Books published by Yale University Press

A landmark history of the world economic order, exploring how developing countries have fought to escape impoverishment

Drawing on articles in social work and mental health journals, activist newsletters and autobiographies by search activists, this text offers a new perspective on adoption and the search debate, placing them within a social context.

Lothian boasts some of Scotland's most picturesque villages and fine Georgian towns, but its architectural history goes back to the twelfth century. The introduction of monastic orders and the establishment of the parish churches has left examples at Dalmeny and Tyninghame. Lothian also has fine church buildings of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries while schisms within the Reformed religion are reflected in a variety of lesser churches. Tower-houses are reminders of war and conflict and of the power struggles of the nobility, poignantly expressed in the ruins of Linlithgow Palace. More peaceful and prosperous years, both before and after the Act of Union, produced large estates and a series of fine classical mansion houses - Newhailes, Yester House, Dalkeith - while the grandiloquent Hopetoun, Newliston and Gosford House testify to the genius of the Adams, father and sons. Where Tantallon, Dirleton and other early castles were defensive, their successors of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, such as Dalmeny and Dalhousie, are unashamedly romantic. Lothian's achievements of the Industrial Revolution range form the simplicity of Telford's Lothian Bridge to the dramatic and celebrated spans of the Forth Rail Bridge.

The 366 lyrics of Petrarch's Canzoniere exert a unique influence in literary history. From the mid-fifteenth century to the early seventeenth, the poems are imitated in every major language of western Europe, and for a time they provide Renaissance Europe with an almost exclusive sense of what love poetry should be. In this stimulating look at the international phenomenon of Petrarch's poetry, Gordon Braden focuses on materials in languages other than English--Italian, French, and Spanish, with brief citations from Croatian and Cypriot Greek, among others. Braden closely examines Petrarch's theme of love for an impossible object of desire, a theme that captivated and inspired across centuries, societies, and languages. The book opens with a fresh interpretation of Petrarch's sequence, in which Braden defines the poet's innovations in the context of his predecessors, Dante and the troubadours. The author then examines how Petrarchan predispositions affect various strains of Renaissance literature: prose narrative, verse narrative, and, primarily, lyric poetry. In the final chapter, Braden turns to the poetry of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz to demonstrate a sophisticated case of Petrarchism taken to one of its extremes within the walls of a convent in seventeenth-century Mexico.

This work covers the English county of Berkshire. Stretching from the fringes of London, Berkshire originally covered much of present day Oxfordshire. The variety of architecture is, consequently, broad and remarkable, from the towns of the home counties to the farmhouses and churches of its west.

In this ambitious reinterpretation of the early Stuart period in England, Glenn Burgess contends that the common understanding of seventeenth-century English politics is oversimplified and inaccurate. The long-accepted standard view holds that gradual polarization between the Court and Parliament during the reigns of James I and Charles I reflected the split between absolutists--who upheld the divine right of monarchy to rule--and constitutionalists--who resisted tyranny by insisting the monarch was subject to law--and resulted inevitably in civil war. Yet, Burgess argues, the very terms that have been used to understand the period are misleading: there were almost no genuine absolutist thinkers in England before the Civil War, and the "constitutionalism" of common lawyers and parliamentarians was a very different notion from current understandings of that term. Burgess turns to the great body of common law that enshrined many of England's liberties and institutions. Examining the political opinions of such key figures as Sir Edward Coke and Sir Francis Bacon, he concludes that the laws of the land represented a civilization no monarchist would have attacked. Further, absolutism was a rare creed at the time and, while it was accepted that the king was next to God in authority, this detracted nothing from the insistence that he rule under the law. Rather than a polarization of ideas fueling political division, says Burgess, it was Charles I's inappropriate exploitation of agreed prerogatives that exposed tensions, forged divisions, and ruptured the "pacified politics" of which the early modern English were so proud. Burgess's new perspective sets the political thought of Hobbes, Locke, and others into contemporary context, revises the distorted view of pre-civil war England, and refocuses discussion on the real conflicts and human complexities of the period.

A fascinating history of the profitable paradox of the American outdoor experience: visiting nature first requires shopping

Composer John Kander and lyricist Fred Ebb collaborated for more than forty years, longer than any such partnership in Broadway history. Together they wrote over twenty musicals. Their two most successful works, Cabaret and Chicago, had critically acclaimed Broadway revivals and were made into Oscar-winning films. This book, the first study of Kander and Ebb, examines their artistic accomplishments as individuals and as a team. Drawing on personal papers and on numerous interviews, James Leve analyzes the unique nature of this collaboration. Leve discusses their contribution to the concept musical; he examines some of their most popular works including Cabaret, Chicago, and Kiss of the Spider Woman; and he reassesses their "flops" as well as their incomplete and abandoned projects. Filled with fascinating information, the book is a resource for students of musical theater and lovers of Kander and Ebb's songs and shows.

Dr. Bennett Simon provides a psychoanalytic reading of Aeschylus' Oresteia, Euripedes' Medea, Shakespeare's King Lear and Macbeth, O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night, and Beckett's Endgame, six plays from ancient to modern times which involve a particular form of intrafamily warfare: the killing of children or of the possibility of children.

