Check out our first batch of new releases for 2021, including an engrossing story of early modern maritime disaster, an anthology of pre-1700 nature writing, a volume exploring a range of perspectives on fair housing, and more!
Jump to: Featured Titles | Literature and Cultural Studies | Medieval and Renaissance Studies | Political Science and Human Rights | Urban Studies
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FEATURED TITLES
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"Richmond Barbour gives a fascinating account of the disastrous history of the Trades Increase, the largest ship in the British East India Company fleet and an embodiment of Jacobean England's hopes for trade and expansion. This is much more than a maritime disaster story; it is a cultural history, essential reading for an understanding of the development of early modern England."—Stephen Orgel, Stanford University Launched in 1609 as the greatest English merchant vessel of its era, the Trades Increase and nearly all who sailed it perished three years later on the far side of the world. This is the engrossing account of the ship's tragic expedition and global capitalism at its hour of emergence. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 352 pages | 6 x 9 | 15 illus. |
LITERATURE AND CULTURAL STUDIES
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With its peerless selection of ninety-eight original sources dating from antiquity to the dawn of the Enlightenment and concerned with the natural world and humankind's place within it, The Marvels of the World offers a corrective to the still-prevalent tendency to dismiss premodern attitudes toward nature as simple or univocal. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 384 pages | 6 1/8 x 9 1/4 | 35 illus. |
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"Raisa Rexer makes a compelling case for the cultural significance of these peculiarly sensitive, occasionally troubling images. Sober and scholarly without ever being prudish or pious, she guides us with insight, good taste, and even humor, through a seedy world."—Andrew Counter, University of Oxford Between 1839 and the end of the nineteenth century, millions of nude photographs of the female form were produced in France. Drawing upon government records, legal decisions, newspaper accounts, and contemporary literature, Raisa Adah Rexer recounts the history of these images and elucidates their immense cultural and artistic reach. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 328 pages | 7 x 10 | 87 halftones |
MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE STUDIES
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"Fulton's magisterial study shows the complex and reciprocal ways in which the English Bible informed the early modern political imagination. Challenging long-held assumptions about early translations, Fulton moves from Erasmus to Tyndale to the Geneva Bible, before offering a series of dazzling new insights on how biblical reading shaped literary form and meaning for Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton. The Book of Books is a model of thorough and superb scholarship in every respect."—Laura L. Knoppers, University of Notre Dame In The Book of Books, Thomas Fulton charts the process of recovery, interpretation, and reuse of scripture in early modern English literary culture, exploring the uses of the Bible as a combination of text and paratext that revolved around sites of social controversy and was continually transformed for political purposes. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 400 pages | 6 x 9 | 30 illus. |
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"Knowing Fictions makes an original, sophisticated and timely contribution to the fields of siglo de oro and early modern studies. Barbara Fuchs builds on exquisitely contextualized close readings of a series of canonical and non-canonical first-person biographical and pseudo-biographical narratives and witness accounts to advance a new theory of the picaresque as a self-conscious or 'knowing' narrative form that educates readers in the art of critical media consumption."—David Castillo, University at Buffalo In Knowing Fictions, Barbara Fuchs engages the picaresque as a set of literary strategies that interrogate the mechanisms of truth-telling itself and shows how picaresque texts effectively encouraged readers to adopt a critical stance toward the truth claims implicit in the forms of authoritative discourse proliferating in Imperial Spain. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 208 pages | 6 x 9 | 3 halftones |
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"By decentering the author as the imagined source and originator of the poetry collection, Megan Heffernan is able to attend to the agency of stationers and compilers, as well as the agency of poetry itself. In one of her most exciting claims, Heffernan argues that the poetry shapes the material form of the printed book in these early poetry collections. Indeed, she shows, these innovative arrangements shaped the development of vernacular poetic craft and notions of authorship in the seventeenth century and after."—Jenny C. Mann, author of The Trials of Orpheus: Poetry, Science, and the Early Modern Sublime In Making the Miscellany Megan Heffernan charts the development of printed poetry in early modern England, showing how material practices of organization were dynamic responses to poetic form and content. Her book argues for a literary history that is sensitive to the conditions of making and using early printed books. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 336 pages | 6 x 9 | 33 illus. |
