Books published by Cornell University Press

In Bounded Wilderness, Kathryn Jasper focuses on the innovations undertaken at the hermitage of Fonte Avellana in central Italy during the eleventh century by its prior, Peter Damian (d. 1072). The congregation of Fonte Avellana experimented with reforming practices that led to new ways of managing property and relations among clergy, nobles, and the laity.Kathryn Jasper charts how Damian's notion of monastic reform took advantage of the surrounding topography and geography to amplify the sensory aspects of ascetic experiences. By focusing on monastic landscapes and land ownership, Jasper demonstrates that reform extended beyond abstract ideas. Rather, reform circulated locally through monastic networks and addressed practical concerns such as property boundaries and rights over water, orchards, pastures, and mills. Putting new sources, both documentary and archaeological, into conversation with monastic charters and Damian's letters, Bounded Wilderness reveals the interrelationship of economic practices, religious traditions, and the natural environment in the idea and implementation of reform.

Much of the hoopla surrounding quality circles, teams, and high-performance work systems has been based on anecdotes and very thin evidence. It has not been established that those employee involvement strategies amount to anything more than another series of management fads or ruses designed to get more out of workers without giving them anything in return. This revelatory book, written by some of the skeptics, lays some of the suspicion to rest.Based on their visits to 44 plants and surveys of more than 4,000 employees, Eileen Appelbaum, Thomas Bailey, Peter Berg, and Arne L. Kalleberg concluded that companies are indeed more successful when managers share knowledge and power with workers and when workers assume increased responsibility and discretion.The study of steel, apparel, and medical electronics and imaging plants revealed much. In self-directed teams, workers were able to eliminate bottlenecks and coordinate the work process. In task forces created to improve quality, they communicated with individuals outside their own work groups and were able to solve problems. Expensive equipment in steel mills operated with fewer interruptions, turnaround and labor costs were cut in apparel factories, and costly inventories of components and medical equipment were reduced.And what did the employees think? The worker survey showed that jobs in participatory work systems often provide more challenging tasks and more opportunities for creativity. Employees in apparel had higher hourly earnings; those in steel had both higher hourly earnings and higher job satisfaction. Workers in more participatory settings were no more likely than others to report heavy workloads or excessive demands on their time. They were, however, less likely to report involuntary overtime or conflict with co-workers, and were more likely to be satisfied with their surroundings. Manufacturing Advantage provides the best assessment available of the effectiveness of high-performance work systems. Freestanding chapters near the end of the book provide full documentation of research data without interrupting the narrative flow.

Seeking the Mothers in Ovid's "Heroides" explores Ovid's reconceptualization of the heroines' maternal experience. Rather than aligning them with the stereotypical roles of Roman women, motherhood enables the Ovidian heroines to challenge traditional norms with irreverent perspectives on gender categories and familial relationships. Seeking the Mothers in Ovid's "Heroides" confronts these perspectives to overcome the dialectic between the (male) voice of the poet and the (female) voice of the heroines, by arguing for a form of polyphonic "cooperation" between the two voices, thus providing new angles on ironical discourse and gender fluidity within the Heroides.By reading the Heroides both through feminist theory and against Ovid's poetic production, Simona Martorana provides a novel approach to describe how motherhood enhances the heroines' agency, drawing upon works of Kristeva, Irigaray, Butler, Mulvey, Cavarero, Braidotti, and Ettinger. The application of theory is flexible throughout Seeking the Mothers in Ovid's "Heroides" and tailored to the nuances of specific passages, rather than being uniformly imposed on the ancient text.Seeking the Mothers in Ovid's "Heroides" reveals how the irony, ambiguity, and polyphony intrinsic to Ovid's poetry are amplified by the heroines' poetic voices. Martorana breaks new ground by incorporating contemporary feminist theories within the analysis of the Heroides and provides an original comprehensive analysis of motherhood that encompasses other Ovidian works, Latin poetry, and classical literature more broadly.

