Cornell University Press imprint: 972 books
Afterlives
The Return of the Dead in the Middle Ages
Language: English
Release Date: March 31, 2016
Simultaneously real and unreal, the dead are people, yet they are not. The society of medieval Europe developed a rich set of imaginative traditions about death and the afterlife, using the dead as a point of entry for thinking about the self, regeneration, and loss. These macabre preoccupations are...
by Joseph F. O'Callaghan
Language: English
Release Date: November 12, 2013
Language: English
Release Date: November 12, 2013
Medieval Spain is brilliantly recreated, in all its variety and richness, in this comprehensive survey. Likely to become the standard work in English, the book treats the entire Iberian Peninsula and all the people who inhabited it, from the coming of the Visigoths in the fifth century to the reign...
If God Meant to Interfere
American Literature and the Rise of the Christian Right
Language: English
Release Date: May 12, 2016
The rise of the Christian Right took many writers and literary critics by surprise, trained as we were to think that religions waned as societies became modern. In If God Meant to Interfere, Christopher Douglas shows that American writers struggled to understand and respond to this new social and...
Christian Imperialism
Converting the World in the Early American Republic
Language: English
Release Date: November 18, 2015
In 1812, eight American missionaries, under the direction of the recently formed American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, sailed from the United States to South Asia. The plans that motivated their voyage were ano less grand than taking part in the Protestant conversion of the entire...
by Éric Rebillard
Language: English
Release Date: October 25, 2012
Language: English
Release Date: October 25, 2012
For too long, the study of religious life in Late Antiquity has relied on the premise that Jews, pagans, and Christians were largely discrete groups divided by clear markers of belief, ritual, and social practice. More recently, however, a growing body of scholarship is revealing the degree to which...
Fortifying China
The Struggle to Build a Modern Defense Economy
Language: English
Release Date: December 15, 2009
Fortifying China explores the titanic struggle to turn China into an aspiring world-class military technological power. The defense economy is leveraging the country's vibrant civilian economy and gaining access to foreign sources of technology and know-how. Drawing on extensive Chinese-language sources,...
by Yuen Yuen Ang
Language: English
Release Date: September 6, 2016
Language: English
Release Date: September 6, 2016
Before markets opened in 1978, China was an impoverished planned economy governed by a Maoist bureaucracy. In just three decades it evolved into the world’s second-largest economy and is today guided by highly entrepreneurial bureaucrats. In How China Escaped the Poverty Trap, Yuen Yuen Ang explains...
Fearful Spirits, Reasoned Follies
The Boundaries of Superstition in Late Medieval Europe
Language: English
Release Date: November 15, 2017
Superstitions are commonplace in the modern world. Mostly, however, they evoke innocuous images of people reading their horoscopes or avoiding black cats. Certain religious practices might also come to mind—praying to St. Christopher or lighting candles for the dead. Benign as they might seem today,...
The Secret Within
Hermits, Recluses, and Spiritual Outsiders in Medieval England
Language: English
Release Date: February 7, 2014
Spiritual seekers throughout history have sought illumination through solitary contemplation. In the Christian tradition, medieval England stands out for its remarkable array of hermits, recluses, and spiritual outsiders—from Cuthbert, Godric of Fichale, and Christina of Markyate to Richard Rolle,...
by David Harrington Watt
Language: English
Release Date: May 9, 2017
Language: English
Release Date: May 9, 2017
David Harrington Watt's Antifundamentalism in Modern America gives us a pathbreaking account of the role that the fear of fundamentalism has played—and continues to play—in American culture. Fundamentalism has never been a neutral category of analysis, and Watt scrutinizes the various political...
Faithful Narratives
Historians, Religion, and the Challenge of Objectivity
Language: English
Release Date: January 24, 2014
Historians of religion face complex interpretive issues when examining religious texts, practices, and experiences. Faithful Narratives presents the work of twelve eminent scholars whose research has exemplified compelling strategies for negotiating the difficulties inherent in this increasingly important...
by E. Harris Harbison
Language: English
Release Date: December 15, 2009
Language: English
Release Date: December 15, 2009
In The Age of Reformation, first published in 1955, E. Harris Harbison shows why sixteenth-century Europe was ripe for a catharsis. New political and social factors were at work—the growth of the middle classes, the monetary inflation resulting from an influx of gold from the New World, the invention...
Monastic Reform as Process
Realities and Representations in Medieval Flanders, 900–1100
Language: English
Release Date: November 15, 2017
The history of monastic institutions in the Middle Ages may at first appear remarkably uniform and predictable. Medieval commentators and modern scholars have observed how monasteries of the tenth to early twelfth centuries experienced long periods of stasis alternating with bursts of rapid development...
Creating Cistercian Nuns
The Women's Religious Movement and Its Reform in Thirteenth-Century Champagne
Language: English
Release Date: November 22, 2011
In Creating Cistercian Nuns, Anne E. Lester addresses a central issue in the history of the medieval church: the role of women in the rise of the religious reform movement of the thirteenth century. Focusing on the county of Champagne in France, Lester reconstructs the history of the women’s religious...