Produktdetaljer
Om bidragsyterne
Jonathan Lamb is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities at Vanderbilt University, USAThis volume covers a period when Europeans were making great advances in the production and application of pure knowledge, especially in the fields of navigation and discovery. Thus European powers gained empires around the globe and the benefits that came with them, while the rest of the world had to be content with supplying the raw material (i.e labour, bullion, wood, plants, ore) of these good things. This would not have been possible without navies and trading monopolies, enterprises in which the freedom of the seas was disputed, then gained or lost.
The essays in this volume range between three eras in the age of discovery: first, the excitement of seeing something for the first time; second, the experience of understanding the importance of the new thing; and third, the disillusion incident to reframing the prehistory of humanity and its destiny without the usual signposts of an anthropocentric journey from innocence to salvation via sin, atonement and judgment. The maritime contribution to all three eras was enormous not simply because it provided a mobile platform for the inspection of the new but because it proved experimentally that there were no extremes of heroic virtue or of brutal depravity to which humans might not tend when necessity or wantonness called for them. Usually the evil side of humanity was assigned to `savages’ but in the curiously singular person of the pirate, a mirror-image can be found of everyone – really, all people who lived on or by the sea were pirates of a sort.
Commencing as an age of rational certainties, the Enlightenment gave way to the opposite. The symmetries of the Linnaean system yielded to the endless process of mutation Buffon called speciation. Rational government of the passions was succeeded by the cult of sensibility and spontaneous emotion. The mathematical exactness of Cartesian knowledge was supplanted by imagination. Sailors returned with pictures of mirages never seen before, the products of Nature’s own imagination that posed a question posed again here: `No doubt they are real, but are they true?’
List of Illustrations
General Editor’s Preface, Margaret Cohen
Introduction, Jonathan Lamb
1. Knowledges, Hanna Roman
2. Practices, Adam Miller
3. Networks, Anne M. Thell
4. Conflicts, David Taylor
5. Islands and Shores, Killian Quigley
6. Travellers, Jonathan Schroeder
7. Representations, Christopher Pinney
8. Imaginary Worlds, Margarette Lincoln
Notes
Bibliography
Contributors
Index
The Cultural Histories are multi-volume sets that survey the social and cultural construction of specific subjects across six historical periods, broadly:
- Antiquity
- The Medieval Age
- The Early Modern Age
- The Age of Enlightenment
- The Age of Empire
- The Modern Age
The subjects covered range from Animals to Dress and Fashion, from Sport to Furniture, from Money to Fairy Tales. Each volume discusses the same themes in its chapters so that readers may gain an understanding of a period by reading an entire volume, or follow a theme through history by reading the relevant chapter in each volume. Each six-volume set is illustrated.
Titles are available as printed sets for libraries needing just one subject or preferring a one-off purchase and tangible reference for their shelves, or as part of a fully searchable digital library available to institutions by annual subscription or perpetual access (see www.bloomsburyculturalhistory.com).
PRAISE FOR THE SERIES
A Cultural History of Dress and Fashion
“Intriguing, surprising, and thought-provoking essays covering many cultural layers of dress history.”
CHOICE
A Cultural History of Fairy Tales
“A comprehensive treatise that belongs in every academic library concerned with a form of literature that has had broad appeal for centuries and continues to do so.”
CHOICE
A Cultural History of Hair
“A thick, tangled and deliciously idiosyncratic history of hair.”
Times Literary Supplement
A Cultural History of Law
“These introductions should be of great use to scholars from across the periods.”
Law & Literature
A Cultural History of Peace
“The set is a good introduction to the study of peace and encourages looking at world history in a new way.”
CHOICE
A Cultural History of Theatre
“All six volumes are aesthetically attractive, with well-chosen cover illustrations in color and numerous halftones throughout. Page layouts with wide margins, good paper, subtitles, generous bibliographies, notes, and index all add to the appeal.”
CHOICE
A Cultural History of Tragedy
“A highly contemporary work, alert to politics, social theory and sexuality.”
London Review of Books
A Cultural History of Western Empires
“Students seeking a comparative, interdisciplinary, and compelling account of the spread of Western empires will find much of interest here.”
CHOICE
A Cultural History of Work
“[Programs] such as economics, American and world history, women’s studies, and art history will benefit from the information herein.”
American Reference Books Annual