Author: Hannele Klemettilä File Type: pdf We dont usually think of haute cuisine when we think of the Middle Ages. But while the poor did eat a lot of vegetables, porridge, and bread, the medieval palate was far more diverse than commonly assumed. Meat, including beef, mutton, deer, and rabbit, turned on spits over crackling fires, and the rich showed off their prosperity by serving peacock and wild boar at banquets. Fish was consumed in abundance, especially during religious periods such as Lent, and the air was redolent with exotic spices like cinnamon and pepper that came all the way from the Far East. In this richly illustrated history, Hannele Klemettila corrects common misconceptions about the food of the Middle Ages, acquainting the reader not only with the food culture but also the customs and ideologies associated with eating in medieval times. Fish, meat, fruit, and vegetables traveled great distances to appear on dinner tables across Europe, and Klemettilla takes us into the medieval kitchens of Western Europe and Scandinavia to describe the methods and utensils used to prepare and preserve this well-traveled food. The Medieval Kitchen also contains more than sixty original recipes for enticing fare like roasted veal paupiettes with bacon and herbs, rose pudding, and spiced wine. Evoking the dining rooms and kitchens of Europe some six hundred years ago, The Medieval Kitchen will tempt anyone with a taste for the food, customs, and folklore of times long past. **Review Oh no! Not whole-roasted ox again! Even for the aristocracy, medieval fare must have been boring, its been assumed. The reality was quite otherwise, Hannele Klemettila reveals. This social history with recipes is as delicious in its details as it is mouthwatering in its presentation. Granted, fine dining was a luxury, and prestige catering a mark of status consumption could be outrageously conspicuous, then as now. In most places and at most times, however, fresh produce was available in abundance and even the relatively poor could expect to eat meat three times a week. More enterprising readers may want to take a stab at some of the 60-odd recipes in which Klemettila serves up a splendid banquet of forgotten flavours. (New Scotsman) The chance to make your own medieval dishes brings Klemettilas history to life in your own kitchen. . . . She presents a fascinating picture of a very different mindset when it comes to food. (National Catholic Reporter) The Medieval Kitchen is an admirable effort to elucidate how and what European peoples ate during the late Middle Ages. . . . The volume is filled with illustrations from medieval books of hours and other manuscripts informative captions accompanying each illustration give historical context. This book is an ideal introduction to the topic for both students and adventurous cooks. Highly recommended. (Choice) About the Author Hannele Klemettila is a postdoctoral researcher at the Academy of Finland and a specialist in medieval cultural history.

Author: Vyvyan Evans File Type: epub Language is central to our lives, the cultural tool that arguably sets us apart from other species. Some scientists have argued that language is innate, a type of unique human instinct pre-programmed in us from birth. In this book, Vyvyan Evans argues that this received wisdom is, in fact, a myth. Debunking the notion of a language instinct, Evans demonstrates that language is related to other animal forms of communication that languages exhibit staggering diversity that we learn our mother tongue drawing on general properties and abilities of the human mind, rather than an inborn universal grammar that language is not autonomous but is closely related to other aspects of our mental lives and that, ultimately, language and the mind reflect and draw upon the way we interact with others in the world. Compellingly written and drawing on cutting-edge research, The Language Myth sets out a forceful alternative to the received wisdom, showing how language and the mind really work. **Review A much-needed, comprehensive critique of universal grammar. Vyvyan Evans builds a compelling case that will be difficult to refute. David Crystal, author of The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language Evans rebuttal of Chomskys universal grammar from the perspective of cognitive linguistics provides an excellent antidote to popular textbooks where it is assumed that the Chomskyan approach to linguistic theory (in one avatar or another) has somehow been vindicated once and for all. Michael Fortescue, Professor Emeritus, University of Copenhagen The Language Myth builds a compelling case that there is no innate universal grammar. Evanss work is a welcome contribution to our understanding of the origin, nature, and use of human language. Daniel L. Everett, Dean of Arts and Sciences, Bentley University Highly recommended. Seizi Iwata, Kansai University Is the way we think about language on the cusp of a revolution? After reading The Language Myth it certainly looks as if a major shift is in progress, one that will open peoples minds to liberating new ways of thinking about language. New Scientist Voluminous ... completely persuasive. Fortean Times Book Description Language is central to our lives, the cultural tool that arguably sets us apart from other species. Some scientists have argued that language is innate, a type of unique human instinct pre-programmed in us from birth. In this book, Evans argues that this received wisdom is, in fact, a myth.