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"Where much of the scholarship on Lucretius and the early moderns examines his contributions to philosophy and science, Jessie Hock's brilliant book suggests powerful and far-reaching ways of engaging the specifically poetic aspects of Lucretian philosophy."—Elizabeth D. Harvey, University of Toronto Jessie Hock maps the intersection of poetry and natural philosophy in the early modern reception of Lucretius and his De rerum natura. Focusing on Pierre de Ronsard, Remy Belleau, John Donne, Lucy Hutchinson, and Margaret Cavendish, she demonstrates how these poets read De rerum natura as a treatise on the poetic imagination. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 288 pages | 6 x 9 | 0 |
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"Like all of Minnis's work, [From Eden to Eternity] is impressively learned and couched in fluent and charming prose. . . . It requires slow and careful reading, but the argument is clearly made, the information provided is fascinating, and the effort is worthwhile. To read the book through, moreover, is to receive not only a thorough review of medieval ideas about Paradise but an excellent introduction to medieval scholasticism. . . . In addition to his remarkable learning, Minnis is a fine literary critic, and I know no other medievalist capable of presenting work so learned with his deftness and subtlety."—Journal of English and Germanic Philology In From Eden to Eternity, Alastair Minnis argues that Eden afforded an extraordinary amount of creative space to late medieval theologians, painters, and poets as they tried to understand the place that God had deemed worthy of the creature made in His image. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 384 pages | 6 x 9 | 32 color illus. |
POLITICAL SCIENCE AND HUMAN RIGHTS
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"In Assembling the Local, Upal Chakrabarti brings a creative and rigorous Foucauldian eye to the key role of the discourse of political economy in practices of colonial governance. Demonstrating the intimacy between universalism and the limit-case of locality that demarcates its reach, his work is a challenging contribution to the intellectual history of political economy."—Andrew Sartori, New York University In Assembling the Local, Upal Chakrabarti argues that the "local" should be reconceptualized as an abstract machine, which was itself central to the construction of the universal, namely, the establishment of political economy as a form of governance in nineteenth-century British India. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 288 pages | 6 x 9 |
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"Matthew D. Mendham has given us a genuinely valuable book. It is scholarly in the best sense: deeply familiar with its subject, fair-minded in evaluating competing views, penetrating in analysis, quietly witty at times, and free of jargon. Badly as this study is needed, Mendham is the first to attempt anything like it."—Leo Damrosch, Harvard University Why did Rousseau fail—often so ridiculously or grotesquely—to live up to his own principles? In Hypocrisy and the Philosophical Intentions of Rousseau, Matthew D. Mendham is the first to systematically analyze Rousseau's normative philosophy and self-portrayals in view of the yawning gap between them. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 296 pages | 6 x 9 | 0 |
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"Dustin Sebell is a master of close reading and reasoning. His novel treatment of Book IV of the Memorabilia shows how the Socratic understanding of justice and civic life serves as the basis for both political and natural philosophy."—Christopher Nadon, Claremont McKenna College In Xenophon's Socratic Education, through a careful reading of Book IV of Xenophon's Memorabilia, Dustin Sebell shows how Socrates ascended, with his students in tow, from moral or political opinion to knowledge. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 240 pages | 6 x 9 |
URBAN STUDIES
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"The United States is facing a dire crisis in housing. We cannot eradicate the catastrophe of unfair housing without understanding the history and politics of housing discrimination that have brought us to the current moment. This volume belongs in the toolkit we need to ideologically equip ourselves in this twenty-first-century struggle to end racism in U.S. housing."—Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, author of Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership Perspectives on Fair Housing provides historical, sociological, economic, and legal perspectives on the critical and continuing problem of housing discrimination and offers insight on the tools required to address it. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 240 pages | 6 x 9 | 11 illus. |
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