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Bitstreams - Matthew G. Kirschenbaum - Bog - University of Pennsylvania Press - Plusbog.dk

Bitstreams - Matthew G. Kirschenbaum - Bog - University of Pennsylvania Press - Plusbog.dk

What are the future prospects for literary knowledge now that literary texts-and the material remains of authorship, publishing, and reading-are reduced to bitstreams, strings of digital ones and zeros? What are the opportunities and obligations for book history, textual criticism, and bibliography when literary texts are distributed across digital platforms, devices, formats, and networks? Indeed, what is textual scholarship when the "text" of our everyday speech is a verb as often as it is a noun? These are the questions that motivate Matthew G. Kirschenbaum in Bitstreams, a distillation of twenty years of thinking about the intersection of digital media, textual studies, and literary archives. With an intimate narrative style that belies the cold technics of computing, Kirschenbaum takes the reader into the library where all access to Toni Morrison's "papers" is mediated by digital technology; to the bitmapped fonts of Kamau Brathwaite's Macintosh; to the process of recovering and restoring fourteen lost "HyperPoems" by the noted poet William Dickey; and finally, into the offices of Melcher Media, a small boutique design studio reimagining the future of the codex. A persistent theme is that bits-the ubiquitous ones and zeros of computing-are never self-identical, but always inflected by the material realities of particular systems, platforms, and protocols. These materialities are not liabilities: they are the very bulwark on which we stake the enterprise for preserving the future of literary heritage.

DKK 246.00
1

Bitstreams - Matthew G. Kirschenbaum - Bog - University of Pennsylvania Press - Plusbog.dk

Bitstreams - Matthew G. Kirschenbaum - Bog - University of Pennsylvania Press - Plusbog.dk

What are the future prospects for literary knowledge now that literary texts-and the material remains of authorship, publishing, and reading-are reduced to bitstreams, strings of digital ones and zeros? What are the opportunities and obligations for book history, textual criticism, and bibliography when literary texts are distributed across digital platforms, devices, formats, and networks? Indeed, what is textual scholarship when the "text" of our everyday speech is a verb as often as it is a noun? These are the questions that motivate Matthew G. Kirschenbaum in Bitstreams, a distillation of twenty years of thinking about the intersection of digital media, textual studies, and literary archives. With an intimate narrative style that belies the cold technics of computing, Kirschenbaum takes the reader into the library where all access to Toni Morrison's "papers" is mediated by digital technology; to the bitmapped fonts of Kamau Brathwaite's Macintosh; to the process of recovering and restoring fourteen lost "HyperPoems" by the noted poet William Dickey; and finally, into the offices of Melcher Media, a small boutique design studio reimagining the future of the codex. A persistent theme is that bits-the ubiquitous ones and zeros of computing-are never self-identical, but always inflected by the material realities of particular systems, platforms, and protocols. These materialities are not liabilities: they are the very bulwark on which we stake the enterprise for preserving the future of literary heritage.

DKK 554.00
1

Making Seafood Sustainable - Mansel G. Blackford - Bog - University of Pennsylvania Press - Plusbog.dk

Making Seafood Sustainable - Mansel G. Blackford - Bog - University of Pennsylvania Press - Plusbog.dk

In the spring of 2007, National Geographic warned, "The oceans are in deep blue trouble. From the northernmost reaches of the Greenland Sea to the swirl of the Antarctic Circle, we are gutting our seas of fish." There were legitimate grounds for concern. After increasing more than fourfold between 1950 and 1994, the global wild fish catch reached a plateau and stagnated despite exponential growth in the fishing industry. As numerous scientific reports showed, many fish stocks around the world collapsed, creating a genuine global overfishing crisis. Making Seafood Sustainable analyzes the ramifications of overfishing for the United States by investigating how fishers, seafood processors, retailers, government officials, and others have worked together to respond to the crisis. Historian Mansel G. Blackford examines how these players took steps to make fishing in some American waters, especially in Alaskan waters, sustainable. Critical to these efforts, Blackford argues, has been government and industry collaboration in formulating and enforcing regulations. What can be learned from these successful experiences? Are they applicable elsewhere? What are the drawbacks? Making Seafood Sustainable addresses these questions and suggests that sustainable seafood management can be made to work. The economic and social costs incurred in achieving sustainable resource usage are significant, but there are ways to mitigate them. More broadly, this study illustrates ways to manage commonly held natural resources around the world—land, water, oil, and so on—in sustainable ways.

