1492

Sample

David Crowe

A History of the Gypsies of Eastern Europe and Russia, drawn from previously untapped East European, Russian, and traditional sources, explores the life, history, and culture of the Gypsies, or Roma, from their early appearance in the region during the Middle Ages until the present. David Crowe's study looks at the rich and diverse cultural and historical traditions of the Gypsies in each nation and region. He covers Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, the republics of the former Yugoslavia, Albania, and the states that made up the former Soviet Union. He focuses in particular on Russia, where the Gypsies have exerted a profound influence on literary and musical traditions. . Crowe also explores the virulent prejudice and mistreatment that has been so much a part of the Gypsies' tragic history and culminated in their losses during the Nazi Holocaust. He concludes with a close look at the revival of this prejudice and the plight of the Roma today as they struggle to redefine their role in the new worlds of post-communist Eastern Europe and Russia.

Sample

A.J. Boyle

"Tragic Seneca undertakes a radical re-evaluation of Seneca's plays, their relationship to Roman imperial culture and their instrumental role in the evolution of the European theatrical tradition." "Tragic Seneca attempts to restore Seneca to a central position in the European literary tradition. It will provide readers and directors of Seneca's plays with the essential critical guide to their intellectual, cultural and dramatic complexity."--Jacket.

Sample

Ann E. Moyer

"Theories of music and its nature, central to many aspects of Renaissance thought, have nonetheless been difficult to integrate into modern scholarship. In Musica Scientia, Ann E. Moyer asserts that the Renaissance discipline must be understood in the terms of other contemporary fields of knowledge." "Moyer begins with a clear and concise historical summary of ancient and medieval musical thought, emphasizing the importance of the Phythagorean teachings about music, transmitted to the medieval world through Boethius's De institutione arithmetica. Describing the factors that, in the late fifteenth century, led scholars and practicing musicians to raise new questions about the discipline and its study, Moyer closely analyzes the writings of the sixteenth-century Italians who debated the nature of music and its relationship to mathematics, the natural sciences, poetry, and rhetoric. Renaissance thinking about music, she shows, wrought a dramatic change in the understanding of the field: scholars came to distinguish between a science of sounding bodies and an art of music, an art to be studied in terms of poetics and the history of taste." "Moyer's book offers a new and systematic treatment of a critical but neglected aspect of Renaissance thought. It makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the classification of knowledge in the Renaissance and of the process by which two competing kinds of analysis--humanistic and mathematical--came to distinguish the modern arts and sciences."--BOOK JACKET.

Sample

James R. Farr

"This book is a survey of the history of work in general and of European urban artisans in particular, from the late Middle Ages to the era of industrialization. Unlike traditional histories of work and craftsmen, this book offers a multifaceted understanding of artisan experience situated in the artisans' culture. It treats economic and institutional topics, but also devotes considerable attention to the changing ideologies of work, the role of government regulation in the world of work, the social history of craftspeople, the artisan in rebellion against the various authorities in his world, and the ceremonial and leisure life of artisans. Women, masters, journeymen, apprentices, and nonguild workers all received substantial treatment. The book concludes with a chapter on the nineteenth century, examining the transformation of artisan culture, exploring how and why the early modern craftsman became the industrial wage-worker, mechanic, or shopkeeper of the modern age."--Jacket.