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The Nordic welfare state of the 20th century has been hailed around the world as a model of how to build democratic and egalitarian societies. It has often been described as a project of social democracy often following a narrative of secularization and rationalization of society. However some of the most important actors and ideas of the "Scandinavian Sonderweg" had their roots in Protestant often Pietist and revivalist milieus that dreamed of creating an egalitarian community. The present volume explores these often forgotten roots in several case studies of phenomena from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century focusing primarily on questioning the function of aesthetics in the creation of the welfare state model. We argue that aesthetics and what Friedrich Schiller called aesthetic education played an important unifying role for Nordic societies. These aesthetics were shaped by Protestant ideas and practices. Through references to the then widespread circulation of educational texts based on Luther's catechism the later pietistic catechism of Erik Pontoppidan Nordic hymnbooks and practices such as communal singing and preaching in church church coffee reading circles and conventicle meetings a common aesthetic language emerged that unified different social groups and their competing goals and claims. Civic actors and movements learned specific ways to engage in society to develop practices of internalizing responsibility (self)critique and accountability and to communicate and develop a more democratic modern civic sphere. We therefore propose to look at this history from the perspective of a historically changing aesthetic as an integrating principle for understanding the political social cultural economic and many other aspects of the Nordic welfare state.

This book unravels how the agricultural sector and the rural world in Europe became more and more organised within capitalism in the years 1870-1940 and this with the aim of tackling the important challenges of the time. The focus is not so much on the myriad of individual farmers’ actions but on the collective efforts undertaken through the interplay between the state and the agricultural civil society.

A wide variety of actors from landowners associations farmers’ unions cooperatives scientific institutions and researchers to farmers themselves (or civil society) played a critical role in the process of drafting a policy agenda developing agricultural policies and were instrumental in implementing them in close relationship with the state. The result was a metamorphosis from mobilisation and representation of agrarian interests to a form of self-government or co-government of the agricultural sector at the national level which would only reach its highest point after the Second World War.

These issues are explored by established rural historians covering a period of seven decades (1870-1940). The papers provide a wide geographical perspective from the north of Europe to the Mediterranean.

The Greeks had a rich and varied relationship with foreign lands and people which made possible a real circulation of knowledge throughout the Archaic Classical and Hellenistic times. The essays collected in this volume aim at exploring the hypothesis that the most adventurous intellectuals saw foreign lands and foreigners as repositories of knowledge that the Greeks σοφοί had to engage with in the hope of bringing back home valuables in the form of new ideas. Each of the articles included in this collective work explores one aspect of the “stranger” as a potential source with contributions mostly focused on Plato Xenophon Democritus Aristotle Diogenes Cicero and Galen.

On 25 September 1710 Pope Clement XI finally promulgated the 1704 decree Cum Deus optimus which condemned the toleration of certain Confucian rituals among Chinese Catholic converts and the use of the Chinese terms tian and Shangdi to refer to the Christian God. This papal decision antagonised the Kangxi Emperor and devastated the Jesuit China mission. Although the Jesuits were prohibited from publicly refuting the decree the Flemish Jesuit François Noël sought to defend the Jesuit position by publishing his voluminous scholarship on the Chinese classics. Among other works in 1711 Noël published two seminal contributions to the history of Sinology: the Sinensis imperii libri classici sex or Libri sex and the Philosophia Sinica a sophisticated treatment of Chinese metaphysics ritual and ethics. While the Libri sex achieved some degree of influence in the Enlightenment through the French translation of the French Jesuit historian Du Halde and the writings of the philosopher Christian Wolff the Philosophia Sinica was actively suppressed by the Superior-General of the Jesuit order. Yet it is in this latter work where the full breadth of Noël’s originality and intellectual contribution can be found. Noël reinterprets the Jesuits’ position through the lens of Neo-Confucianism integrating concepts such as li taiji yin and yang in his reading of Chinese philosophy. With contributions from Sinologists and intellectual historians this book offers the first systematic study of this pioneering work.

Faustus was a Gallic representative of what has been referred to as 'semipelagianism'. In his De Gratia he fiercely opposed the Augustinian view of Grace and Predestination that had been upheld by Lucidus a presbyter who possibly misunderstood Augustine's thought. Faustus did not open new ground about these contested doctrines but put significant roadblocks to their possible extreme trajectories.

