Cornell University Press: 1150 books
Invisible Weapons
Liturgy and the Making of Crusade Ideology
Language: English
Release Date: January 17, 2017
In 1098, three years into the First Crusade and after a brutal eight-month siege, the Franks captured the city of Antioch. Two days later, Muslim forces arrived with a relief army, and the victors became the besieged. Exhausted and ravaged by illness and hunger, the Franks were exhorted by their religious...
The Self and Its Pleasures
Bataille, Lacan, and the History of the Decentered Subject
Language: English
Release Date: November 1, 2016
Why did France spawn the radical poststructuralist rejection of the humanist concept of ‘man’ as a rational, knowing subject? In this innovative cultural history, Carolyn J. Dean sheds light on the origins of poststructuralist thought, paying particular attention to the reinterpretation of the...
The Life Informatic
Newsmaking in the Digital Era
Language: English
Release Date: May 15, 2013
News journalism is in the midst of radical transformation brought about by the spread of digital information and communication technology and the rise of neoliberalism. What does it look like, however, from the inside of a news organization? In The Life Informatic, Dominic Boyer offers the first anthropological...
The Rational Believer
Choices and Decisions in the Madrasas of Pakistan
Language: English
Release Date: March 15, 2012
Islamic schools, or madrasas, have been accused of radicalizing Muslims and participating, either actively or passively, in terrorist networks since the events of 9/11. In Pakistan, the 2007 siege by government forces of Islamabad’s Red Mosque and its madrasa complex, whose imam and students staged...
Broken Harmony
Shakespeare and the Politics of Music
Language: English
Release Date: February 14, 2011
Music was a subject of considerable debate during the Renaissance. The notion that music could be interpreted in a meaningful way clashed regularly with evidence that music was in fact profoundly promiscuous in its application and effects. Subsequently, much writing in the period reflects a desire...
Light without Heat
The Observational Mood from Bacon to Milton
Language: English
Release Date: June 15, 2018
In Light without Heat, David Carroll Simon argues for the importance of carelessness to the literary and scientific experiments of the seventeenth century. While scholars have often looked to this period in order to narrate the triumph of methodical rigor as a quintessentially modern intellectual...
Preying on the State
The Transformation of Bulgaria after 1989
Language: English
Release Date: December 15, 2009
Immediately after 1989, newly emerging polities in Eastern Europe had to contend with an overbearing and dominant legacy: the Soviet model of the state. At that time, the strength of the state looked like a massive obstacle to change; less than a decade later, the state's dominant characteristic was...
by Dale C. Copeland
Language: English
Release Date: December 15, 2009
Language: English
Release Date: December 15, 2009
One of the most important questions of human existence is what drives nations to war—especially massive, system-threatening war. Much military history focuses on the who, when, and where of war. In this riveting book, Dale C. Copeland brings attention to bear on why governments make decisions that...
by Abbey Steele
Language: English
Release Date: December 15, 2017
Language: English
Release Date: December 15, 2017
Democracy and Displacement in Colombia’s Civil War is one of few books available in English to provide an overview of the Colombian civil war and drug war. Abbey Steele draws on her own original field research as well as on Colombian scholars’ work in Spanish to provide an expansive view of the...
Petrarchism at Work
Contextual Economies in the Age of Shakespeare
Language: English
Release Date: April 19, 2016
The Italian scholar and poet Francesco Petrarch (1304–1374) is best remembered today for vibrant and impassioned love poetry that helped to establish Italian as a literary language. Petrarch inspired later Renaissance writers, who produced an extraordinary body of work regarded today as perhaps...
Chaucer and the Poets
An Essay on Troilus and Criseyde
Language: English
Release Date: November 1, 2016
In this sensitive reading of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, Winthrop Wetherbee redefines the nature of Chaucer’s poetic vision. Using as a starting point Chaucer’s profound admiration for the achievement of Dante and the classical poets, Wetherbee sees the Troilus as much more than a courtly...
The Origin of Sin
An English Translation of the "Hamartigenia"
Language: English
Release Date: December 15, 2009
Aurelius Prudentius Clemens (348–ca. 406) is one of the great Christian Latin writers of late antiquity. Born in northeastern Spain during an era of momentous change for both the Empire and the Christian religion, he was well educated, well connected, and a successful member of the late Roman elite,...
Jacob's Shipwreck
Diaspora, Translation, and Jewish-Christian Relations in Medieval England
Language: English
Release Date: April 18, 2017
Jewish and Christian authors of the High Middle Ages not infrequently came into dialogue or conflict with each other over traditions drawn from ancient writings outside of the bible. Circulating in Hebrew and Latin translations, these included the two independent versions of the Testament of Naphtali...
The Sungod's Journey through the Netherworld
Reading the Ancient Egyptian Amduat
Language: English
Release Date: February 23, 2011
"The ancient Egyptian sources come alive, speaking to us without seeming alien to our modern ways of thinking. Andreas Schweizer invites us to join the nocturnal voyage of the solar barque and to immerse ourselves, with the 'Great Soul' of the sun, into the darkness surrounding us. Here in the illustrations...