Queen of Sorrows takes an original approach to both late-medieval Italian history and the history of Christianity, using both quantitative and qualitative analyses of a remarkable archive of 1,904 testaments to determine patterns in giving to the Virgin of Loreto shrine in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. Bianca M. Lopez argues that in central Italy, as elsewhere, the cult of the Virgin Mary gained new prominence at this time of unprecedented mortality. Individuals gave to Santa Maria di Loreto, which houses the structure in which Mary is believed to have lived, as an expression of their grief, in the hope of strengthening family lineages beyond death, and to care for loved ones believed to be languishing in purgatory.Lopez establishes statistical correlations between different social groups and their donations to Loreto over time, uncovering informative new historical patterns, such as the prominence of widow and migrant donors in the notarial record. The documents also provide a social history of Recanati, revealing how its denizens venerated Mary as a saint with unrivaled spiritual power and uniquely sympathetic to grief, having lost her own son, Jesus. In the fourteenth century, plague survivors transformed their anguish into Marian devotion. The devastation of the plague brought the Virgin out of noble courts and monasteries and onto city streets. However, as Queen of Sorrows details, the popularity and growing wealth of the Loreto's Marian shrine attracted the attention of the papacy and peninsular seigneurial lords, who eventually brought Santa Maria di Loreto under the control of the Church.

"The heart of history, for Heidegger, is not a sequence of occurrences but the eruption of significance at critical junctures that bring us into our own by making all being, including our being, into an urgent issue. In emergency, being emerges."--from The Emergency of BeingThe esoteric Contributions to Philosophy, often considered Martin Heidegger's second main work after Being and Time, is crucial to any interpretation of his thought. Here Heidegger proposes that being takes place as "appropriation." Richard Polt's independent-minded account of the Contributions interprets appropriation as an event of emergency that demands to be thought in a "future-subjunctive" mode. Polt explores the roots of appropriation in Heidegger's earlier philosophy; Heidegger's search for a way of thinking suited to appropriation; and the implications of appropriation for time, space, human existence, and beings as a whole. In his concluding chapter, Polt reflects critically on the difficulties of the radically antirationalist and antimodern thought of the Contributions.Polt's original reading neither reduces this challenging text to familiar concepts nor refutes it, but engages it in a confrontation--an encounter that respects a way of thinking by struggling with it. He describes this most private work of Heidegger's philosophy as "a dissonant symphony that imperfectly weaves together its moments into a vast fugue, under the leitmotif of appropriation. This fugue is seeded with possibilities that are waiting for us, its listeners, to develop them. Some are dead ends--viruses that can lead only to a monolithic, monotonous misunderstanding of history. Others are embryonic insights that promise to deepen our thought, and perhaps our lives, if we find the right way to make them our own."

Philosophy at the Gymnasium returns Greek moral philosophy to its original context--the gyms of Athens--to understand how training for the body sparked training for the mind. The result is an engaging inroad to Greek thought that wrestles with big questions about life, happiness, and education, while providing fresh perspectives on standing scholarly debates.In Philosophy at the Gymnasium, Erik Kenyon reveals the egalitarian spirit of the ancient gym, in which clothes--and with them social markers--are shed at the door, leaving individuals to compete based on their physical and intellectual merits alone. The work opens with Socratic dialogues set in gyms, which call for reform in character education. It explores Plato's moral and political philosophy through the lens of mental and civic health. And it holds up Olympic victors as Aristotle's model for the life of happiness through training.

Tropical Despotisms reveals the alarm that spread among France's Caribbean possessions during the period between the Seven Years' War and the Revolution and the determination to cultivate a new patriotic community rooted in the Enlightenment principles of honor and civic virtue. Following France's humiliating defeat at the hands of the British, a loose coalition of frustrated and enlightened reformers hoped to promote imperial regeneration in order to restore France's wounded national pride, stabilize and strengthen the Antillean colonies, and bind them more closely to the metropole.David Allen Harvey describes the historical relationship between capitalism and slavery in the making of the modern world economy and seeks to move beyond simplistic arguments on either extreme by discussing the contingent and evolving relationship between the two. As a result, he reveals how capitalism and slavery developed in tandem in the eighteenth century Caribbean, but that reformers sought to enact a gradual transition to a free wage labor regime more in keeping with capitalism's ideal of free and voluntary contractual relationships between formally equal parties.Tropical Despotisms provides a new perspective on the social and demographic structure of the in the French Antilles and the wider French Atlantic world. Through the eyes of enlightened reformers, Harvey uncovers not only the deep and critical debates around the issues of slavery and race, but also the efforts by enlightened reformers, as they proposed a rethinking the political and economic structures by which the empire had hitherto been ruled, rationalizing governing institutions, and liberalizing trade.