This intriguing book explores how ordinary people in traditional China used contracts to facilitate the transactions of their daily lives, as they bought, sold, rented, or borrowed land, livestock, people, or money. In the process it illuminates specific everyday concerns during China's medieval transformation. Valerie Hansen translates and analyzes surviving contracts and also draws on tales of the supernatural, rare legal sources, plays, language texts, and other anecdotal evidence to describe how contracts were actually used. She explains that the educated wrote their own contracts, whereas the illiterate paid scribes to draft them and read them aloud. The contracts reveal much about everyday life: problems with inflation that resulted from the introduction of the first paper money in the world; the persistence of women's rights to own and sell land at a time when their lives were becoming more constricted; and the litigiousness of families, which were complicated products of remarriages, adoptions, and divorces. The Chinese even armed their dead with contracts asserting ownership of their grave plots, and Hansen provides details of an underworld court system in which the dead could sue and be sued. Illustrations and maps enrich a book that will be fascinating for anyone interested in Chinese life and society.

Seizing the Hungarian throne at the age of fifteen, Matthias Corvinus, the "Raven King," was an effervescent presence on the fifteenth-century stage. A successful warrior and munificent art patron, he sought to leave as symbols of his strategic and humanist ambitions a strong, unified country, splendid palaces, and the most magnificent library in Christendom. But Hungary, invaded by Turkey after Matthias's death in 1490, yielded its treasures, and the Raven King's exquisite library of two thousand volumes, witness to a golden cultural age, was dispersed first across Europe and then the world.The quest to recover this collection of sumptuously illuminated scripts provoked and tantalized generations of princes, cardinals, collectors, and scholars and imbued Hungarians with the mythical conviction that the restoration of the lost library would seal their country's rebirth. In this thrilling and absorbing account, drawing on a wealth of original sources in several languages, Marcus Tanner tracks the destiny of the Raven King and his magnificent bequest, uncovering the remarkable story of a life and library almost lost to history.

Famed for his learning, wordplay, fantasy and insight, the French writer Francois Rabelais (1494?-1553) was also widely known for scoffing, supposed atheism, salacious writing and irresponsible whimsy. This book explores Renaissance England's response to the humorous yet difficult and ambiguous Rabelais. Anne Lake Prescott describes in detail how a host of English writers - Philip Sidney, Ben Jonson, John Webster, John Donne, James I, Shakespeare and Michael Drayton, among many others - collectively and sometimes individually appreciated and condemned Rabelais.

Since its publication in the early nineteenth century, this long narrative poem has stood unchallenged as the supreme masterpiece of Vietnamese literature. Thông's new and absorbingly readable translation (on pages facing the Vietnamese text) is illuminated by notes that give comparative passages from the Chinese novel on which the poem was based, details on Chinese allusions, and literal translations with background information explaining Vietnamese proverbs and folk sayings.

Fascinating and mysterious, the idea of the harem long captured the imagination of the West. The Muslim practice of concealing the women of the household from the eyes of alien men tempted Europeans to extravagant projections of their own wishes and fears. This intriguing book examines the art that resulted. Drawing on a wide range of evidence from the late seventeenth century to the early twentieth century--including travel writing, literature, painting, and even opera--Ruth Bernard Yeazell demonstrates the surprising variety of expressions inspired by the harem of the Western imagination. The book provides both a rich account of changing perceptions of the harem and a demonstration of the tenacious persistence of myth and stereotype. Yeazell shows that Europe's hunger for facts about the harem combined repeatedly with the impulse to fantasize. Masculine erotic fantasies of the harem were reflected in the paintings of Ingres and Delacroix, the writings of de Sade, Byron, and Loti, and the work of anonymous pornographers. Alternate representations portrayed the harem as a prison or a locus of freedom, a place of murderous rivalry or a home of loving sisterhood, a chamber of erotic license or a nightmarish snare of frustration and ennui. And Montesquieu, Mozart, and Charlotte Brontë among others explored in their art the opposition of the imaginary pleasures of the harem to the freely chosen union of a loving couple. In a nuanced reading of Ingres's Bain turc andother works, Yeazell concludes that for some the appeal of the harem lay in the fantasy of eluding time and death.

The first history of all the English cathedrals, from Birmingham and Bury St Edmunds to Worcester and York Minster

The first complete history of Southwark, London’s stubbornly independent community over the Thames

A comprehensive look at how slavery and resistance to it have shaped Yale University

A former Harvard president reflects on how elite universities are responding to critiques from the left and the right, and how they can do better

A bold new account of the state of globalization today—and what its collapse might mean for the world economy

The lost memoir of Britain’s first Black Olympic medal winner—and the America he discovered

From two distinguished experts on election law, an alarming look at how the American presidency could be stolen—by entirely legal means

The first book to examine the iconic depiction of evolution, the “march of progress,” and its role in shaping our understanding of how humans evolved

An exploration of how China’s Belt and Road Initiative seeks to reshape international order and how it has catalyzed a new era of infrastructural geopolitics

An enchanting, beautifully illustrated guide to seasonal plants—showing the long history of herbal remedies and their uses today

Experience the world of Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius and the tremendous challenges he faced and overcame, with the help of Stoic philosophy