers and created new wants. This unparalleled 'product revolution' provoked philosophers and pundits to proclaim a 'new luxury', one that reached out to the middling and trading classes, unlike the elite and corrupt luxury of old. Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth Century Britain is cultural history at its best, built on a fresh empirical base drawn directly from customs accounts, advertising material, company papers, and contemporary correspondence. Maxine Berg traces how this new consumer society of the eighteenth century and the products first traded, then invented to satisfy it, stimulated industrialization itself. Global markets for the consumer goods of private and domestic life inspired the industrial revolution and British products 'won the world'.

Book The Beau Monde

    Book Details:
  • Author : Hannah Greig
  • Publisher : OUP Oxford
  • Release : 2013-09-26
  • ISBN : 0191664014
  • Pages : 934 pages

Download or read book The Beau Monde written by Hannah Greig and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2013-09-26 with total page 934 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of the world's first fashion-obsessed society in 18th-century London Caricatured for extravagance, vanity, glamorous celebrity and, all too often, embroiled in scandal and gossip, 18th-century London's fashionable society had a well-deserved reputation for frivolity. But to be fashionable in 1700s London meant more than simply being well dressed. Fashion denoted membership of a new type of society--the beau monde, a world where status was no longer determined by coronets and countryseats alone but by the more nebulous qualification of metropolitan 'fashion'. Conspicuous consumption and display were crucial; the right address, the right dinner guests, the right possessions, the right jewels, the right seat at the opera. The Beau Monde leads us on a tour of this exciting new world, from court and parliament to London's parks, pleasure grounds, and private homes. From brash displays of diamond jewellery to the subtle complexities of political intrigue, we see how membership of the new elite was won, maintained--and sometimes lost. On the way, we meet a rich and colourful cast of characters, from the newly ennobled peer learning the ropes and the imposter trying to gain entry by means of clever fakery, to the exile banned for sexual indiscretion. Above all, as the story unfolds, we learn that being a Fashionable was about far more than simply being 'modish'. By the end of the century, it had become nothing less than the key to power and exclusivity in a changed world.

Book Hedonizing Technologies

Download or read book Hedonizing Technologies written by Rachel Maines and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2009-06-09 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book addresses basic issues in the history of labor and industry and makes an original contribution to the discussion of how technology and people interact.

Book Luxury in the Eighteenth Century

Download or read book Luxury in the Eighteenth Century written by M. Berg and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-01-11 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Luxury in the 18th Century' explores the political, economic, moral and intellectual effects of the production and consumption of luxury goods, and provides a broadly-based account from a variety of perspectives, addressing key themes of economic debate, material culture, the principles of art and taste, luxury as 'female vice' and the exotic.

Book The Enduring Legacy

Download or read book The Enduring Legacy written by G. S. Rousseau and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1988-10-27 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This comprehensive 1988 survey of the poet's life and work appeared during the 300th anniversary of Alexander Pope's birth in 1688.

Book Consumption and Culture in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

Download or read book Consumption and Culture in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries written by John Brewer and published by . This book was released on 1991 with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Book Leisure in Art and Literature

Download or read book Leisure in Art and Literature written by Tom Winnifrith and published by Springer. This book was released on 1992-06-18 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The description or depiction of leisure activities has formed part of the subject matter of art and literature for a long time. This volume looks at funeral games in Homer, leisure as depicted in painting, and the part that literature played in promoting athleticism in public schools and Oxbridge.

Book The Problem of Pleasure

    Book Details:
  • Author : Dominic Erdozain
  • Publisher : Boydell & Brewer Ltd
  • Release : 2010
  • ISBN : 1843835282
  • Pages : 323 pages

Download or read book The Problem of Pleasure written by Dominic Erdozain and published by Boydell & Brewer Ltd. This book was released on 2010 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book combines intellectual, cultural and social history to address a major area of encounter between Christianity and British culture: the world of leisure.

Book Palaces of Pleasure

    Book Details:
  • Author : Lee Jackson
  • Publisher : Yale University Press
  • Release : 2019-06-25
  • ISBN : 0300245092
  • Pages : 333 pages

Download or read book Palaces of Pleasure written by Lee Jackson and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2019-06-25 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An energetic and exhilarating account of the Victorian entertainment industry, its extraordinary success and enduring impact The Victorians invented mass entertainment. As the nineteenth century’s growing industrialized class acquired the funds and the free time to pursue leisure activities, their every whim was satisfied by entrepreneurs building new venues for popular amusement. Contrary to their reputation as dour, buttoned-up prudes, the Victorians reveled in these newly created ‘palaces of pleasure’. In this vivid, captivating book, Lee Jackson charts the rise of well-known institutions such as gin palaces, music halls, seaside resorts and football clubs, as well as the more peculiar attractions of the pleasure garden and international exposition, ranging from parachuting monkeys and human zoos to theme park thrill rides. He explores how vibrant mass entertainment came to dominate leisure time and how the attempts of religious groups and secular improvers to curb ‘immorality’ in the pub, variety theater and dance hall faltered in the face of commercial success. The Victorians’ unbounded love of leisure created a nationally significant and influential economic force: the modern entertainment industry.

Book Eighteenth Century Vitalism

Download or read book Eighteenth Century Vitalism written by C. Packham and published by Springer. This book was released on 2012-01-31 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers an important account of the relationship between science and culture in the eighteenth century. It examines the 'vitalist' turn in physiology and natural philosophy, and its presence and effect in the burgeoning of philosophical and scientific inquiry of the Scottish Enlightenment, and the radical politics and culture of the 1790s.

Book The Theory of the Leisure Class

Download or read book The Theory of the Leisure Class written by Thorstein Veblen and published by The Floating Press. This book was released on 2009-05-01 with total page 472 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Considered the first in-depth critique of consumerism, economist Thorstein Veblen's 1899 book The Theory of the Leisure Class has come to be regarded as one of the great works of economic theory. Using contemporary and anthropological accounts, Veblen held that our economic and social norms are driven by traces of our early tribal life, rather than ideas of utility.

Book Literature of Travel and Exploration  A to F

Download or read book Literature of Travel and Exploration A to F written by Jennifer Speake and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2003 with total page 516 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Containing more than 600 entries, this valuable resource presents all aspects of travel writing. There are entries on places and routes (Afghanistan, Black Sea, Egypt, Gobi Desert, Hawaii, Himalayas, Italy, Northwest Passage, Samarkand, Silk Route, Timbuktu), writers (Isabella Bird, Ibn Battuta, Bruce Chatwin, Gustave Flaubert, Mary Kingsley, Walter Ralegh, Wilfrid Thesiger), methods of transport and types of journey (balloon, camel, grand tour, hunting and big game expeditions, pilgrimage, space travel and exploration), genres (buccaneer narratives, guidebooks, New World chronicles, postcards), companies and societies (East India Company, Royal Geographical Society, Society of Dilettanti), and issues and themes (censorship, exile, orientalism, and tourism). For a full list of entries and contributors, a generous selection of sample entries, and more, visit the Literature of Travel and Exploration: An Encyclopedia website.