This book aims to reconceive the field of knowledge of the “Gallic past” in French discourse of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries by focusing on the monument as an object capable of underpinning insights into that past, the evolution of the concept, and the epistemic practices used to produce it. Through monuments, the book redirects our gaze toward the French provinces, where material and immaterial evidence of the Gallic past was “discovered” and transformed into epistemic objects. This perspective results in a “provincialization” of Paris as a site of knowledge production and sheds light on the crucial role of provincial scholarship, not only in the “invention” of the Gallic past but also in methodological and epistemological renewal. The result is a revision of recent historiography, which interpreted the narrative of an “autochthonous” pre-Roman, Gallic past as nation-building. This volume offers a pioneering contribution toward new directions in historical epistemology focused on the historicity of the “species” of evidence of each epoch.

This book is an interdisciplinary study that draws on a combination of archaeological evidence, building archaeological analysis, archival sources to explore the dynamic relations between dwelling houses, social organization of households, and patterns of cohabitation during the eighteenth century. The empirical focus of this book is on Swedish towns, but it also addresses more general issues about urbanity and urban life, space and social organization, and materiality and individual agency. Aggregated questions about urban life and urban space are combined with a micro historical method revealing aspects of daily life and urban change. This study unveils a previously neglected history. Swedish eighteenth century towns have commonly been identified as a territory characterized by its sleepy absence of change. This study proves the opposite. Houses were built larger, with more diverse and complex inner structures. Family structures changed; households generally became smaller, the share of households headed by a married couple declined, and the number of single households increased. Population density increased, the number of families residing in the same house increased, and rental accommodation became more prevalent. This volume is essential reading for anyone interested in early modern housing, urban change, and interdisciplinary methods.

A Companion to Roman Italy investigates the impactof Rome in all its forms—political, cultural, social, andeconomic—upon Italy’s various regions, as well as theextent to which unification occurred as Rome became the capital ofItaly. The collection presents new archaeological data relating to thesites of Roman Italy Contributions discuss new theories of how to understandcultural change in the Italian peninsula Combines detailed case-studies of particular sites withwider-ranging thematic chapters Leading contributors not only make accessible the most recentwork on Roman Italy, but also offer fresh insight on long standingdebates

In this comprehensive tour of the long history and philosophy of expertise, from ancient Greece to the 20th century, Jamie Carlin Watson tackles the question of expertise and why we can be skeptical of what experts say, making a valuable contribution to contemporary philosophical debates on authority, testimony, disagreement and trust. His review sketches out the ancient origins of the concept, discussing its early association with cunning, skill and authority and covering the sort of training that ancient thinkers believed was required for expertise. Watson looks at the evolution of the expert in the middle ages into a type of “genius” or “innate talent” , moving to the role of psychological research in 16th-century Germany, the influence of Darwin, the impact of behaviorism and its interest to computer scientists, and its transformation into the largely cognitive concept psychologists study today.

An erudite scholar and an elegant writer, Gordon S. Wood has won both numerous awards and a broad readership since the 1969 publication of his widely acclaimed The Creation of the American Republic. With The Purpose of the Past, Wood has essentially created a history of American history, assessing the current state of history vis-à-vis the work of some of its most important scholars-doling out praise and scorn with equal measure. In this wise, passionate defense of history's ongoing necessity, Wood argues that we cannot make intelligent decisions about the future without understanding our past. Wood offers a master's insight into what history-at its best-can be and reflects on its evolving and essential role in our culture.

Sohail Inayatullah takes us on a journey through Indian philosophy, grand theory and macrohistory. We understand and appreciate Indian theories of history, specifically cyclical and spiral theories of time. From other civilizations, we learn how seminal thinkers understood the stages and mechanisms of transformation. Ssu-Ma Chien, Ibn Khaldun, Giambattista Vico, George Wilhelm Friedrick Hegel, Oswald Spengler, Comte Pitirim Sorokin, and Michel Foucault are invited to a dialog on the nature of agency and structure, and the escape ways from the patterns of history. But the journey is centered on P.R. Sarkar, the controversial Indian philosopher, guru and activist. While Sarkar passed away in 1990, his work, his social movements, his vision of the future remains ever alive. Inayatullah brings us closer to the heart and head of this giant luminary. Through Understanding Sarkar, we gain insight into how knowledge can transform and liberate. This publication has also been published in paperback, please click here for details.

This highly original and penetrating study explores fundamental intellectual predispositions and concepts which underpin the literature and thought of the Augustan period in England. By examining in particular Augustan notions of probability and the way they provided a framework for thinking about and organising experience, Dr Patey reconstructs a characteristically eighteenth-century theory of literature which offers a much more satisfactory account of the work of Pope, Johnson, Fielding and others than the Romantic literary categories already in existence. The scope of this study is encyclopaedic and it will be an essential reference work for all scholars of eighteenth-century English literature and intellectual history, as well as historians of ideas.

Foucalt deals with the emergence in the early 17th century of a new understanding of society and its relation to war.

The elaborate and inventive slaughter of humans and animals in the arena fed an insatiable desire for violent spectacle among the Roman people. Donald G. Kyle combines the words of ancient authors with current scholarly research and cross-cultural perspectives, as he explores * the origins and historical development of the games * who the victims were and why they were chosen * how the Romans disposed of the thousands of resulting corpses * the complex religious and ritual aspects of institutionalised violence * the particularly savage treatment given to defiant Christians. This lively and original work provides compelling, sometimes controversial, perspectives on the bloody entertainments of ancient Rome, which continue to fascinate us to this day.

Centering his analysis on the consequences for self-representation of the epistemic shift to modernity, Dr. Hembree reassesses the cultural importance of one of the early seventeenth-century's neglected masterpieces of prose fiction, Honoré d'Urfé's L'Astrée. He argues that the narrative, published in five volumes from 1607 to 1627, provides an intellectual bridge between the rejection of ontological guarantees of identity and meaning in Montaigne's Essais, and the formulation of subjective consciousness as a new foundation for self-knowledge in the writings of Descartes. Suspended between medieval and modern paradigms of self-representation, L'Astrée contributed to the reconceptualization of the self and the social symbolic order that occurred in the early modern period. Therein lies its relevance for twentieth-century readers who, like d'Urfé's contemporaries, are caught in a semiotic crisis engendered by yet another cultural divide.