De la démocratie en Amérique

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Jay R. Berkovitz

"Rites and Passages emphasizes the resilience of religious tradition during periods of social and political turbulence. Viewing French Jewish history through the lens of ritual, Berkovitz describes the struggles of the French Jewish minority to maintain its cultural distinctiveness while also participating in the larger social and economic matrix." "Introducing new and previously unused primary sources, Rites and Passages offers a fresh perspective on the dynamic relationship between tradition and modernity."--BOOK JACKET.

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L.M. de Rijk

This volume contains the first critical edition and a complete English translation of the well-known correspondence conducted by the fourteenth-century 'sceptic' author Nicholas of Autrecourt (c. 1300-1369), with Bernard of Arezzo and a Master Giles. In the Introduction the extant manuscripts are analysed and the different positions of Nicholas, Bernard and Giles are discussed; the purport of Giles' reply to Nicholas is, contrary to common opinion, identified as a defence of Aristotelianism rather than of Bernard's 'sceptic' views. Two appendices contain the first critical edition of the records of the Avignon trial against Nicholas found in the Vatican Archives, and the 'Condemned Articles' with an English translation. The volume is rounded off with extensive indexes, which facilitate the use of the book as a source for the history of fourteenth-century thought.

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Mary Wollstonecraft

From Goodreads: Writing in an age when the call for the rights of man had brought revolution to America and France, Mary Wollstonecraft produced her own declaration of female independence in 1792. Passionate and forthright, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman attacked the prevailing view of docile, decorative femininity, and instead laid out the principles of emancipation: an equal education for girls and boys, an end to prejudice, and for women to become defined by their profession, not their partner. Mary Wollstonecraft's work was received with a mixture of admiration and outrage - Walpole called her 'a hyena in petticoats' - yet it established her as the mother of modern feminism.

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Neil Postman

"In Building a Bridge to the Eighteenth Century Neil Postman revisits the Enlightenment, that great flowering of ideas that provided a humane direction for the future - ideas that formed our nation and that we would do well to embrace anew."--BOOK JACKET. "He turns our attention to Goethe, Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, Kant, Edward Gibbon, Adam Smith, Thomas Paine, Jefferson, and Franklin, and to their then-radical thinking about inductive science, religious and political freedom, popular education, rational commerce, the nation-state, progress, and happiness."--BOOK JACKET. "Postman calls for a future connected to traditions that provide sane authority and meaningful purpose - as opposed to an overreliance on technology and an increasing disregard for the lessons of history. And he argues passionately for specific new guidelines in the education of our children, with renewed emphasis on developing the intellect as successfully as we are developing a computer-driven world."--BOOK JACKET.