Author: By Susan Mosher Stuard In the fourteenth century, garish ornaments, bright colors, gilt, and military effects helped usher in the age of fashion in Italy. Over a short span of years important matters began to turn on the cut of a sleeve. Fashion influenced consumption and provided a stimulus that drove demand for goods and turned wealthy townspeople into enthusiastic consumers. Making wise decisions about the alarmingly expensive goods that composed a fashionable wardrobe became a matter of pressing concern, especially when the market caught on and became awash in cheaper editions of luxury wares.Focusing on the luxury trade in fashionable wear and accessories in Venice, Florence, and other towns in Italy, Gilding the Market investigates a major shift in patterns of consumption at the height of medieval prosperity, which, more remarkably, continued through the subsequent era of plague, return of plague, and increased warfare. A fine sensitivity to the demands of le pompe, that is, the public display of private wealth, infected town life. The quest for luxuries affected markets by enlarging exchange activity and encouraging retail trades. As both consumers and tradesmen, local goldsmiths, long-distance traders, bankers, and money changers played important roles in creating this new age of fashion.In response to a greater public display of luxury goods, civic sumptuary laws were written to curb spending and extreme fashion, but these were aimed at women, youth, and children, leaving townsmen largely unrestricted in their consumption. With erudition, grace, and an evocative selection of illustrations, some reproduced in full color, Susan Mosher Stuard explores the arrival of fashion in European history.

Author: Pierre Potier Missionnaire chez les Hurons et Francais du Detroit (Windsor) de 1744 a 1781, le jesuite belge Pierre Potier (1708-1781) a laisse une documentation considerable. Robert Toupin nous livre ici ces ecrits jusqua aujourdhui disperses dans plusieurs fonds darchives. Documents indispensables pour letude de la formation des missionnaires jesuites et du travail devangelisation en Nouvelle-France, les ecrits de Potier touchent la theologie, la philosophie, la morale, lEcriture sainte, les langues (latine, francaise, huronne), les sciences, ladministration de la mission (livres de compte, registres de catholicite des Hurons et des Francais), sans parler des notes sur les ouvrages de piete ou de devotion, des itineraires de voyages et de la correspondance. La partie la plus originale demeure toutefois le lexique des facons de parler en Nouvelle-France, un repertoire terminologique de premiere importance. Une description commentee de la bibliotheque personnelle de Potier complete letude. Excellent ouvrage de reference pour les historiens, ce livre sadresse egalement aux linguistiques, aux anthropologues, aux ethnologues et aux specialistes de la toponymie dans lempire francais dAmerique. Cest un corpus situe a la frontiere de la culture savante, bien ancre dans le territoire du savoir encyclopedique.

Author: Omar Calabrese A leading young Italian semiologist scrutinizes today's cultural phenomena and finds the prevailing taste to be neo-baroque--characterized by an appetite for virtuosity, frantic rhythms, instability, poly-dimensionality, and change. Omar Calabrese locates a sign of the times in an amazing variety of literary, philosophical, artistic, musical, and architectural forms, from the Venice Biennale through the new science to television series, video games, and zapping with the remote control device from channel to channel! Calabrese admits that he begins the book with a refusal to distinguish between Donald Duck and Dante. Avoiding hierarchies or ghettos among works, he takes his readers on a fast-paced expedition through contemporary culture that closes with an elegant essay on evaluation and classical form. According to Calabrese, the enormous quantity of narrative now being produced has led to a new situation: everything has already been said, and everything has already been written. The only way of avoiding saturation has been to turn to a poetics of repetition. The author shows that pleasure in texts is now produced by tiny variations, and a certain kind of citation from other works has taken on a central importance that would have been unthinkable only a few years ago. In describing this development, and others shared by both avant-garde and mass media, he makes us aware of the rapid shrinkage in the once ample space between highbrow and lowbrow.Originally published in .The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Author: Christopher A. Bail In July 2010, Terry Jones, the pastor of a small fundamentalist church in Florida, announced plans to burn two hundred Qurans on the anniversary of the September 11 attacks. Though he ended up canceling the stunt in the face of widespread public backlash, his threat sparked violent protests across the Muslim world that left at least twenty people dead. In Terrified, Christopher Bail demonstrates how the beliefs of fanatics like Jones are inspired by a rapidly expanding network of anti-Muslim organizations that exert profound influence on American understanding of Islam.Bail traces how the anti-Muslim narrative of the political fringe has captivated large segments of the American media, government, and general public, validating the views of extremists who argue that the United States is at war with Islam and marginalizing mainstream Muslim-Americans who are uniquely positioned to discredit such claims. Drawing on cultural sociology, social network theory, and social psychology, he shows how anti-Muslim organizations gained visibility in the public sphere, commandeered a sense of legitimacy, and redefined the contours of contemporary debate, shifting it ever outward toward the fringe. Bail illustrates his pioneering theoretical argument through a big-data analysis of more than one hundred organizations struggling to shape public discourse about Islam, tracing their impact on hundreds of thousands of newspaper articles, television transcripts, legislative debates, and social media messages produced since the September 11 attacks. The book also features in-depth interviews with the leaders of these organizations, providing a rare look at how anti-Muslim organizations entered the American mainstream.