A showcase of one hundred of the world's most significant books offers the author's introductory essays on such writers as James Boswell, Colette, and Joseph Roth, and includes explorations of a range of genres and specific works.
In this new edition of a classic work, the great Catholic apologist and historian Hilaire Belloc examines the five most destructive heretical movements in Christianity: Arianism, Mohammedanism (Islam), Albigensianism, Protestantism, and Modernism. Belloc describes how these movements began, how they spread, and how they have continued to influence the world. He accurately predicts the re-emergence of militant Islam and its violent aggression against Western civilization. When we hear the word "heresies", we tend to think of distant centuries filled with religious quarrels that seemed important at the time but are no longer relevant. Belloc shows that the heresies of olden times are still with us, sometimes under different names and guises, and that they still shape our world.
Some of the most portentous events in medieval history—the Cathar crusade, the persecution and mass burnings of heretics, the papal inquisition—fall between 1000 and 1250, when the Catholic Church confronted the threat of heresy with force. Moore’s narrative focuses on the motives and anxieties of elites who waged war on heresy for political gain.
The struggle over fundamental issues erupted with great fury in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. In this book preeminent medievalist Heinrich Fichtenau turns his attention to a new attitude that emerged in Western Europe around the year 1000. This new attitude was exhibited both in the rise of heresy in the general population and in the self-confident rationality of the nascent schools. With his characteristic learning and insight, Fichtenau shows how these two separate intellectual phenomena contributed to a medieval world that was never quite as uniform as might appear from our modern perspective.
Galicia was created at the first partition of Poland in 1772 and disappeared in 1918. Yet, in slightly over a century, the idea of Galicia came to have meaning for both the peoples who lived there and the Habsburg government that ruled it. Indeed, its memory continues to exercise a powerful fascination for those who live in its former territories and for the descendants of those who emigrated out of Galicia. The idea of Galicia was largely produced by the cultures of two cities, Lviv and Cracow. Making use of travelers' accounts, newspaper reports, and literary works, Wolff engages such figures as Emperor Joseph II, Metternich, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Ivan Franko, Stanisław Wyspiański, Tadeusz "Boy" Żeleński, Isaac Babel, Martin Buber, and Bruno Schulz. He shows the exceptional importance of provincial space as a site for the evolution of cultural meanings and identities, and analyzes the province as the framework for non-national and multi-national understandings of empire in European history.
When Margaret Sanger returned to Europe in 1920, World War I had altered the social landscape as dramatically as it had the map of Europe. Population concerns, sexuality, venereal disease, and contraceptive use had entered public discussion, and Sanger's birth control message found receptive audiences around the world. This volume focuses on Sanger from her groundbreaking overseas advocacy during the interwar years through her postwar role in creating the International Planned Parenthood Federation. The documents reconstruct Sanger's dramatic birth control advocacy tours through early 1920s Germany, Japan, and China in the midst of significant government and religious opposition to her ideas. They also trace her tireless efforts to build a global movement through international conferences and tours. Letters, journal entries, writings, and other records reveal Sanger's contentious dealings with other activists, her correspondence with the likes of Albert Einstein and Eleanor Roosevelt, and Sanger's own dramatic evolution from gritty grassroots activist to postwar power broker and diplomat. A powerful documentary history of a transformative twentieth-century figure, The Selected Papers of Margaret Sanger, Volume 4 is a primer for the debates on individual choice, sex education, and planned parenthood that remain all-too-pertinent in our own time.
In Defining Heresy, Irene Bueno investigates the theories and practices of anti-heretical repression in the first half of the fourteenth century, focusing on the figure of Jacques Fournier/Benedict XII (c.1284-1342). Throughout his career as a bishop-inquisitor in Languedoc, theologian, and, eventually, pope at Avignon, Fournier made a multi-faceted contribution to the fight against religious dissent. Making use of judicial, theological, and diplomatic sources, the book sheds light on the multiplicity of methods, discourses, and textual practices mobilized to define the bounds of heresy at the end of the Middle Ages. The integration of these commonly unrelated areas of evidence reveals the intellectual and political pressures that inflected the repression of heretics and dissidents in the peculiar context of the Avignon papacy.