"The Renaissance in National Context" aims to dispel the commonly held view that the great efflorescence of art, learning and culture in the period from around 1350 to 1550 was solely or even primarily an Italian phenomenon. A team of distinguished scholars addresses the development of art, literacy and humanism across the length and breadth of Europe--from Rome to the Netherlands, from Poland to France. The book demonstrates that the revival of letters, and the generation of new currents in artistic expression, had many sources independent of Italy, meeting numerous local needs, and serving various local functions, specific to the political, economic, social and religious climates of particular regions and principalities. In particular the authors emphasize that while the Renaissance was in a fashion backward looking, recovering the culture of Greece and Rome, it nevertheless served as the springboard for many specifically modern developments, including the diplomacy of the 'new princes, ' the spread of education and printing, the growth of nationalist feeling and the birth of the 'new science'. Bridges of cultural transmission are given equal emphasis with the barriers which were to generate increased separation of linguistic and cultural domains. Three essays on major Italian centres do moreover demonstrate that the diversity of the Renaissance applies to the peninsula no less than to the rest of Europe.

The "Scientific Revolution" of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries continues to command attention in historical debate. What was its nature? How did it develop? Controversy still rages about the extent to which it was essentially a "revolution of the mind," or how far it must also be explained by wider considerations--social, economic, political and cultural. In this volume, leading scholars of early modern science argue the importance of specifically national contexts for understanding the transformation in natural philosophy between Copernicus and Newton. Distinct political, religious, cultural and linguistic formations shaped scientific interests and concerns differently in Italy, France, Britain, the Germanies, Spain, and so on, and explain different levels of scientific intensity. Questions of institutional development, and of the transmission of scientific ideas, are also addressed. The emphasis on national determinants makes this volume an entirely original contribution to the study of the scientific revolution.

Sexual Knowledge, Sexual Science explores attempts to develop bodies of knowledge about sex from antiquity to the present day. Taking into account cognate sciences like zoology, anatomy, embryology and psychiatry, the volume analyses the shaping over the centuries of disciplines which came by 1900 to be called 'sexology'. Various contributions explore the interfaces between 'high' and 'low' sexual teachings, and the connections and tensions between popular and empirical sexual knowledge on the one hand and overtly scientific formulations. A major concern of the book is to investigate the ideological functions - in terms of group, class and gender - of sexual science, especially when incorporated into systems of legal, medical and political power. Among sexual liberals and radicals it has long been an article of faith that sexual science, sexual liberation and sexual fulfilment will all advance hand-in-hand. With the modern backlash against permissiveness, and against the background of AIDS, such views are being challenged. This new book offers an historical perspective upon such questions.

The Scientific Revolution Revisited brings Mikulás Teich back to the great movement of thought and action that transformed European science and society in the seventeenth century. Drawing on a lifetime of scholarly experience in six penetrating chapters, Teich examines the ways of investigating and understanding nature that matured during the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, charting their progress towards science as we now know it and insisting on the essential interpenetration of such inquiry with its changing social environment. The Scientific Revolution was marked by the global expansion of trade by European powers and by interstate rivalries for a stake in the developing world market, in which advanced medieval China, remarkably, did not participate. It is in the wake of these happenings, in Teich's original retelling, that the Thirty Years War and the Scientific Revolution emerge as products of and factors in an uneven transition in European and world history: from natural philosophy to modern science, feudalism to capitalism, the late medieval to the early modern period. With a narrative that moves from pre-classical thought to the European institutionalisation of science - and a scope that embraces figures both lionised and neglected, such as Nicole Oresme, Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, Isaac Newton, René Descartes, Thaddeus Hagecius, Johann Joachim Becher - The Scientific Revolution Revisited illuminates the social and intellectual sea changes that shaped the modern world. This work was published by Saint Philip Street Press pursuant to a Creative Commons license permitting commercial use. All rights not granted by the work's license are retained by the author or authors.

The main literary and artistic currents of Romanticism are well known. This volume aims uniquely to set them in their wider contexts. Thirteen distinguished contributors examine the particular configurations of the Romantic movement within individual national contexts. Parallels, influences and differences are explored between the course of Romanticism in England, France, Germany and ten other European nations, and special emphasis is placed upon the interplay between Romantic culture and social, political and economic change. Narrow definitions of Romanticism are avoided: the contributors emphasize the Romantic strands within science, philosophy and political thinking as well as within art and literature. The book also forms part of a sequence of collections of essays which started with The Enlightenment in National Context (1981). In preparation are Fin-de-Siècle and its Legacy and the Renaissance in National Context. The purpose of these and other envisaged collections is to bring together comparative, national and inter-disciplinary approaches to the history of great movements in the development of human thought and action.

This original collection offers an account of key moments and themes in the history of the Czech lands from the time of the rise of the Premyslide dynasty in the ninth century to the fall of socialism in 1989. The pieces, commissioned especially for this volume, are written by prominent scholars almost all teaching and researching in the present-day Czech Republic. Apart from eleven historical essays along socio-political times there are four contributions which focus broadly on the arts, sciences and education, emphasising political, economic and other aspects. Two further essays consider the worlds of the university and of science in the period 1800-1914, and 1800-1930 respectively. The co-existence and encounters between Czechs and Germans embedded in Czech history are emphasised throughout the book, while the conflicts between the two nationalities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are examined in a separate chapter. Lastly, pursuing the 'ethnic' theme, there are essays on both the little-explored question of Czech-Jewish relations and on the sensitive Czech-Slovak question.

The main literary and artistic currents of Romanticism are well known. This volume aims uniquely to set them in their wider contexts. Thirteen distinguished contributors examine the particular configurations of the Romantic movement within individual national contexts. Parallels, influences and differences are explored between the course of Romanticism in England, France, Germany and ten other European nations, and special emphasis is placed upon the interplay between Romantic culture and social, political and economic change. Narrow definitions of Romanticism are avoided: the contributors emphasize the Romantic strands within science, philosophy and political thinking as well as within art and literature. The book also forms part of a sequence of collections of essays which started with The Enlightenment in National Context (1981). In preparation are Fin-de-Siècle and its Legacy and the Renaissance in National Context. The purpose of these and other envisaged collections is to bring together comparative, national and inter-disciplinary approaches to the history of great movements in the development of human thought and action.