Arguing that historians must write in a comic mode, aware of history's artifice, risks, and incompletion, Caroline Walker Bynum here examines diverse medieval texts to show how women were able to appropriate dominant social symbols in ways that allowed for the emergence of their own creative voices. By arguing for the positive importance attributed to the body, these essays giv...(展开全部)

The Chinese territory is densely meshed with holy sites (mountains, caves, springs...) where the gods manifest themselves and where pilgrims come to meet them. The present volume, the result of a Franco-Japanese conference held in Paris in 2017, includes fifteen chapters in French and English, exploring the conceptions and practices at these holy sites; they build the analysis ...(展开全部)

The Chinese territory is densely meshed with holy sites (mountains, caves, springs...) where the gods manifest themselves and where pilgrims come to meet them. The present volume, the result of a Franco-Japanese conference held in Paris in 2017, includes fifteen chapters in French and English, exploring the conceptions and practices at these holy sites; they build the analysis ...(展开全部)

A fascinating work of detective history, "The Black Death" traces the causes and far-reaching consequences of this infamous outbreak of plague that spread across the continent of Europe from 1347 to 1351. Drawing on sources as diverse as monastic manuscripts and dendrochronological studies (which measure growth rings in trees), historian Robert S. Gottfried demonstrates how a b...(展开全部)

A fascinating work of detective history, "The Black Death" traces the causes and far-reaching consequences of this infamous outbreak of plague that spread across the continent of Europe from 1347 to 1351. Drawing on sources as diverse as monastic manuscripts and dendrochronological studies (which measure growth rings in trees), historian Robert S. Gottfried demonstrates how a b...(展开全部)

For those to whom "Taoism" is the Tao te ching and Chuang-tzu, nothing could seem more foreign to Taoism than bureaucracy. In these two classics, the Way (tao) is everything that bureaucracy is not: it is nonhierarchical, undifferentiated, ineffable, spontaneous. The bureaucratic spirit pertains rather to stuffy Confucians, who foolishly imagine that the way to fulfill human po...(展开全部)

For those to whom "Taoism" is the Tao te ching and Chuang-tzu, nothing could seem more foreign to Taoism than bureaucracy. In these two classics, the Way (tao) is everything that bureaucracy is not: it is nonhierarchical, undifferentiated, ineffable, spontaneous. The bureaucratic spirit pertains rather to stuffy Confucians, who foolishly imagine that the way to fulfill human po...(展开全部)

Whether chanted as devotional prayers, intoned against the dangers of the wilds, or invoked to heal the sick and bring ease to the dead, incantations were pervasive features of Buddhist practice in late medieval China (600-1000 C.E.). Material incantations, in forms such as spell-inscribed amulets and stone pillars, were also central to the spiritual lives of both monks and lay...(展开全部)