This book offers new and innovative perspectives on the archaeology of consumption in Byzantine cities and their hinterlands. Case-studies range from towns in eastern Macedonia north-western and central Greece and Crete to urban centres in Serbia Bulgaria and western Turkey. The archaeological data and historical insights presented in this volume are always of great interest often exciting and more than once outright astonishing. The commodities discussed in the volume are dated between the 6th and the 16th century CE and include pottery (e.g. glazed table wares amphorae cooking pots storage jars) textile fragments metal objects bronze and golden jewellery marble carved slabs and columns.

Feeding the Byzantine City sheds compelling light on a world which was much more complex and interconnected than has often been assumed which makes it essential reading for scholars and a larger audience alike.

The exemplum held immense power in antiquity especially in the political field. What role did historical or legendary figures from the Greco-Roman past play during the Empire in speeches intended to build legitimise or question power? How were they selected? How did they work? These are the questions that the eighteen contributions in this volume seek to answer. This multifaceted approach crosses several literary genres including poetry historiography and political or philosophical discourse which are examined over six centuries. It considers different types of power or authority (imperial power but also the authority of the magistrate in the Greek city during Roman domination and the power of bishops). This highlights the plasticity of exempla that depending on the context could justify or question a vast diversity of ideologies and practices of power.

Published anonymously in 1733 Memoirs of the Twentieth Century is one of the earliest futuristic novels known in Anglophone and Euro-American literature. It foregrounds an acceleration of history brought about by an increasing degree of global interconnectedness and the exclusion of prophetism and astrology as credible ways to know the future. The work of Samuel Madden an Irish writer and philanthropist of Whig sympathies it consists of a collection of diplomatic letters composed in the 1990s which the narrator claims were brought to him from the time to come by a supernatural entity. Through these correspondences twentieth-century world scenarios are spread out before the reader in which British naval power rules the waves and international commerce while the transnational scheming of the Jesuits threatens the independence of weaker European courts.

This book — which includes a study followed by an annotated edition of the text — assesses the cultural significance of this literary work as an apt observatory on how historical time as a cultural construction was shaped during the eighteenth century by new forms of transnational circulation of information and by the dubious space carved out in European culture by seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century debates on the nature of historical knowledge.

Through and by means of the Memoirs case study this volume aims to contribute to a wider cultural history of the future and speculative fiction. The novel’s ironic distancing of beliefs considered to be superstitious and absurd — such as divination techniques and occult and magical disciplines — offers an exceptional testimony to the negotiation of the boundaries of verisimilitude and credibility within a religious enlightenment.

« On ne naît pas homme on le devient ». La formule de Simone de Beauvoir détournée par les historiennes et les historiens des masculinités peut également s’appliquer à la période médiévale à travers l’éducation. Au sein du discours clérical du xiii e siècle la masculinité laïque loin d’être innée est en effet envisagée comme un apprentissage autant pour les garçons et les adolescents que pour les adultes - pères de famille et maris. Cette identité de genre constitue un statut qui s’acquiert au prix de nombreux efforts sur soi-même par un long processus de transformation intérieure. Élaboré dans les commentaires bibliques un idéal de masculinité incarné par Adam se dessine également et exerce une grande influence sur le comportement masculin prescrit dans les textes pédagogiques. Le discours normatif ainsi produit participe de la différenciation des sexes. Il constitue un moyen privilégié de forger l’identité sexuée et un terreau fertile d’exploration historique.

Dans une perspective d’histoire culturelle et sociale cet ouvrage s’intéresse à la manière dont la masculinité est construite au sein d’un corpus de sources du xiii e siècle principalement composé par des frères mendiants. Il interroge un domaine de recherche au développement récent en plein essor depuis les années 1990-2000 qui reste toutefois encore peu exploité pour la période médiévale en particulier dans le milieu francophone. Ayant rendu les hommes visibles en tant qu’êtres sexués l’étude des masculinités s’avère pourtant complémentaire de l’histoire des femmes et indispensable pour appréhender les sociétés médiévales dans le dialogue entre les genres qui y prend place.

An early visual mass medium the magic lantern was omnipresent in most Western societies between 1880 and 1930. The Christian Church especially the Catholics spiritual associations such as the Freemasons political interest groups and teaching institutions all made use of lectures enriched by projected images to disseminate information convictions and doctrines. Moreover the lantern often featured as a concealed aid in stage spectacles. Nineteen authors analyse the effects of "the beam of light in the dark" in the context of religion faith and belief. Attention is paid to the wide spectrum of locations where projections took place as well as to the lantern's impressive versatility. The lavishly illustrated chapters collected in this volume range from analyses of religious propaganda to fundraising lectures for missionary work in China from the fight against alcoholism to the secularisation of society and from the lantern's application in spiritualist sessions to its use in science and teaching.