Download Free The Gargantuan Polity Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online The Gargantuan Polity and write the review.

The Gargantuan Polity examines political, legal, theological, and literary texts in the late Middle Ages, to show how individuals were defined by contracts of mutual obligation, which allowed rulers to hold power due to approval of their subjects.
Montesquieu's liberalism and critique of universalism in politics, often thought to stand in tension, comprise a coherent philosophical and political project.
Focusing on early Renaissance Franco-Ottoman relations, this book fills a gap in studies of Ottoman representations by early modern European powers by addressing the Franco-Ottoman bond. In French Encounters with the Ottomans, Pascale Barthe examines the birth of the Franco-Ottoman rapprochement and the enthusiasm with which, before the age of absolutism, French kings and their subjects pursued exchanges-real or imagined-with those they referred to as the 'Turks.' Barthe calls into question the existence of an Orientalist discourse in the Renaissance, and examines early cross-cultural relations through the lenses of sixteenth-century French literary and cultural production. Informed by insights from historians, literary scholars, and art historians from around the world, this study underscores and challenges long-standing dichotomies (Christians vs. Muslims, West vs. East) as well as reductive periodizations (Middle Ages vs. Renaissance) and compartmentalization of disciplines. Grounded in close readings, it includes discussions of cultural production, specifically visual representations of space and customs. Barthe showcases diplomatic envoys, courtly poets, 'bourgeois', prominent fiction writers, and chroniclers, who all engaged eagerly with the 'Turks' and developed a multiplicity of responses to the Ottomans before the latter became both fashionable and neutralized, and their representation fixed.
Twenty-two eminent scholars of Early Modernity offer a thorough examination of the art and the main themes of François Rabelais’s work in the larger context of European humanism.
The Unbridled Tongue is a book about talking too much and why it was considered not just inadvisable but dangerous in sixteenth-century Europe. Drawing on a wide range of sources and approaches, it is the first book to address Renaissance literary portrayals of gossip and rumor in a social, religious, political, and historical frame.
Drawing on rich archival sources, explores the relationship between honor and violence in the Périgord region in prerevolutionary France.
It is well known that Renaissance culture gave an empowering role to the individual and thereby to agency. But how does race factor into this culture of empowerment? Canonical French authors like Rabelais and Montaigne have been celebrated for their flexible worldviews and interest in the difference of non-French cultures both inside and outside of Europe. As a result, this period in French cultural history has come to be valued as an exceptional era of cultural opening toward others. Agents without Empire shows that such a celebration is, at the very least, problematic. Szabari argues that before the rise of the French colonial empire, medieval categories of race based on the redemption story were recast through accounts of the Ottoman Empire that were made accessible, in a sudden and unprecedented manner, to agents of the French crown. Spying performed by Frenchmen in the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century permeated French culture in large part because those who spied also worked as knowledge producers, propagandists, and artists. The practice changed what it meant to be cultured and elite by creating new avenues of race- and gender-specific consumption for French and European men that affected all areas of sophisticated culture including literature, politics, prints, dressing, personal hygiene, and leisure. Agents without Empire explores race making in this period of European history in the context of diplomatic reposts, travel accounts, natural history, propaganda, religious literature, poetry, theater, fiction, and cheap print. It intervenes in conversations in whiteness studies, race theory, theories of agency and matter, and the history of diplomacy and spying to offer a new account of race making in early modern Europe.
This book employs perspectives from continental philosophy, intellectual history, and literary and cultural studies to breach the divide between early modernist and modernist thinkers. It turns to early modern humanism in order to challenge late 20th-century thought and present-day posthumanism. This book addresses contemporary concerns such as the moral responsibility of the artist, the place of religious beliefs in our secular societies, legal rights extended to nonhuman species, the sense of ‘normality’ applied to the human body, the politics of migration, individual political freedom and international terrorism. It demonstrates how early modern humanism can bring new perspectives to postmodern antihumanism and even invite us to envision a humanism of the future.
Popular sovereignty - the doctrine that the public powers of state originate in a concessive grant of power from "the people" - is the cardinal doctrine of modern constitutional theory, placing full constitutional authority in the people at large, rather than in the hands of judges, kings, or a political elite. This book explores the intellectual origins of this influential doctrine and investigates its chief source in late medieval and early modern thought - the legal science of Roman law. Long regarded the principal source for modern legal reasoning, Roman law had a profound impact on the major architects of popular sovereignty such as François Hotman, Jean Bodin, and Hugo Grotius. Adopting the juridical language of obligations, property, and personality as well as the classical model of the Roman constitution, these jurists crafted a uniform theory that located the right of sovereignty in the people at large as the legal owners of state authority. In recovering the origins of popular sovereignty, the book demonstrates the importance of the Roman law as a chief source of modern constitutional thought.
The volume brings together a stellar group of contributors who examine the social capital thesis by means of four different approaches: theoretical, historical, comparative, and empirical. In the end, this book will serve to answer two fundamental questions which have hitherto been neglected: What can a gendered analysis tell us about social capital? And what can social capital tell us about women and politics?