DKK 506.00
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Covenant Brothers - Daniel G. Hummel - Bog - University of Pennsylvania Press - Plusbog.dk

Covenant Brothers - Daniel G. Hummel - Bog - University of Pennsylvania Press - Plusbog.dk

Weaving together the stories of activists, American Jewish leaders, and Israeli officials in the wake of the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, Covenant Brothers portrays the dramatic rise of evangelical Christian Zionism as it gained prominence in American politics, Israeli diplomacy, and international relations after World War II. According to Daniel G. Hummel, conventional depictions of the Christian Zionist movement—the organized political and religious effort by conservative Protestants to support the state of Israel—focus too much on American evangelical apocalyptic fascination with the Jewish people. Hummel emphasizes instead the institutional, international, interreligious, and intergenerational efforts on the part of Christians and Jews to mobilize evangelical support for Israel. From missionary churches in Israel to Holy Land tourism, from the Israeli government to the American Jewish Committee, and from Billy Graham's influence on Richard Nixon to John Hagee's courting of Donald Trump, Hummel reveals modern Christian Zionism to be an evolving and deepening collaboration between Christians and the state of Israel. He shows how influential officials in the Israeli Ministry of Religious Affairs and Foreign Ministry, tasked with pursuing a religious diplomacy that would enhance Israel's standing in the Christian world, combined forces with evangelical Christians to create and organize the vast global network of Christian Zionism that exists today. He also explores evangelicalism's embrace of Jewish concepts, motifs, and practices and its profound consequences on worshippers' political priorities and their relationship to Israel. Drawing on religious and government archives in the United States and Israel, Covenant Brothers reveals how an unlikely mix of Christian and Jewish leaders, state support, and transnational networks of institutions combined religion, politics, and international relations to influence U.S. foreign policy and, eventually, global geopolitics.

DKK 472.00
1

Roads to Health - G. Geltner - Bog - University of Pennsylvania Press - Plusbog.dk

Roads to Health - G. Geltner - Bog - University of Pennsylvania Press - Plusbog.dk

In Roads to Health , G. Geltner demonstrates that urban dwellers in medieval Italy had a keen sense of the dangers to their health posed by conditions of overcrowding, shortages of food and clean water, air pollution, and the improper disposal of human and animal waste. He consults scientific, narrative, and normative sources that detailed and consistently denounced the physical and environmental hazards urban communities faced: latrines improperly installed and sewers blocked; animals left to roam free and carcasses left rotting on public byways; and thoroughfares congested by artisanal and commercial activities that impeded circulation, polluted waterways, and raised miasmas. However, as Geltner shows, numerous administrative records also offer ample evidence of the concrete measures cities took to ameliorate unhealthy conditions. Toiling on the frontlines were public functionaries generally known as viarii , or "road-masters," appointed to maintain their community''s infrastructures and police pertinent human and animal behavior. Operating on a parallel track were the camparii , or "field-masters," charged with protecting the city''s hinterlands and thereby the quality of what would reach urban markets, taverns, ovens, and mills. Roads to Health provides a critical overview of the mandates and activities of the viarii and camparii as enforcers of preventive health and safety policies between roughly 1250 and 1500, and offers three extended case studies, for Lucca, Bologna, and the smaller Piedmont town of Pinerolo. In telling their stories, Geltner contends that preventive health practices, while scientifically informed, emerged neither solely from a centralized regime nor as a reaction to the onset of the Black Death. Instead, they were typically negotiated by diverse stakeholders, including neighborhood residents, officials, artisans, and clergymen, and fostered throughout the centuries by a steady concern for people''s greater health.

DKK 584.00
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Argentina Betrayed - Antonius C. G. M. Robben - Bog - University of Pennsylvania Press - Plusbog.dk

Argentina Betrayed - Antonius C. G. M. Robben - Bog - University of Pennsylvania Press - Plusbog.dk

