ibidem-Sachbuch is the non-fiction section of ibidem Press. Here you will find a broad spectrum of non-fiction literature with interesting topics for the general public - from biographies and contemporary witness reports to political analyses.
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The so-called Investiture Conflict was a watershed moment in the political life of the Latin West and the history of the papacy. Occurring at a time of rapid social change and political expansion, the eleventh-century reform movement became a debate centered on a ritual: the investment of bishops with the signs of their sacred and secular authority. The consecration of bishops, however, was only one of several contemporaneous conflicts over the significance of consecrations. Less well known is that which occurred over the dedication of churches. This book provides an examination of the consecration, placing the fundamental questions of the Gregorian Reform and Investiture Conflict back into their original liturgical framework. This context allows us to consider the symbolic richness of the liturgy that attracted large numbers of people. ;
This fascinating and groundbreaking book explores the way in which the canonical image of the Virgin Mary developed out of the Italian Renaissance. Faced with the naturalistic effects of pictorial space and light, the Church had to ensure the distinction of Mary as being both the human mother of Christ and a doctrinal symbol in her own right. The intentions of patrons, artistic practice and operating circumstances all contributed to mark out this duality, and create the 'sacred distance' of Mary from the rest of humankind. Marian iconography has its own history, and the introduction discusses the visual tradition of the middle ages which shaped Marian iconography at the beginning of the 14th century. The book then deals with the doctrinal issues relating to the Virgin: Mary as Theotokos, Mary Annunciate, Mary as Queen of Heaven and Mary as the Immaculate Conception. A concluding chapter discusses the power of this image as a visual symbol. The book therefore discusses the various possible interpretations of Marian iconography in an attempt to understand an image, and the dangers of making assumptions about artistic intention and audience response. It should be of interest to anyone who is curious about the life of an image and its inherent power.
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During the first half of the twentieth century, world politics was reshaped in pursuit of a new international order. The ideological foundations of the 'new diplomacy' (and its fate during the interwar period) are well known. This book instead examines the practices of internationalism and diplomacy from the First Hague Conference of 1899 to the aftermath of the Second World War. By focusing on these practices, such as disarmament regimes or public diplomacy, and their use as instruments to build international order(s), it emphasises the constructed, contested, and experimental character of what subsequently became a standard repertoire of international politics. Essays from a range of interdisciplinary scholars address well-established principles such as self-determination, and also less prominent practices such as small arms control or parliamentary inquiry. The book makes a major contribution to the growing historiography on twentieth-century internationalism.
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Sanctity and pornography in medieval culture exposes the complexity of bodily exposure in medieval devotion and contemporary pornographic cultures. Through readings of texts and images, sacred and profane, from preimodern France and Italy as well as Anglo-American modernity, the book makes a case for paying closer attention to the surfaces of our bodies and the desires that those surfaces can articulate and arouse. From the Old French life of Saint Alexis to the work of writer-filmmaker Miranda July, from Wakefield Poole to Pietro Aretino, these are texts and images that diminish the distance between premodern Europe and contemporary California, between the sacred and the profane, as they demonstrate how, in the end as in the beginning, the surface of things is never simple. ;
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The new wave of cultural materialists in Britain and new historicists in the United States here join forces to depose the sacred icon of the "eternal bard" and argue for a Shakespeare who meditates and exploits political, cultural and ideological forces. Ten years on, this second edition presents additional essays by Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield. ;
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Since its publication in 1962, Carlos Fuentes' novel, Aura, remains not merely an object of academic interest but a continuous source of controversy in Mexico. It was the explosive combination of sex and religion that incensed the Ministro de Hacienda, Salvador Abascal, and linked Aura to the recent polemical Mexican film El crimen del Padre Amaro. Aura is preoccupied with the place and persistence of the sacred in modern Mexico rather than simply the secret abuses of institutional Catholicism. This critical edition of the work is accompanied by an introduction and notes on the text. ;
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The art of poverty is the first book in English to analyse depictions of beggars in sixteenth-century European art. Featuring works from Germany, the Low Countries, Britain, France and Italy, it discusses a diverse body of imagery in many different media, from crude woodcuts to monumental church altarpieces. It develops a striking thesis, arguing that these works largely conformed to two paradoxical, though mutually supportive, representational approaches. The earlier chapters follow the emergence of a trenchantly negative approach in Northern art, in which beggars are shown as vagabonds, whose idleness and thievery threatened the values of sixteenth-century society (especially its growing emphasis on the need to work). In the other predominant visual mode, beggars are exalted as examples of sacred purity. In many Italian religious paintings, beggars are morally exalted with reference to sacred texts, and made formally beautiful with reference to revered artistic models. Though these approaches reflect the impact of religious reform, it is shown that, by the end of the century, they happily co-existed within Protestant and Catholic cultures. The final part of the book is concerned with the issue of artistic style and with the growing tendency of the beggar image to mediate and dissolve the didactic traditions through which it had originally been defined. The art of poverty will be of special interest to scholars and students of Renaissance art history, and its progressive approach and cross-disciplinary theme and perspective will also make it vital reading for those concerned with the development of early modern European culture. ;
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The Subject of Love: Hélène Cixous and the Feminine Divine is about abundant, generous, other-regarding love. In the history of Western ideas of love, such a configuration has been inseparable from our ideas about divinity and the sacred; often reserved only for God; and rarely thought of as a human achievement. This book is a substantial engagement with her philosophies of love, inviting the reader to reflect on the conditions of subjectivity that just might open us to something like a divine love of the other. Renshaw follows this thread in this genealogy of abundant love: the thread that connects the subject of love from 5th century B.C.E. Greece and Plato, to the 20th century protestant theology of agapic love of Anders Nygren, to the late 20th century poetico-philosophy of Hélène Cixous. This study will be of particular interest to academics and students of the history of gender, cultural studies, criticism and gender studies ;
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In early modern Europe, the visual image began to move, not only as it traveled across great distances but also due to the introduction of innovative visual formats that produced animation within the image itself. This book traces the arduous journeys of visual images through evidence of their use and reproduction along missionary routes from Europe to India, Japan, China, Brazil and Chile. It argues that missionary world travel was crucial to the early modern re-animation of the image through devices such as the reflection of the mirror, the multiple registers of vision of the anthropomorphic image, the imaginative and disorienting possibilities of the utopic image, and even the reconstitution of the sacred image with memories of the relation of travel to life and death. Within the journeys traced in the book, the visual image forged new connections between different locations and across different cultures, accumulating increasingly entangled histories. Even more intriguingly, these images frequently returned to Europe, changed but still recognisable, there to be used again with an awareness of their earlier travels. ;
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