Monastery, Monument, Museum

Author(s):  
Maurizio Peleggi

Monastery, Monument, Museum examines cultural sites, artifacts, and institutions of Thailand as both products and vehicles of cultural memory. From rock caves to reliquaries, from cultic images to temple murals, from museums and modern monuments to contemporary artworks, cultural sites and artifacts are considered in relation to the transmission of religious beliefs and political ideologies, as well as manual and intellectual knowledge, throughout thelongue durée of Thailand’s cultural history. Sequenced by and large chronologically along a period of time spanning the eleventh century through to the start of the twenty-first, the eight chapters in this book are grouped into three sections that surface distinct themes and analytical concerns: devotional art in Part I, museology and art history in Part II, and political art in Part III. The chapters can even be read as self-contained essays, each supplied with extensive bibliographic references.By examining the interplay between cultural sites and artifacts, their popular and scholarly appreciation, and the institutional configuration of a cultural legacy, Monastery, Monument, Museum makes a contribution to the literature on memory studies. A second area of scholarship this book engages is the art history of Thailand by shifting focus from the chronological and stylistic analysis of artifacts to their social life—and afterlife. Monastery, Monument, Museum brings together in one volume a millennium of art and cultural history of Thailand. Its novel analysis and thought-provoking re-interpretation of a variety of artifacts and source materials will be of interest to both the specialist and the general reader.

Author(s):  
Carlos Machado

This book analyses the physical, social, and cultural history of Rome in late antiquity. Between AD 270 and 535, the former capital of the Roman empire experienced a series of dramatic transformations in its size, appearance, political standing, and identity, as emperors moved to other cities and the Christian church slowly became its dominating institution. Urban Space and Aristocratic Power in Late Antique Rome provides a new picture of these developments, focusing on the extraordinary role played by members of the traditional elite, the senatorial aristocracy, in the redefinition of the city, its institutions, and spaces. During this period, Roman senators and their families became increasingly involved in the management of the city and its population, in building works, and in the performance of secular and religious ceremonies and rituals. As this study shows, for approximately three hundred years the houses of the Roman elite competed with imperial palaces and churches in shaping the political map and the social life of the city. Making use of modern theories of urban space, the book considers a vast array of archaeological, literary, and epigraphic documents to show how the former centre of the Mediterranean world was progressively redefined and controlled by its own elite.


This book offers a cross-disciplinary approach to pain and suffering in the early modern period, based on research in the fields of literary studies, art history, theatre studies, cultural history and the study of emotions. It has a sustained focus on visual sources, textual material and documents about actual events rather than well-known thinkers or ‘masterpieces’ of art history, and a preference for cases and historical contexts over systematic theory-building. The hurt(ful) body brings under discussion visual and performative representations of embodied pain, using an insistently dialectical approach that takes into account the perspective of the hurt body itself, the power and afflictions of its beholder and, finally, the routinising and redeeming of hurt within institutional contexts. The volume’s two-fold approach of the hurt body, defining ‘hurt’ both from the perspective of the victim and the beholder (as well as their combined creation of a gaze), is unique. It establishes a double perspective about the riddle of ‘cruel’ viewing by tracking the shifting cultural meanings of victims’ bodies, and confronting them to the values of audiences, religious and popular institutional settings, and practices of punishment. It encompasses both the victim’s presence as an image or performed event of pain and the conundrum of the look – the transmitted ‘pain’ experienced by the watching audience. This will be done through three rubrics: the early modern performing body, beholder or audience responses, and the operations of institutional power. Because of its interdisciplinary approach of the history of pain and the hurt(ful) body, the book will be of interest for Lecturers and students from different fields, like the history of ideas, the history of the body, urban history, theatre studies, literary studies, art history, emotion studies and performance studies


2020 ◽  

This volume covers the vast field of memory, commemoration and the art of memory in the Middle Ages. Memory was not only a religious, social and historical phenomenon but also a driving factor in cultural life and in the production of art. It played an important role in medieval intellectual, visual and material culture, touching on almost all spheres of personal and social life. Yet the perception of memory did not remain static. The period covered by this volume, 500-1450, was one of enormous change in the way memory was understood, expressed, and valued. The authors of the essays trace the changes in the understanding of memory in its diverse forms and social fields, analysing everyday life as well as politics, philosophy and theology. As can be demonstrated, functions and perceptions evolved over the medieval millennium and laid the foundations for the modern understanding of individual and social memory.