The ruthless military dictatorship that ruled Argentina between 1976 and 1983 betrayed the country's people, presiding over massive disappearances of its citizenry and, in the process, destroying the state's trustworthiness as the guardian of safety and well-being. Desperate relatives risked their lives to find the disappeared, and one group of mothers defied the repressive regime with weekly protests at the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires. How do societies cope with human losses and sociocultural traumas in the aftermath of such instances of political violence and state terror? In Argentina Betrayed, Antonius C. G. M. Robben demonstrates that the dynamics of trust and betrayal that convulsed Argentina during the dictatorship did not end when democracy returned but rather persisted in confrontations over issues such as the truth about the disappearances, the commemoration of the past, and the guilt and accountability of perpetrators. Successive governments failed to resolve these debates because of erratic policies made under pressure from both military and human rights groups. Mutual mistrust between the state, retired officers, former insurgents, and bereaved relatives has been fueled by recurrent revelations and controversies that prevent Argentine society from conclusively coming to terms with its traumatic past. With thirty years of scholarly engagement with Argentina-and drawing on his extensive, fair-minded interviews with principals at all points along the political spectrum-Robben explores how these ongoing dynamics have influenced the complicated mourning over violent deaths and disappearances. His analysis deploys key concepts from the contemporary literature of human rights, transitional justice, peace and reconciliation, and memory studies, including notions of trauma, denial, accountability, and mourning. The resulting volume is an indispensable contribution to a better understanding of the terrible crimes committed by the Argentine dictatorship in the 1970s and their aftermath.

DKK 673.00
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Cistercian Stories for Nuns and Monks - Martha G. Newman - Bog - University of Pennsylvania Press - Plusbog.dk

Cistercian Stories for Nuns and Monks - Martha G. Newman - Bog - University of Pennsylvania Press - Plusbog.dk

Around the year 1200, the Cistercian Engelhard of Langheim dedicated a collection of monastic stories to a community of religious women. Martha G. Newman explores how this largely unedited collection of tales about Cistercian monks illuminates the religiosity of Cistercian nuns. As did other Cistercian storytellers, Engelhard recorded the miracles and visions of the order''s illustrious figures, but he wrote from Franconia, in modern Germany, rather than the Cistercian heartland. His extant texts reflect his interactions with non-Cistercian monasteries and with Langheim''s patrons rather than celebrating Bernard of Clairvaux. Engelhard was conservative, interested in maintaining traditional Cistercian patterns of thought. Nonetheless, by offering to women a collection of narratives that explore the oral qualities of texts, the nature of sight, and the efficacy of sacraments, Engelhard articulated a distinctive response to the social and intellectual changes of his period.In analyzing Engelhard''s stories, Newman uncovers an understudied monastic culture that resisted the growing emphasis on the priestly administration of the sacraments and the hardening of gender distinctions. Engelhard assumed that monks and nuns shared similar interests and concerns, and he addressed his audiences as if they occupied a space neither fully sacerdotal nor completely lay, neither scholastic nor unlearned, and neither solely male nor only female. His exemplary narratives depict the sacramental value of everyday objects and behaviors whose efficacy relied more on individual spiritual formation than on sacerdotal action. By encouraging nuns and monks to imagine connections between heaven and earth, Engelhard taught faith as a learned disposition. Newman''s study demonstrates that scholastic questions about signs, sacraments, and sight emerged in a narrative form within late twelfth-century monastic communities.

DKK 499.00
1

Democracy Without Justice in Spain - Omar G. Encarnacion - Bog - University of Pennsylvania Press - Plusbog.dk

Democracy Without Justice in Spain - Omar G. Encarnacion - Bog - University of Pennsylvania Press - Plusbog.dk

Spain is a notable exception to the implicit rules of late twentieth-century democratization: after the death of General Francisco Franco in 1975, the recovering nation began to consolidate democracy without enacting any of the mechanisms promoted by the international transitional justice movement. There were no political trials, no truth and reconciliation commissions, no formal attributions of blame, and no apologies. Instead, Spain''s national parties negotiated the Pact of Forgetting, an agreement intended to place the bloody Spanish Civil War and the authoritarian excesses of the Franco dictatorship firmly in the past, not to be revisited even in conversation. Formalized by an amnesty law in 1977, this agreement defies the conventional wisdom that considers retribution and reconciliation vital to rebuilding a stable nation. Although not without its dark side, such as the silence imposed upon the victims of the Civil War and the dictatorship, the Pact of Forgetting allowed for the peaceful emergence of a democratic state, one with remarkable political stability and even a reputation as a trailblazer for the national rights and protections of minority groups.Omar G. Encarnación examines the factors in Spanish political history that made the Pact of Forgetting possible, tracing the challenges and consequences of sustaining the agreement until its dramatic reversal with the 2007 Law of Historical Memory. The combined forces of a collective will to avoid revisiting the traumas of a difficult and painful past and the reliance on the reformed political institutions of the old regime to anchor the democratic transition created a climate conducive to forgetting. At the same time, the political movement to forget encouraged the embrace of a new national identity as a modern and democratic European state. Demonstrating the surprising compatibility of forgetting and democracy, Democratization Without Justice in Spain offers a crucial counterexample to the transitional justice movement. The refusal to confront and redress the past did not inhibit the rise of a successful democracy in Spain; on the contrary, by leaving the past behind, Spain chose not to repeat it.