The People's Revolution of 1789 analyzes the historic events that unleashed a vast panoply of anarchic, destructive, and creative disorders that demolished France's Old Regime and founded a new revolutionary order. It captures the complex and dynamic interplay of uprisings, elections, meetings, and revolutionary moments that helped create modern freedom. The People's Revolution of 1789 is the first book to chronicle the Parisian, provincial, and colonial movements of 1789 together. In doing so, Micah Alpaugh builds from hundreds of local and regional studies and sources on the French Revolution to provide a new interpretation of the powerful contestations that created the modern revolutionary tradition. He explores the multiplicity of movements--anarchistically operating without a common leader and usually in only loose coordination--that gave the revolutionary dynamic its power, without which the legislators' revolution at Versailles would have failed or been severely curtailed. The rapid onslaught of protests across the First Year of Liberty compounded their effects, overpowering authorities' efforts to maintain a degenerating order and forcing the establishment of a more open system. The People's Revolution of 1789 reveals in new ways how the French Revolutionaries ended feudalism, established human rights, abolished the police, and instituted new elected governments. By returning emphasis to the people's revolution, we can better understand how world history's most consequential revolution developed, as millions of French people embraced direct action in hopes of fundamental change. Through the movements of millions, the French created the most powerful revolution the world had yet experienced.

In International Law and the Public, Geoffrey P.R. Wallace investigates the public as a crucial, often overlooked, actor in international law. He asks just who is it that counts in the operation of the international legal order. Defying conventional wisdom that sees governments, leaders, generals, lawyers, or elites from the upper echelons of society as the main international legal players, Wallace advances a "popular international law" where ordinary people are considered important legal actors in their own right alongside the usual focus on elites. Far from powerless or unwitting, publics possess both the cognitive and material capacities to understand and contribute to the intricacies of international legal rules. Combining rigorous theorizing with wide-ranging evidence, International Law and the Public is an account of an international legal politics from below, taking seriously the place of ordinary people in international affairs.

Throw Your Voice is a story of loss and recovery. It relates how children placed in a temporary care institution make sense of their situations. Moving between a Kazakhstan government children's home, Hope House, and the Almaty State Puppet Theater, Meghanne Barker shows how children, and puppets, as proxies, bring to life ideologies of childhood and visions of a rosy future. Sites and stories run in parallel. Framed by the narrative of Anton Chekhov's "Kashtanka," about a lost dog taken in by a kind stranger, the author follows the story's staging at the puppet theater. At Hope House, children find themselves on a path similar to Kashtanka, dislodged from their first homes to reside in a second.The heart of this story is about living in displacement and about the fragile intimacies achieved amidst conditions of missing. Whether due to war, migration, or pandemic, people get separated from those closest to them. Throw Your Voice examines how strangers become familiar, and how objects mediate precarious ties. She shows how people use fantasy to mitigate loss.

The lives of the men depicted in Perilous Wagers take place in the squalor of Tokyo's old day-laborer district, San'ya, where they can be found eking out a living from occasional construction work and welfare handouts, permanently displaced from their hometowns to metropolitan Tokyo. Although San'ya has nearly vanished during the past twenty years, its import persists as a black market where its small population of male day-laborers can be contracted for the most undesirable of tasks, without consideration for their health or safety. In this context, Hammering's book examines classic ethnographic themes of labor, exchange, value, honor, shame, temporality, desire, gender, and personhood. It explores how one group of day-laborers embodied a transgressive masculinity intimately intertwined with honorable mobster values of old, and how they created dignity and sociality under abject conditions of life. Perilous Wagers tracks these underdog values across construction sites, non-profit organizations, hospitals, bunkhouses, and illegal gambling dens, giving imaginative life to a stigmatized, forgotten social world.

The City is Ours accounts how urban politics mediated the rise of Kurdish nationhood and mobilization in Diyarbakır, Turkey. Muna Güvenç elucidates how urban and architectural forms are not merely the backdrop of the cityscape where political struggles unfold; they constitute the very essence of these conflicts. Güvenç posits that urban spaces offer "wiggle room", turning oppression into chances for dissent and resilience and offering opportunities for vulnerable minority groups to create sociopolitical blocs and mobilizations. Gvenç takes readers from municipal halls to the streets and illustrates how, in the early 2000s, pro-Kurdish parties harnessed urban planning to resist coercion and foster Kurdish mobilization in Turkey. Gvenç challenges readers to rethink urban neoliberalism, new forms of nationalisms and mobilizations, and the ways they shape cities and politics. The City is Ours is a profound awakening, an invitation to all architects and urban planners, urging them to rise above the confines of their blueprints and embrace the vast tapestry of the politics of space.

