Bücher der Reihe The Natalie Zemon Davis Annual Lectures Series

In the best micro-historical tradition, Carlo Ginzburg, himself one of the founders and icons of this genre of historiography, dissects four moments of European intellectual history. This book relives the experience that participants in the Natalie Zemon Davis Lecture Series at the Budapest campus of Central European University had in 2019 listening to Ginzburg's eloquent and engaging discourses. For the purposes of this volume he has re-edited and completed the leporello of cases charged with the inherent ambiguity between secularism and religions.Secularism is often identified with rejection or at least distancing from the sacred. However, if one assumes that secularism also appropriates and reworks the sacred, its ambiguities come to the fore. The dilemma accompanies the reception of La Boétie's Servitude volontaire between 1574 and today. Before Walter Benjamin, the lesser-known 19th-century Léon de Laborde defended the profanity of reproducing the arts. The tension around the secular pervades the case of the College de Sociologie (Paris, 1937-1939), an attempt to analyze the ideological components of fascism. The fourth lecture approaches a much-discussed contemporary phenomenon - fake news - from a long-term perspective. To what extent are some disturbing features of the world we live in the result of a long, tortuous, unpredictable trajectory?

Hybrid Renaissance introduces the idea that the Renaissance in Italy, elsewhere in Europe, and in the world beyond Europe is an example of cultural hybridization.

In this book Joan Wallach Scott discusses the role history has played as an arbiter of right and wrong and of those who claim to act in its nameΓÇö"in the name of history." Scott investigates three different instances in which repudiation of the past was conceived as a way to a better future: the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg in 1946, the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1996, and the ongoing movement for reparations for slavery in the United States. Scott shows how in these cases history was not only used to explain the past but to produce a particular future. Yet both past and future were subject to the political realities of their time and defined in terms of moral absolutes, often leading to deep contradictions. These three instances demonstrate that history is not an impartial truth, rather its very meaning is constructed by those who act in its name.

Focuses on the historicity of emotions and explore the processes that brought them to the fore of public interest and debate.

In this book the author contends-and this is not a very widely held view-that Byzantium deserves to be considered an influential part of the broader development of Europe, even though its borders also reached out to the vast territories of Anatolia and the Caucasus, and to the eastern Mediterranean.

Three portraits of men who were at the very center of governance in thirteenth-century France.

Secrets and Truth offers a rare insider's look into Secret Police's actions in Romania.

In Emotion and Devotion Miri Rubin explores the craft of the historian through a series of studies of medieval religious cultures. In three original chapters she approaches the medieval figure of the Virgin Mary with the aim of unravelling meaning and experience. Hymns and miracle tales, altarpieces and sermons ¿ a wide range of sources from many European regions ¿ are made to reveal the creativity and richness which they elicited in medieval people, women and men, clergy and laity, people of status and riches as well as those of modest means.

A collection of essays which offer insight into the development of modern conceptions of time, from the Christian dating system (BC/AD or BCE/CE) to the idea of "modernity" as an epoch in human history.