DKK 573.00
1

Political Violence and Trauma in Argentina - Antonius C. G. M. Robben - Bog - University of Pennsylvania Press - Plusbog.dk

Political Violence and Trauma in Argentina - Antonius C. G. M. Robben - Bog - University of Pennsylvania Press - Plusbog.dk

For decades, Argentina''s population was subject to human rights violations ranging from the merely disruptive to the abominable. Violence pervaded Argentine social and cultural life in the repression of protest crowds, a ruthless counterinsurgency campaign, massive numbers of abductions, instances of torture, and innumerable assassinations. Despite continued repression, thousands of parents searched for their disappeared children, staging street protests that eventually marshaled international support. Challenging the notion that violence simply breeds more violence, Antonius C. G. M. Robben''s provocative study argues that in Argentina violence led to trauma, and that trauma bred more violence.In this work of superior scholarship, Robben analyzes the historical dynamic through which Argentina became entangled in a web of violence spun out of repeated traumatization of political adversaries. This violence-trauma-violence cycle culminated in a cultural war that "disappeared" more than ten thousand people and caused millions to live in fear. Political Violence and Trauma in Argentina demonstrates through a groundbreaking multilevel analysis the process by which different historical strands of violence coalesced during the 1970s into an all-out military assault on Argentine society and culture.Combining history and anthropology, this compelling book rests on thorough archival research; participant observation of mass demonstrations, exhumations, and reburials; gripping interviews with military officers, guerrilla commanders, human rights leaders, and former disappeared captives. Robben''s penetrating analysis of the trauma of Argentine society is of great importance for our understanding of other societies undergoing similar crimes against humanity.

DKK 295.00
1

"Sefer Hasidim" and the Ashkenazic Book in Medieval Europe - Ivan G. Marcus - Bog - University of Pennsylvania Press - Plusbog.dk

"Sefer Hasidim" and the Ashkenazic Book in Medieval Europe - Ivan G. Marcus - Bog - University of Pennsylvania Press - Plusbog.dk

Composed in Germany in the early thirteenth century by Judah ben Samuel he-hasid , Sefer Hasidim , or "Book of the Pietists," is a compendium of religious instruction that portrays the everyday life of Jews as they lived together with and apart from Christians in towns such as Speyer, Worms, Mainz, and Regensburg. A charismatic religious teacher who recorded hundreds of original stories that mirrored situations in medieval social living, Judah''s messages advocated praying slowly and avoiding honor, pleasure, wealth, and the lures of unmarried sex. Although he failed to enact his utopian vision of a pietist Jewish society, his collected writings would help shape the religious culture of Ashkenazic Judaism for centuries.In "Sefer Hasidim" and the Ashkenazic Book in Medieval Europe , Ivan G. Marcus proposes a new paradigm for understanding how this particular book was composed. The work, he contends, was an open text written by a single author in hundreds of disjunctive, yet self-contained, segments, which were then combined into multiple alternative versions, each equally authoritative. While Sefer Hasidim offers the clearest example of this model of composition, Marcus argues that it was not unique: the production of Ashkenazic books in small and easily rearranged paragraphs is a literary and cultural phenomenon quite distinct from anything practiced by the Christian authors of northern Europe or the Sephardic Jews of the south. According to Marcus, Judah, in authoring Sefer Hasidim in this manner, not only resisted Greco-Roman influences on Ashkenazic literary form but also extended an earlier Byzantine rabbinic tradition of authorship into medieval European Jewish culture.