Author: Jeffrey J Rossman File Type: pdf Challenging the claim that workers supported Stalins revolution from above as well as the assumption that working-class opposition to a workers state was impossible, Jeffrey Rossman shows how a crucial segment of the Soviet population opposed the authorities during the critical industrializing period of the First Five-Year Plan. Marshaling an impressive range of archival evidence, Rossman recounts in vivid detail myriad individual and collective acts of protest, including mass demonstrations, food riots, strikes, slowdowns, violent attacks against officials, and subversive letters to the authorities. Male and female workers in one of Russias oldest, largest, and reddest manufacturing centers--the textile plants of the Ivanovo Industrial Region--actively resisted Stalinist policies that consigned them to poverty, illness, and hunger. In April 1932, 20,000 mill workers across the region participated in a wave of strikes. Seeing the event as a rebuke to his leadership, Stalin dispatched Lazar Kaganovich to quash the rebellion, resulting in bloodshed and repression. Moscow was forced to respond to the crisis on the nations shop floors with a series of important reforms. Rossman uncovers a new dimension to the relationship between the Soviet leadership and working class and makes an important contribution to the debate about the nature of resistance to the Stalinist regime. ReviewWith this challenging and deeply researched book, Jeffrey Rossman helps establish the paradigm of resistance in Soviet historiography. He shows that among textile workers class consciousness and discourse continued to live well into the Soviet era. Rossman argues that collective memory of earlier struggles shaped social identity, political activism, indeed the entire relationship of workers to Soviet power in the Central Industrial Region. --Daniel Orlovsky, Southern Methodist UniversityThis outstanding work challenges many of the more paradigmatic interpretations of the relationship between the Stalinist leadership and its working class. Worker Resistance under Stalin will make a major statement and provoke some much needed controversy around this question. --Donald Filtzer, University of East LondonFrom roughly 1928 to 1932 the Ivanovo Industrial Region (IIR) became the epicenter of worker resistance to Stalins revolution from above. In this powerful and highly original study, Jeffrey Rossman narrates how the regions textile workers responded to Stalins crash industrialization program with strikes, slowdowns, sabotage, and demonstrations, culminating in April 1932 in an uprising in Vichuga, when 17,500 strikers attacked the headquarters of the police, OGPU, and party, which resulted in two deaths and a couple of dozen injuries. On the basis of exhaustive work in local and national archives, including the regional archives of the Federal State Security Service, Rossman reconstructs with exemplary acuity the impact of intensified workloads, wage arrears, shutdowns, and the deterioration of equipment upon the lives of IIR textile workers...A fine study that vindicates the importance of resistance as a category for understanding Soviet realities against certain recent efforts to deny its very possibility.--S. A. Smith (Russian Review 20060701)This meticulously researched and clearly argued account of industrial relations during First Five-Year Plan emphasizes workers own actions and sentiments and is therefore a refreshing addition to a field that has declined so markedly over the last decade. Jeffrey Rossmans Worker Resistance under Stalin challenges the largely pre-archival revisionist historiography that claimed proletarian support for Stalins revolution...The power of this volume lies in its superb research and captivating narrative. Rossman worked extensively in eight archives (with citations from 160 files) but it is not so much the quantity of the research as its quality that is so impressive...A groundbreaking contribution to the field. Rossman has single-handedly destroyed the myth that it was impossible for workers to resist Stalin. He has also allowed workers own voices to refute the absurd notion that they welcomed such brutal policies and supported Stalinism. Worker Resistance under Stalin provides the essential comparative baseline for understanding why the generalized working-class anger did not escalate into rebellion.--Kevin Murphy (Revolutionary Russia 20060601)Jeffrey Rossmans well researched and passionately written book on the resistance of the textile workers to Stalins industrialization contributes to a number of issues that are the subject of heated debate in the historiography of Stalinism the mechanisms of a genesis of social resistance to the regime, its extent, effects, dimensions and limits, and the process and sources of the construction of identities. The book explores, among other major issues, the evolution of forms of worker protest the emergence of patterns of resistance the impact of workerss struggle on central power policies the reasons for the failure of shopfloor resistance the divisions between the workers caused by resistance the role of a worker leader and the degree of the (un)development of a political consciousness among workers, to name just a few...Rossmans thorough research in the regional and central archives of Russia has produced a wonderful result--a vivid, intense, colourful and complex story of the worker struggle not just for bread but also for the preservation of the shopfloor democracy and self preservation of the working class as a political group.--Elena A. Osokina (International Review of Social History ) About the AuthorJeffrey J. Rossman is Associate Professor of History at the University of Virginia.

Author: Hannah Arendt File Type: epub Few thinkers have addressed the political horrors and ethical complexities of the twentieth century with the insight and passionate intellectual integrity of Hannah Arendt. She was irresistible drawn to the activity of understanding, in an effort to endow historic, political, and cultural events with meaning. Essays in Understanding assembles many of Arendts writings from the 1930s, 1940s, and into the 1950s. Included here are illuminating discussions of St. Augustine, existentialism, Kafka, and Kierkegaard relatively early examinations of Nazism, responsibility and guilt, and the place of religion in the modern world and her later investigations into the nature of totalitarianism that Arendt set down after The Origins of Totalitarianism was published in 1951. The body of work gathered in this volume gives us a remarkable portrait of Arendts developments as a thinkerand confirms why her ideas and judgments remain as provocative and seminal today as they were when she first set them down. From the Trade Paperback edition.**About the Author Hannah Arendt was born in Hanover, Germany, 1906, fled to Paris in 1933, and came to the United States after the outbreak of World War II. She was editorial director of Schocken Books from 1946 to 1948. She taught at Berkeley, Princeton, the University of Chicago, and The New School for Social Research. Arendt died in 1975.