With "The Invention of Art", Larry Shiner challenges our conventional understandings of art and asks us to reconsider its history entirely, arguing that the category of fine art is a modern invention - that the lines drawn between art and craft resulted from key social transformations in Europe during the long 18th century.

A fascinating cultural history of this most magical of islands Sicily has always acted as a gateway between Europe and the rest of the world. Fought over by Phoenicians and Greeks, Romans, Goths and Byzantines, Arabs and Normans, Germans, Spanish and French for thousands of year, Sicily became a unique melting pot where diverse traditions merged, producing a unique heritage and...(展开全部)

An authoritative history of art history from its medieval origins to its modern predicaments In this wide-ranging and authoritative book, the first of its kind in English, Christopher Wood tracks the evolution of the historical study of art from the late middle ages through the rise of the modern scholarly discipline of art history. Synthesizing and assessing a vast array of wr...(展开全部)

This masterly collection of texts interrogates the raging academic question, What is art history? Editor Preziosi, who directs ground-breaking critical studies of art history and museology, provides introductions to 35 challenging readings gathered in nine chapters. This plethora of alternatives is curiously complicated, even obfuscating. Covered here are the most current and r...(展开全部)

Global warming and the future of the climate is one of the greatest challenges of our time, but what do we know about climate variations 500 years ago, or 5000 years ago? How can we know anything at all about the history of weather? What impact have climate changes had on human prosperity and the spirit of invention? In this major new book Wolfgang Behringer introduces us to th...(展开全部)

How has our understanding of medicine evolved over the past 2,500 years? A Cultural History of Medicine, as the first comprehensive and interdisciplinary overview of the cultural history of medicine from ancient times to modernity, discusses this. With six highly illustrated volumes covering 2500 years of human history, this is the definitive reference work on the subject. Indi...(展开全部)

How has our understanding of medicine evolved over the past 2,500 years? A Cultural History of Medicine, as the first comprehensive and interdisciplinary overview of the cultural history of medicine from ancient times to modernity, discusses this. With six highly illustrated volumes covering 2500 years of human history, this is the definitive reference work on the subject. Indi...(展开全部)

One of the most common--and wounding--misconceptions about literary scholars today is that they simply don't love books. While those actually working in literary studies can easily refute this claim, such a response risks obscuring a more fundamental question: why should they? That question led Deidre Shauna Lynch into the historical and cultural investigation of Loving Literat...(展开全部)

作者從文化發展的角度探討了人類對於男性陽具的各種態度：古代希臘人將陽具視為男性的「神聖權力」的表徵，羅馬仁則認為它代表了世俗的力量。中世紀時，由於基督教的盛行，原本神聖的象徵成了魔鬼的代表。文藝復興時期，科學凌駕於神學之上，人們開始認知它在生理學上的意義。書中也討論到陽具在心理學發展中所扮演的角色，以及現代社會對於陽具的新觀點。