DKK 623.00
1

Natural Law - G. W. F. Hegel - Bog - University of Pennsylvania Press - Plusbog.dk

Natural Law - G. W. F. Hegel - Bog - University of Pennsylvania Press - Plusbog.dk

One of the central problems in the history of moral and political philosophy since antiquity has been to explain how human society and its civil institutions came into being. In attempting to solve this problem philosophers developed the idea of natural law, which for many centuries was used to describe the system of fundamental, rational principles presumed universally to govern human behavior in society. By the eighteenth century the doctrine of natural law had engendered the related doctrine of natural rights, which gained reinforcement most famously in the American and French revolutions. According to this view, human society arose through the association of individuals who might have chosen to live alone in scattered isolation and who, in coming together, were regarded as entering into a social contract. In this important early essay, first published in English in this definitive translation in 1975 and now returned to print, Hegel utterly rejects the notion that society is purposely formed by voluntary association. Indeed, he goes further than this, asserting in effect that the laws brought about in various countries in response to force, accident, and deliberation are far more fundamental than any law of nature supposed to be valid always and everywhere. In expounding his view Hegel not only dispenses with the empiricist explanations of Hobbes, Hume, and others but also, at the heart of this work, offers an extended critique of the so-called formalist positions of Kant and Fichte.

DKK 209.00
1

A Sixth–Century Monastery at Beth–Shan (Scythopolis) - G. M. Fitzgerald - Bog - University of Pennsylvania Press - Plusbog.dk

A Sixth–Century Monastery at Beth–Shan (Scythopolis) - G. M. Fitzgerald - Bog - University of Pennsylvania Press - Plusbog.dk

The book examines the building, mosaics, objects, and mosaic inscriptions found at the site of a sixth-century monastery at Beth-Shan. The mosaic floors are described in particular detail, with reference to comparable mosaics elsewhere in Palestine. Translations are given of the inscriptions within the mosaics.Publications of the Palestine Section of the University Museum, University of Pennsylvania Vol. IV

DKK 315.00
1

Reports on the Vrokastro Area, Eastern Crete, Vo – The Settlement History of the Vrokastro Area and Related Studies - Barbara J. Hayden - Bog -

Reports on the Vrokastro Area, Eastern Crete, Vo – The Settlement History of the Vrokastro Area and Related Studies - Barbara J. Hayden - Bog -

Data gathered through systematic survey detail the settlement history of the Vrokastro region from the Final Neolithic period through the early part of the twentieth century. Each period is introduced by an environmental pattern for the settlement, with a brief summary of project methodology and goals, a description of the regional topography and botany, and a synopsis of the regional topography and hydrology. The penultimate chapter and conclusions present a summary of the regional settlement history, growth, demographics, and a prospectus concerning future work in the Vrokastro region.An accompanying CD-ROM includes six appendices—Survey Methodology, Catalogue of Chipped and Ground Stone Implements, Agricultural and Demographic Tables, the Agricultural Year in the Vrokastro Area, Panaghia Phaneromeni Documentation, and the Holocene Evolution of the Istron Area, Mirabello—tables, and a chart on epigraphical data. Content of the book''s CD-ROM may be found online at this location: http://core.tdar.org/project/376536.Other contributing scholars: H.M.C. Dierckx, G. Harrison, J. Moody, G. Postma, C. Rackham, and A.B. Stallworth.University Museum Monograph, 119

DKK 811.00
1

Kant and the Possibility of Progress - - Bog - University of Pennsylvania Press - Plusbog.dk

Kant and the Possibility of Progress - - Bog - University of Pennsylvania Press - Plusbog.dk

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) transformed the philosophical, cultural, and religious landscape of modern Europe. Emphasizing the priority of practical reason and moral autonomy, Kant's radically original account of human subjectivity announced new ethical imperatives and engendered new political hopes. This collection of essays investigates the centrality of progress to Kant's philosophical project and the contested legacy of Kant's faith in reason's capacity to advance not only our scientific comprehension and technological prowess, but also our moral, political, and religious lives. Accordingly, the first half of the volume explores the many facets of Kant's thinking about progress, while the remaining essays each focus on one or two thinkers who play a crucial role in post-Kantian German philosophy: J. G. Herder (1744-1803), J. G. Fichte (1762-1814), G. W. F. Hegel (1770-1831), Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), and Martin Heidegger (1889-1976). This two-part structure reflects the central thesis of the volume that Kant inaugurates a distinctive theoretical tradition in which human historicity is central to political philosophy. By exploring the origins and metamorphoses of this tremendously influential tradition, the volume offers a timely perspective on fundamental questions in an age increasingly suspicious of the Enlightenment's promise of universal rational progress. It aims to help us face three sets of questions: (1) Do we still believe in the possibility of progress? If we do, on what grounds? If we do not, why have we lost the hope for a better future that animated previous generations? (2) Is the belief in progress necessary for the maintenance of today's liberal democratic order? Does a cosmopolitan vision of politics ultimately depend on a faith in humanity's gradual, asymptotic realization of that lofty aim? (3) And, if we no longer believe in progress, can we dispense with hope without succumbing to despair?