Author(s):  
Tim Greenwood

Although the Byzantine annexation of Armenian territories in the later tenth and eleventh centuries has been studied from a number of perspectives, little attention has been paid to the subsequent history of those districts, and in particular the circumstances and the responses of the communities who stayed put. This chapter explores the social and cultural history of the district of Tarōn in the century after its incorporation as a theme. Through comparison with the annexation of Vaspurakan in 1021, it argues that both the lay and clerical elite left Tarōn in 966. This affected land tenure in several ways, including the creation of stratiotika ktemata and the imposition of the demosion. Evidence from an Armenian Gospels manuscript indicates that the land tax was still being collected—and the registers updated—as late as 1067. A new network of episcopal sees was established across the former Armenian see of Tarōn. Finally the History of Tarōn, a composition completed in the 980s, shows how one monastic community took advantage of the recent turmoil to promote its claim to foundation and endowment by St Grigor the Illuminator at the start of the fourth century. It also forged multiple links between the activities of St Grigor and the metropolitan see of Caesarea, associating the conversion of Tarōn, and by implication of Armenia, with the Byzantine Church.


Author(s):  
Peter E. Gordon ◽  
John P. McCormick

This introductory chapter first sets out the book's purpose, which is to bring together a broad range of papers on diverse themes pertaining to the intellectual and cultural history of the Weimar Republic. It includes a great variety of contributions by scholars affiliated with manifold disciplines, including, but not limited to, history, political theory, philosophy, sociology, history of science, film theory, art history, and literary criticism. Few if any single-volume works have succeeded at offering a unified portrait of the rich developments of Weimar thought, and the authors believe the time is right to offer a guidebook to the German interwar era, a compendium focused primarily on the major intellectual trends of the time. The chapter then discusses the unity and diversity of Weimar thought followed by an overview of the subsequent chapters.


2021 ◽  

A Cultural History of Sport in the Modern Age covers the period 1920 to today. Over this time, world-wide participation in sport has been shaped by economic developments, communication and transportation innovations, declining racism, diplomacy, political ideologies, feminization, democratization, as well as increasing professionalization and commercialization. Sport has now become both a global cultural force and one of the deepest ways in which individual nations express their myths, beliefs, values, traditions, and realities. The 6 volume set of the Cultural History of Sport presents the first comprehensive history from classical antiquity to today, covering all forms and aspects of sport and its ever-changing social, cultural, political, and economic context and impact. The themes covered in each volume are the purpose of sport; sporting time and sporting space; products, training, and technology; rules and order; conflict and accommodation; inclusion, exclusion, and segregation; minds, bodies, and identities; representation.


1982 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 559-570 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karl L. Hutterer

Early Southeast Asia is an impressive collection of papers dealing with the archaeology, history, epigraphy, art history, and geography of early Southeast Asian states and their development. The high scholarship of individual contributions notwithstanding, the collection as a whole demonstrates that the past thirty years have seen relatively little progress in understanding this important aspect of the social and cultural history of the region. Archaeologists have made many important new discoveries but have been unable to bring them to bear within a historical synthesis; related disciplines have dealt with other types of evidence but also seem unable to translate them into a common language of cultural and social meaning.


Author(s):  
Vincenzo Ferrone

This chapter examines the historical problem of how to gain an understanding of the fundamental traits that were original to the Enlightenment. More specifically, it considers how the Enlightenment arose over the intellectual, political, and social life of eighteenth-century élites, so as to produce a cultural revolution that transformed European society. Franco Venturi interpreted the Enlightenment as the “history of a movement,” a movement of a political nature that was created by self-conscious intellectual minorities. The chapter considers Venturi's proposal to go back to a view of the Enlightenment as a movement and as a fundamental chapter in the new history of intellectuals. In particular, it discusses Venturi's project for a political history of the Enlightenment, his denunciation of scholars engaged in the social history of the Enlightenment, and the emergence of a new cultural history in the 1980s.


Author(s):  
Felicity Chaplin

While there have been significant contributions on la Parisienne in the fields of art history, fashion theory and culture, and cultural history, little is written on her appearance and function in cinema. This book is an attempt to address this gap in scholarship by examining the figure of la Parisienne in cinema. The approach of this book is threefold: textual (the films), contextual (the history of the representations of the Parisienne type), and intertextual (the relationship between the films and other texts such as novels and paintings, extending to the star persona of the actress). However the overarching methodology of this book is iconographical, tracing the historical prefigurations of la Parisienne in the art, literature, and mass culture of nineteenth-century France. The findings of this book are both general (la Parisienne as a cultural type) and specific (la Parisienne as a she appears in different films). La Parisienne can be defined as a figure of French modernity, understood both in its technological and cultural sense, and is recognisable in terms of six interconnected categories: art, cosmopolitanism, fashion, danger, prostitution, and stardom. These categories reveal the way the Parisienne type is constantly evolving while at the same time possessing a set of recognisable motifs. By connecting the films discussed in this book to a cultural tradition to which they may not at first appear to belong, this book not only enriches our understanding of these films, it also offers new analytical and interpretative perspectives.


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