Product Description: From personal finance and consumer spending to ballooning national expenditures on warfare and social welfare, debt is fundamental to the dynamics of global capitalism. The contributors to this volume explore the concept of indebtedness in its various senses and from a wide range of perspectives...read more

At first glance, the Renaissance and the Reformation--two movements (one cultural, one religious) that defined Europe from 1400 to 1600--may appear to be polar opposites. The Renaissance found scholars and artists celebrating the beauty and splendor of the material world, while the Reformation saw Protestant and Catholic religious leaders and their followers focusing on eternal salvation. However, there were actually striking similarities between these two worlds. For instance, while both Renaissance artists and Reformation pastors originally desired a return to a "golden age" of the past, they both ended up creating something very new instead.In The Renaissance and Reformation, Merry Wiesner-Hanks allows the historical participants to tell their own stories. She presents a mix of visual sources and written documents not only from learned scholars, trained artists, university-educated religious reformers, and powerful political leaders--but also from more ordinary men and women. Leonardo da Vinci considers the merits of painting versus poetry in his notebook, while the Italian diplomat Baldassar Castiglione recommends the pastime of music-making to gentlemen in his book The Courtier. A group of small-time investors signs a contract for a trading venture from Genoa to Corsica and Sardinia, and a wealthy Florentine widow writes a letter to her son, weighing his ability to start a new business. A picture essay uses individual and family portraits to discuss ideas about personality, temperament, and "genius"; social differences in marital patterns; and changes in family relationships. Wiesner-Hanks places events in Europe in a global context, allowing readers to examine the ways in which they were related to the voyages of exploration.

Product Description: This book tells the extraordinary story of three sixteenth-century sisters who, along with their father and brothers, were afflicted with an extremely rare genetic condition that made them unusually hairy. Amazingly, the Gonzales sisters were not mocked or shunned, but were welcomed in the courts of Europe, spending much of their lives among nobles, musicians, and artists...read more

Product Description: This concise overview explores the construction of gender in many cultures around the world at different times. (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

The book surveys the ways in which Christian ideas and institutions shaped sexual norms and conduct from the time of Luther and Columbus to that of Thomas Jefferson. It is global in scope and geographic in organization, with chapters on Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox Europe, Latin America, Africa and Asia, and North America. All the key topics are covered, including marriage and divorce, fornication and illegitimacy, clerical sexuality, same-sex relations, witchcraft and love magic, moral crimes, and inter-racial relationships. Each chapter in this second edition has been fully updated to reflect new scholarship, with expanded coverage of many of the key issues, particularly in areas outside of Europe. Other updates include extra analysis of the religious ideas and activities of ordinary people in Europe, and new material on the colonial world. The book sets its findings within the context of many historical fields- the history of sexuality and the body, women's history, legal and religious history, queer theory, and colonial studies- and provides readers with an introduction to key theoretical and methodological issues in each of these areas. Each chapter includes an extensive section on further reading, surveying and commenting on the newest English-language secondary literature.