Singing by Herself reinterprets the rise of literary loneliness by foregrounding the female and feminized figures who have been overlooked in previous histories of solitude. Many of the earliest records of the terms "lonely" and "loneliness" in British literature describe solitaries whose songs positioned them within the tradition of female complaint. Amelia Worsley shows how these feminized solitaries, for whom loneliness was both a space of danger and a space of productive retreat, helped to make loneliness attractive to future lonely poets, despite the sense of suspicion it evoked. Although loneliness today is often associated with states of atomized interiority, soliloquy, and self-enclosure, this study of eighteenth-century poetry disrupts the presumed association between isolation, singular speech, and bounded models of poetic subjectivity. In five chapters focused on lonely poet figures in the works of John Milton, Anne Finch, Alexander Pope, Thomas Gray, and Charlotte Smith--which also take account of the wider eighteenth-century fascination with literary loneliness--Singing by Herself shows how poets increasingly associated the new literary mode of being alone with states of disembodiment, dispersal, and echoic self-doubling. Seemingly solitary lonely voices often dissolve into polyvocal, allusive community, Worsley argues, when in dialogue with each other and also with classical figures of feminized lament such as Sappho, Echo, and Philomela.The book's provocative reflections on lyric mean that it will have a broad appeal to scholars interested in the history of poetry and poetics, as well as to those who study the literary history of gender, affect, and emotion.

In Experimental Histories, Hannah Weaver examines the medieval practice of interpolation--inserting material from one text into another--which is often categorized as being a problematic, inauthentic phenomenon akin to forgery and pseudepigraphy. Instead, Weaver promotes interpolation as the signature form of medieval British historiography and a vehicle of historical theory, arguing that some of the most novel concepts of time in medieval historiography can be found in these altered narratives of the past.For Weaver, historiographical interpolation constitutes the traces of active experimentation with how best to write history, particularly the history of Britain. Historians in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Britain recognized the difficulty of enfolding complex events into a linear chronology and embraced innovative textual methods of creating history. Focusing on the Brut tradition but also analyzing the long history of interpolated historiography, including the Bayeux Embroidery, Experimental Histories offers a new interpretation of generic remixing in medieval writing about the past. Drawing on both manuscript studies and the new formalism, it shows that the practice of inserting materials from romance and hagiography allowed creative revisers to explore how lived events relate to passing time. By embracing interpolation, Weaver provides lively insights into the ways that time becomes history and human actors experience time.

Monstrous Fantasies asks why medieval romances reimagining the crusades ending in a Christian victory circulated in England with such abundance after the 1291 Muslim reconquest of Acre, the last of the Latin crusader states in the Holy Land, and what these texts reveal about the cultural anxieties of late medieval England. Leila K. Norako highlights the impact that the Ottoman victory and subsequent massacre of Christian prisoners at the battle of Nicopolis in 1396 had on intensifying the popularity of what she calls recovery romance. These two episodes inspired a sense of urgency over the fate of the Holy Land and of Latin Christendom itself, resulting in the proliferation of romances in which crusading English kings like Richard I and anachronistic legends like King Arthur not only reconquered Jerusalem but committed genocidal violence against the Muslims. These romances, which--as Norako argues--also influenced Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, conjure fantasies of an ascendant global Christendom by rehearsing acts of conquest and cultural annihilation that were impossible to realize in the late Middle Ages. Emphasizing the tension in these texts between nostalgia and anticipation that fuels their narrative momentum, Monstrous Fantasies also explores how the cultural desires for European and Christian hegemony that recovery romances versified were revived in the wake of the so-called wars on terror in the twenty-first century in such films as Kingdom of Heaven and American Sniper.

No other thinker so engaged the Russian cultural imagination of the early twentieth century as did Friedrich Nietzche. The Revolution of Moral Consciousness shows how Nietzschean thought influenced the brilliant resurgence of literary life that started in the 1890s and continued for four decades. Through an analysis of the Russian encounter with Nietzsche, Edith Clowes defines the shift in ethical and aesthetic vision that motivated Russia's unprecedented artistic renascence and at the same time led its followers to the brink of cultural despair. Clowes shows how in the last years of the nineteenth century a diverse array of writers and critics discovered Nietzsche's thought, embracing or repudiating it with equal vigor. The literary storm brewing around Nietzsche and the concurrent relaxation of censorship combined to attract a public eager to follow the new intellectual fashion. Young writers, such as Andreev and Kuprin, welcomed the idea of the "superman" as a promising path to personal fulfillment. The tragic fates of their protagonists and the alluring gospel of the vulgar Zarathustra-like characters of such bestselling authors as Boborykin, Artsybashev, and Verbitskaia found enthusiastic, if indiscriminating, audiences ready to be "taught" how to "find themselves." By considering this Nietzschean cult, Clowes draws fresh insight into the nature of the budding popular-culture industry in Russia and the fast-growing reading public. From this ferment emerged the greatest Russian literary voices of the early twentieth century. The revolutionary romantics, Gorky and Lunacharsky, sought in Nietzsche's writing a new vision of total social and cultural change. Merezhkovsky led a generation of mystic symbolists in the search for a literary myth of resurrection. Ivanov, Blok, and Belyi appropriated the image of the "crucified Dionysus" as the central symbol of spiritual transfiguration. Their encounters with Nietzschean thought disclose an even more profound creative struggle with their own cultural past and its established formulations of nation and individual, culture and history. Clowes uses the term future anxiety to speak of a creative mentality that strove to assert itself by diminishing the impact of powerful literary precursors, such as Tolstoi, Dostoevsky, and Solovyov, and opening to the imagination the vision of a future full of vast creative possibility.

