Culture & Civilization
Books & eBooks
Houses and Society in Pompeii and Herculaneum by ISBN: 9780691029092Publication Date: 1996Few sources reveal the life of the ancient Romans as vividly as do the houses preserved by the eruption of Vesuvius. Wealthy Romans lavished resources on shaping their surroundings to impress their crowds of visitors. The fashions they set were taken up and imitated by ordinary citizens. In this illustrated book, Andrew Wallace-Hadrill explores the rich potential of the houses of Pompeii and Herculaneum to offer new insights into Roman social life. Exposing misconceptions derived from contemporary culture, he shows the close interconnection of spheres we take as discrete: public and private, family and outsiders, work and leisure. Combining archaeological evidence with Roman texts and comparative material from other cultures, Wallace-Hadrill raises a range of new questions. How did the organization of space and the use of decoration help to structure social encounters between owner and visitor, man and woman, master and slave? What sort of "households" did the inhabitants of the Roman house form? How did the world of work relate to that of entertainment and leisure? How widely did the luxuries of the rich spread among the houses of craftsmen and shopkeepers? Through analysis of the remains of over two hundred houses, Wallace-Hadrill reveals the remarkably dynamic social environment of early imperial Italy, and the vital part that houses came to play in defining what it meant "to live as a Roman."
The Virtues of Economy by ISBN: 9781501742378Publication Date: 2019The humanist perception of fourteenth-century Rome as a slumbering ruin awaiting the Renaissance and the return of papal power has cast a long shadow on the historiography of the city. Challenging this view, James A. Palmer argues that Roman political culture underwent dramatic changes in the late Middle Ages, with profound and lasting implications for city's subsequent development. The Virtues of Economy examines the transformation of Rome's governing elites as a result of changes in the city's economic, political, and spiritual landscape. Palmer explores this shift through the history of Roman political society, its identity as an urban commune, and its once-and-future role as the spiritual capital of Latin Christendom. Tracing the contours of everyday Roman politics, The Virtues of Economy reframes the reestablishment of papal sovereignty in Rome as the product of synergy between papal ambitions and local political culture. More broadly, Palmer emphasizes Rome's distinct role in evolution of medieval Italy's city-communes.
The Sacred Home in Renaissance Italy by ISBN: 0198816553Publication Date: 2018How did religion colour daily life in the Italian Renaissance home? Whether reading sacred texts or conducting superstitious rituals that were frowned on by the Church, private devotion evolved in deeply personal ways. Devotional practices accompanied family rites of passage such as childbirth, marriage, and death, while a wide array of material objects, including books, works of art, jewellery, and relics, helped to create the atmosphere for pious reflection andprayer. Peering into the privacy of the family, the authors expose patterns of piety that helped individuals to confront both the dangers and delights of everyday life.
The Grace of the Italian Renaissance by ISBN: 9780691175485Publication Date: 2020How grace shaped the Renaissance in Italy "Grace" emerges as a keyword in the culture and society of sixteenth-century Italy. The Grace of the Italian Renaissance explores how it conveys and connects the most pressing ethical, social and aesthetic concerns of an age concerned with the reactivation of ancient ideas in a changing world. The book reassesses artists such as Francesco del Cossa, Raphael and Michelangelo and explores anew writers like Castiglione, Ariosto, Tullia d'Aragona and Vittoria Colonna. It shows how these artists and writers put grace at the heart of their work. Grace, Ita Mac Carthy argues, came to be as contested as it was prized across a range of Renaissance Italian contexts. It characterised emerging styles in literature and the visual arts, shaped ideas about how best to behave at court and sparked controversy about social harmony and human salvation. For all these reasons, grace abounded in the Italian Renaissance, yet it remained hard to define. Mac Carthy explores what grace meant to theologians, artists, writers and philosophers, showing how it influenced their thinking about themselves, each other and the world. Ambitiously conceived and elegantly written, this book portrays grace not as a stable formula of expression but as a web of interventions in culture and society.
Historical Culture and Political Reform in the Italian Enlightenment by ISBN: 9781789622034Publication Date: 2020For centuriesthe society and politics of Old Regime Europe relied on the strong connectionbetween past, present, and future and on a belief in the unstoppable continuityof time. What happened during the eighteenth century when the Age of Revolutionsclaimed to cancel the previous social order and announced the dawn of a newera? This book explores how antiquarianism provided new political bodies withallegedly time-hallowed traditions and so served as a source of legitimacy forreshaping European politics. The love for antiquities forged a common languageof political communication within a burgeoning public sphere. To understandwhy this happened, Marco Cavarzere focuses on the cultural debates taking placein the Italian states from 1748 until 1796. During this period, governmentstried to establish regional "national cultures" through erudite scholarship,with the intent of creating new administrative and political centralizationwithin individual Italian states. Meanwhile, other sectors of local societiesused the tools of antiquarianism in order to offer a counter-narrative on thesepolitical reforms. Ultimately, thisbook proposes a localized way of reading antiquarian texts. Far from presentingtimeless knowledge, erudition in fact gave voice to specific tensions whichwere linked to restricted political arenas and regional public opinion.
Beyond Catholicism by ISBN: 9781137342027Publication Date: 2013The essays within Beyond Catholicism trace the interconnections of belief, heresy, and mysticism in Italian culture from the Middle Ages to today. In particular, they explore how religious discourse has unfolded within Italian culture in the context of shifting paradigms of rationality, authority, time, good and evil, and human collectivities.
