Jewish Education and Society in the High Middle Ages
Author: N/A The Jews of northern France, Germany, and England, known collectively as Ashkenazic Jewry, have commanded the attention of scholars since the beginnings of modern Jewish historiography. Over the past century, historians have produced significant studies about Jewish society in medieval Ashkenaz that have revealed them as a well-organized, creative, and steadfast community. Indeed, the Franco-Russian Jewry withstood a variety of physical, political, and religious attacks in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries to produce an impressive corpus of Talmudic and halakhic compositions, known collectively as Tosafot, that revolutionized the study of rabbinic literature. Although the literary creativity of the Tosafists has been documented and analyzed, and the scope and policies of communal government in Ashkenaz have been fixed and compared, no sustained attempt has been made to integrate these crucial dimensions. Jewish Education and Society in the High Middle Ages considers these relationships by examining the degree of communal involvement in the educational process, as well as the economic theories and communal structures that affected the process from the most elementary level to the production of the Tosafist corpus. By drawing parallels and highlighting differences to pre-Crusade Ashkenaz, the period following the Black Death, Spanish and Provencal Jewish society, and general medieval society, Ephraim Kanarfogel creates an insightful and compelling portrait of Ashkenazic society. Available in paperback for the first time with a new preface included, Jewish Education and Society in the High Middle Ages will be a welcome addition to the libraries of Jewish studies scholars and students of medieval religious literature.
Author: Arthur L. Stinchcombe
Plantations, especially sugar plantations, created slave societies and a racism persisting well into post-slavery periods: so runs a familiar argument that has been used to explain the sweep of Caribbean history. Here one of the most eminent scholars of modern social theory applies this assertion to a comparative study of most Caribbean islands from the time of the American Revolution to the Spanish American War. Arthur Stinchcombe uses insights from his own much admired Economic Sociology to show why sugar planters needed the help of repressive governments for recruiting disciplined labor. Demonstrating that island-to-island variations on this theme were a function of geography, local political economy, and relation to outside powers, he scrutinizes Caribbean slavery and Caribbean emancipation movements in a world-historical context.Throughout the book, Stinchcombe aims to develop a sociology of freedom that explains a number of complex phenomena, such as how liberty for some individuals may restrict the liberty of others. Thus, the autonomous governments of colonies often produced more oppressive conditions for slaves than did so-called arbitrary governments, which had the power to restrict the whims of the planters. Even after emancipation, freedom was not a clear-cut matter of achieving the ideals of the Enlightenment. Indeed, it was often a route to a social control more efficient than slavery, providing greater flexibility for the planter class and posing less risk of violent rebellion.
Author: Joshua Scodel
This book examines how English writers from the Elizabethan period to the Restoration transformed and contested the ancient ideal of the virtuous mean. As early modern authors learned at grammar school and university, Aristotle and other classical thinkers praised golden means balanced between extremes: courage, for example, as opposed to cowardice or recklessness. By uncovering the enormous variety of English responses to this ethical doctrine, Joshua Scodel revises our understanding of the vital interaction between classical thought and early modern literary culture. Scodel argues that English authors used the ancient schema of means and extremes in innovative and contentious ways hitherto ignored by scholars. Through close readings of diverse writers and genres, he shows that conflicting representations of means and extremes figured prominently in the emergence of a self-consciously modern English culture. Donne, for example, reshaped the classical mean to promote individual freedom, while Bacon held extremism necessary for human empowerment. Imagining a modern rival to ancient Rome, georgics from Spenser to Cowley exhorted England to embody the mean or lauded extreme paths to national greatness. Drinking poetry from Jonson to Rochester expressed opposing visions of convivial moderation and drunken excess, while erotic writing from Sidney to Dryden and Behn pitted extreme passion against the traditional mean of conjugal moderation. Challenging his predecessors in various genres, Milton celebrated golden means of restrained pleasure and self-respect. Throughout this groundbreaking study, Scodel suggests how early modern treatments of means and extremes resonate in present-day cultural debates.
Author: Christopher Abram
Norse mythology is obsessed with the idea of an onrushing and unstoppable apocalypse: Ragnarok, when the whole of creation will perish in fire, smoke, and darkness and the earth will nolonger support the life it once nurtured. Most of the Old Norse texts that preserve the myths of Ragnarok originated in Iceland, a nation whose volcanic activity places it perpetually on the brink of a world-changing environmental catastrophe. As the first full-length ecocritical study of Old Norse myth and literature, Evergreen Ash argues that Ragnarok is primarily a story of ecological collapse that reflects the anxieties of early Icelanders who were trying to make a home in a profoundly strange, marginal, and at times hostile environment.Christopher Abram here contends that Ragnarok offers an uncanny foreshadowing of our current global ecological crisisthe era of the Anthropocene. Ragnarok portends what may happen when a civilization believes that nature can be mastered and treated only as a resource to be exploited for human ends. The enduring power of the Ragnarok myth, and its relevance to life in the era of climate change, lies in its terrifying evocation of a world in which nothing is what it was before, a world that is no longer home to usand, thus, a world with no future. Climate change may well be our Ragnarok.