"This book describes the experiences of the diverse people who successfully defended Fort Stanwix on the New York frontier at the Mohawk River Oneida carrying place portage between 1758 and 1781. It focuses on Colonel Peter Gansevoort's 3rd New York Continental regiment and the August 1777 three-week siege by forces under British Colonel St. Leger."--

Byzantine Media Subjects invites readers into a world replete with images--icons, frescoes, and mosaics filling places of worship, politics, and community. Glenn Peers asks readers to think themselves into a world where representation reigned and humans followed, and indeed were formed. Interrogating the fundamental role of representation in the making of the Byzantine human, Peers argues that Byzantine culture was (already) posthuman. The Byzantine experience reveals the extent to which media like icons, manuscripts, music, animals, and mirrors fundamentally determine humans. In the Byzantine world, representation as such was deeply persuasive, even coercive; it had the power to affect human relationships, produce conflict, and form self-perception. Media studies has made its subject the modern world, but this book argues for media having made historical subjects. Here, it is shown that media long ago also made Byzantine humans, defining them, molding them, mediating their relationship to time, to nature, to God, and to themselves.

"Italian Forgers takes an unorthodox approach to a popular topic: art forgery. Based on original published sources as well as current and past scholarship, Italian Forgers focuses not on art forgery per se, but on the major forgery scandals in the context of a shifting art market operated by a number of Italians who fashioned a very sophisticated and self-conscious response to the constant and often intense demand for Italian objects."--

"An account of the skills that are necessary both for individuals to flourish in the twenty-first century and for societies to approach sustainability"--Provided by publisher"--

"This book includes a series of studies and reflections on Protestant and Mormon missionary encounters throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries"--

How to Do Things with Dead People studies human contrivances for representing and relating to the dead. Alice Dailey takes as her principal objects of inquiry Shakespeare's English history plays, describing them as reproductive mechanisms by which living replicas of dead historical figures are regenerated in the present and re-killed. Considering the plays in these terms exposes their affinity with a transhistorical array of technologies for producing, reproducing, and interacting with dead things-technologies such as literary doppelgangers, photography, ventriloquist puppetry, X-ray imaging, glitch art, capital punishment machines, and cloning. By situating Shakespeare's historical drama in this intermedial conversation, Dailey challenges conventional assumptions about what constitutes the context of a work of art and contests foundational models of linear temporality that inform long-standing conceptions of historical periodization and teleological order. Working from an eclectic body of theories, pictures, and machines that transcend time and media, Dailey composes a searching exploration of how the living use the dead to think back and look forward, to rule, to love, to wish and create.

"A study of the stalled/non-existent process of legally reckoning with the 1965 state-sponsored genocide in Indonesia"--

A particularly vicious and bloody civil war has racked Algeria for a decade. Amnesty International notes that since 1992, in a population of 28 million, 80,000 people have been reported killed, and the actual total is almost certainly higher. This terrible war overshadows Algeria's long and complex history and its prominence on the world economic stage--second in size among African nations, Algeria has the longest Mediterranean coastline and contains the world's fifth-largest natural gas reserves. Algeria, 1830-2000 is a comprehensive narrative history of the country. Benjamin Stora, widely recognized as the leading expert on Algeria, presents the story of this turbulent area from the start of formal French colonialism in the early nineteenth century, through the prolonged war for independence in the latter 1950s, to the internal strife of the present day. This book adapts and updates three short volumes published originally in French by La Découverte. For this English edition, Stora has written a new introductory chapter on Algeria's colonial period (1830-1954) and has revised the final section to bring the volume up to date.

"Includes all 150 species of venomous elapid snakes in Australia. Species accounts are illustrated with photos, distribution maps, and anatomical drawings and include natural history, range, and habitat information, identification guidelines, rate of lethality, and conservation status. Also in the book are instructions for first aid treatment of snake bites and a description of antivenoms"--