DKK 506.00
1

Studies on Istanbul and Beyond – The Freely Papers, Volume 1 - Robert G. Ousterhout - Bog - University of Pennsylvania Press - Plusbog.dk

Studies on Istanbul and Beyond – The Freely Papers, Volume 1 - Robert G. Ousterhout - Bog - University of Pennsylvania Press - Plusbog.dk

Written by recipients of the John Freely Fellowship awarded annually through the American Research Institute in Turkey from a major gift from the Joukowsky Family Foundation of New York to honor a celebrated author of travel and history books, this volume focuses particular attention on the city of Istanbul, its history, and institutions during the Ottoman and Republican periods. Chapters by young scholars consider the office of the Ottoman Court Historian, opposing voices during the reign of Sultan Süleyman, naming Turkish Sabbatians, Istanbul''s population variables, and changes in Turkish tobacco production. Contributors : Emine Fetvac (Department of History of Art, Stanford University), Erbu Turan (Department of History, Fordham University), Cengiz Sisman (Department of History, TOBB-ETU University), Betül Basaran (Department of Philosophy and Religion, University of Chicago), and Ebru Kayaalp (Department of Anthropology, Rice University).

DKK 297.00
1

"Beowulf" and Other Old English Poems - - Bog - University of Pennsylvania Press - Plusbog.dk

"Beowulf" and Other Old English Poems - - Bog - University of Pennsylvania Press - Plusbog.dk

The best-known literary achievement of Anglo-Saxon England, Beowulf is a poem concerned with monsters and heroes, treasure and transience, feuds and fidelity. Composed sometime between 500 and 1000 C.E. and surviving in a single manuscript, it is at once immediately accessible and forever mysterious. And in Craig Williamson''s splendid new version, this often translated work may well have found its most compelling modern English interpreter.Williamson''s Beowulf appears alongside his translations of many of the major works written by Anglo-Saxon poets, including the elegies "The Wanderer" and "The Seafarer," the heroic "Battle of Maldon," the visionary "Dream of the Rood," the mysterious and heart-breaking "Wulf and Eadwacer," and a generous sampling of the Exeter Book riddles. Accompanied by a foreword by noted medievalist Tom Shippey on Anglo-Saxon history, culture, and archaeology, and Williamson''s introductions to the individual poems as well as his essay on translating Old English, the texts transport us back to the medieval scriptorium or ancient mead hall to share an exile''s lament or herdsman''s recounting of the story of the world''s creation. From the riddling song of a bawdy onion that moves between kitchen and bedroom, to the thrilling account of Beowulf''s battle with a treasure-hoarding dragon, the world becomes a place of rare wonder in Williamson''s lines. Were his idiom not so modern, we might almost think the Anglo-Saxon poets had taken up the lyre again and begun to sing after a silence of a thousand years.

DKK 242.00
1

Power Play - Jenny Adams - Bog - University of Pennsylvania Press - Plusbog.dk

Power Play - Jenny Adams - Bog - University of Pennsylvania Press - Plusbog.dk

The game of chess reached western Europe by the year 1000, and within several generations it had become one of the most popular pastimes ever. Both men and women, and even priests played the game despite the Catholic Church''s repeated prohibitions. Characters in countless romances, chansons de geste , and moral tales of the eleventh through twelfth centuries also played chess, which often symbolized romantic attraction or sexual consummation.In Power Play , Jenny Adams looks to medieval literary representations to ask what they can tell us both about the ways the game changed as it was naturalized in the West and about the society these changes reflected. In its Western form, chess featured a queen rather than a counselor, a judge or bishop rather than an elephant, a knight rather than a horse; in some manifestations, even the pawns were differentiated into artisans, farmers, and tradespeople with discrete identities. Power Play is the first book to ask why chess became so popular so quickly, why its pieces were altered, and what the consequences of these changes were. More than pleasure was at stake, Adams contends. As allegorists and political theorists connected the moves of the pieces to their real-life counterparts, chess took on important symbolic power. For these writers and others, the game provided a means to figure both human interactions and institutions, to envision a civic order not necessarily dominated by a king, and to imagine a society whose members acted in concert, bound together by contractual and economic ties. The pieces on the chessboard were more than subjects; they were individuals, playing by the rules.

DKK 584.00
1