Author: Edited by Jennifer R. Wies and Hillary J. Haldane
Anthropology at the Front Lines of Gender-Based Violence is a broad and accessible volume, with a truly global approach to understanding the lives of front-line workers in women's shelters, anti-violence organizations, and outreach groups. Often written from a first-person perspective, these essays examine government workers, volunteers, and nongovernmental organization employees to present a vital picture of practical approaches to combating gender-based violence.
Author: Suzanne Myre
Death may seem a grim and morbid subject matter, but in the capable hands of Suzanne Myre, nothing about death is beyond humour (and death isnt always what it seems).Numbering 13 in total, the stories are populated with eccentric characters, follow unexpected plotlines, and, though thematically united, are completely unique and distinct from one another. From a murderous croissant to a woman seeking salvation in a most unconventional way and a couple of precocious children whose fates are intertwined with a Rottweilers, the tales in Death Sentences never fail to intrigue, surprise, and entertain. Myres style ranges from the concrete to the abstract; her tone runs the gamut from touching, sincere, and uplifting to sarcastic, cynical, and bittersweet. What is unwavering, however, is that the writing is witty, mischievous, sharp, and vivaciousalways invigorating, never dull or predictable.We come to realize that death comes in all forms (physical, spiritual, metaphorical), people cope in the most curious ways, and in the end, theres no reason we cant have a sense of humour about it all.This is the first translation of Mises a mort. Though Myre has been a prolific and acclaimed writer in Quebec for a decade, this is the first time her work has been translated into English.
Author: Jerusha O. Conner
Activism is once again back on college campuses as students protest issues such as sexual assault, climate change, racial injustice, and student debt. It's perhaps unsurprising that the current political moment has triggered the rise of a new breed of student activistuncompromising, focused, and connected. But many pundits have variously derided student activists as either snowflakes, too fragile to encounter opinions that run contrary to their own, or as social justice warriors who aggressively fight against those who transgress the ever-changing bounds of political correctness. The New Student Activists moves beyond these simple stereotypes and convenient caricatures to examine the nuanced motives and complex experiences of real-life, present-day college student activists. Jerusha O. Conner offers insight into who these student activists arethe causes they care about, the strategies they deploy, the factors that motivate and sustain them, and the impact they have had on their campuses and beyond. Conner dubs today's student activists neoactivists, who borrow from and build on the legacies of past generations of college student activists. Exploring when, how, and why this diverse group of students turned to activism, Conner examines the social and educational influences on their sociopolitical development. She also reveals the fraught but mutually transformative relationship between institutions of higher education and student activists in the contemporary moment. Written for anyone interested in better understanding the latest wave of student activism on campuses, The New Student Activists raises fascinating implications for developmental theory and higher education policy and practice.
Author: Myrto Tsakatika
This book addresses the question of political legitimacy in the European Union from the much neglected angle of political responsibility. It develops an original communitarian approach to legitimacy based on Alasdair MacIntyres ethics of virtues and practices, that can be contrasted with prevalent liberal-egalitarian and neo-republican approaches. Tsakatika argues that a responsibility deficit, quite distinct from the often discussed democratic deficit, can be diagnosed in the European Union. This is documented in chapters that provide in-depth analysis of accountability, transparency and the difficulties associated with identifying responsibility in European governance. Closing this gap requires going beyond institutional engineering. It calls for gradual convergence towards certain core social and political practices and for the flourishing of the virtues of political responsibility in Europes nascent political community. Throughout the book, normative political theory is brought to bear on concrete dilemmas of institutional choice faced by the EU during the recent constitutional debates. Political responsibility and the European Union will be of interest to specialists and postgraduate students of political theory, constitutional law and European Union Studies.
Author: Scott Soames
This is a major, wide-ranging history of analytic philosophy since 1900, told by one of the tradition's leading contemporary figures. The first volume takes the story from 1900 to mid-century. The second brings the history up to date. As Scott Soames tells it, the story of analytic philosophy is one of great but uneven progress, with leading thinkers making important advances toward solving the tradition's core problems. Though no broad philosophical position ever achieved lasting dominance, Soames argues that two methodological developments have, over time, remade the philosophical landscape. These are (1) analytic philosophers' hard-won success in understanding, and distinguishing the notions of logical truth, a priori truth, and necessary truth, and (2) gradual acceptance of the idea that philosophical speculation must be grounded in sound prephilosophical thought. Though Soames views this history in a positive light, he also illustrates the difficulties, false starts, and disappointments endured along the way. As he engages with the work of his predecessors and contemporaries--from Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein to Donald Davidson and Saul Kripke--he seeks to highlight their accomplishments while also pinpointing their shortcomings, especially where their perspectives were limited by an incomplete grasp of matters that have now become clear. Soames himself has been at the center of some of the tradition's most important debates, and throughout writes with exceptional ease about its often complex ideas. His gift for clear exposition makes the history as accessible to advanced undergraduates as it will be important to scholars. Despite its centrality to philosophy in the English-speaking world, the analytic tradition in philosophy has had very few synthetic histories. This will be the benchmark against which all future accounts will be measured.
In Prosody and Purpose in the English Renaissance the eminent scholar O B Hardison Jr sets out to recover the special kinds of music inherent in English Renaissance poetry The book begins with a thorough and wideranging survey of the development of prosodic theory from the ancient ars metrica tradition to the sixteenth century with special emphasis on such issues as the relation of verse form and genre the relation of syntax to prosody and the role of language reform in shaping Renaissance prosody