Cornell University Press: 1150 books
The Talents of Jacopo da Varagine
A Genoese Mind in Medieval Europe
Language: English
Release Date: December 14, 2015
Jacopo da Varagine (c. 1228–1298) is remembered today primarily for his immensely popular work The Golden Legend, a massive collection of stories about the saints. Compiled over the years 1260–67, The Golden Legend quickly eclipsed earlier collections of saints’ lives. One indication of its...
Growing Up Muslim
Muslim College Students in America Tell Their Life Stories
Language: English
Release Date: April 15, 2014
"While 9/11 and its aftermath created a traumatic turning point for most of the writers in this book, it is telling that none of their essays begin with that moment. These young people were living, probing, and shifting their Muslim identities long before 9/11.... I've heard it said that the second...
Defiant Priests
Domestic Unions, Violence, and Clerical Masculinity in Fourteenth-Century Catalunya
Language: English
Release Date: June 6, 2017
Two hundred years after canon law prohibited clerical marriage, parish priests in the late medieval period continued to form unions with women that were marriage all but in name. In Defiant Priests, Michelle Armstrong-Partida uses evidence from extraordinary archives in four Catalan dioceses to show...
by Ron E. Hassner
Language: English
Release Date: December 15, 2010
Language: English
Release Date: December 15, 2010
Sacred sites offer believers the possibility of communing with the divine and achieving deeper insight into their faith. Yet their spiritual and cultural importance can lead to competition as religious groups seek to exclude rivals from practicing potentially sacrilegious rituals in the hallowed space...
Discerning Spirits
Divine and Demonic Possession in the Middle Ages
Language: English
Release Date: September 25, 2015
Trance states, prophesying, convulsions, fasting, and other physical manifestations were often regarded as signs that a person was seized by spirits. In a book that sets out the prehistory of the early modern European witch craze, Nancy Caciola shows how medieval people decided whom to venerate as...
Holy Matter
Changing Perceptions of the Material World in Late Medieval Christianity
Language: English
Release Date: March 29, 2014
A magnificent proliferation of new Christ-centered devotional practices—including affective meditation, imitative suffering, crusade, Eucharistic cults and miracles, passion drama, and liturgical performance—reveals profound changes in the Western Christian temperament of the twelfth century and...
Afterlives
The Return of the Dead in the Middle Ages
Language: English
Release Date: March 31, 2016
Simultaneously real and unreal, the dead are people, yet they are not. The society of medieval Europe developed a rich set of imaginative traditions about death and the afterlife, using the dead as a point of entry for thinking about the self, regeneration, and loss. These macabre preoccupations are...
by Joseph F. O'Callaghan
Language: English
Release Date: November 12, 2013
Language: English
Release Date: November 12, 2013
Medieval Spain is brilliantly recreated, in all its variety and richness, in this comprehensive survey. Likely to become the standard work in English, the book treats the entire Iberian Peninsula and all the people who inhabited it, from the coming of the Visigoths in the fifth century to the reign...
If God Meant to Interfere
American Literature and the Rise of the Christian Right
Language: English
Release Date: May 12, 2016
The rise of the Christian Right took many writers and literary critics by surprise, trained as we were to think that religions waned as societies became modern. In If God Meant to Interfere, Christopher Douglas shows that American writers struggled to understand and respond to this new social and...
Christian Imperialism
Converting the World in the Early American Republic
Language: English
Release Date: November 18, 2015
In 1812, eight American missionaries, under the direction of the recently formed American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, sailed from the United States to South Asia. The plans that motivated their voyage were ano less grand than taking part in the Protestant conversion of the entire...
by Éric Rebillard
Language: English
Release Date: October 25, 2012
Language: English
Release Date: October 25, 2012
For too long, the study of religious life in Late Antiquity has relied on the premise that Jews, pagans, and Christians were largely discrete groups divided by clear markers of belief, ritual, and social practice. More recently, however, a growing body of scholarship is revealing the degree to which...
Fortifying China
The Struggle to Build a Modern Defense Economy
Language: English
Release Date: December 15, 2009
Fortifying China explores the titanic struggle to turn China into an aspiring world-class military technological power. The defense economy is leveraging the country's vibrant civilian economy and gaining access to foreign sources of technology and know-how. Drawing on extensive Chinese-language sources,...
by Yuen Yuen Ang
Language: English
Release Date: September 6, 2016
Language: English
Release Date: September 6, 2016
Before markets opened in 1978, China was an impoverished planned economy governed by a Maoist bureaucracy. In just three decades it evolved into the world’s second-largest economy and is today guided by highly entrepreneurial bureaucrats. In How China Escaped the Poverty Trap, Yuen Yuen Ang explains...
Fearful Spirits, Reasoned Follies
The Boundaries of Superstition in Late Medieval Europe
Language: English
Release Date: November 15, 2017
Superstitions are commonplace in the modern world. Mostly, however, they evoke innocuous images of people reading their horoscopes or avoiding black cats. Certain religious practices might also come to mind—praying to St. Christopher or lighting candles for the dead. Benign as they might seem today,...